George Zarkadakis

At zero minus 15 seconds, a warning tone sounds in the plane.

Until then, everybody was excited about the new things and about new discoveries and about new technologies.

And then we discovered something that can destroy us completely.

It was terrifying.

And I think that's when people realized that maybe there are some technologies that are not for good.

And that's when we became gradually, as public, more skeptical to technologies.

But some elite academics and scientists believed that better technology was actually the key to our future because it could help us bypass the messy parts of being human.

What if human decision-making procedures were too slow?

What if people's judgments are clouded by their emotions?

To give us more control over ourselves and the world around us.

Our machines will churn out the right answers and the right decisions and the right judgments.

and in effect, replace God with science.

And it's such a confident moment in American academia.

After the war, there was more money, there were more people, there was more cultural capital, more political capital for science and technology than ever before.

There's also a real concern about the practicalities of preventing a nuclear war, which was a very real threat at that time.

Nuclear detente, and in particular mutually assured destruction, rely very specifically on information processing capability.

You need to know where your enemy's nuclear arsenals are.

You need to know if you've been attacked or that you were about to be.

And the argument went that if the United States could have a system that could think, that could strategize,

that could react more intelligently than a group of generals and admirals, then we would have a clear advantage over the Soviet Union.