Professor Lawrence Doner is probably the most brilliant man I ever met. I was working in Washington D.C. in 1966 and a bunch of us had traveled out to NASA’s Goddard Space Center in Greenbelt, Maryland for several lectures.

We wanted to find out if it would be possible to capture Doner’s brain patterns on a computer. Our group was led by Martin Schramm, a mathematician from the Defense Department, whose assignment was to preserve Professor Doner’s brain patterns for posterity. Doner was dying from leukemia. Schramm’s challenge was, could a computer somehow become or impersonate a human being?

OK, my introduction here was make-believe. Today’s column is about the message in “Project Immortality,” a television play by Loring Mandel broadcast on June 11, 1959, as part of the CBS television series, “Playhouse 90.”

The plot is what I described in my first paragraphs. Then, seven years later in 1966, Mandel’s play was in production at Arena Stage, one of the nation’s preeminent regional professional theaters, where I was the publicity director.

The trip to the Goddard Space Center was real. Our entire theater company bused out to Goddard to familiarize ourselves with the world of computer programming capacity.

For me, “Project Immortality” remains an early expression of concern about the beginnings of artificial intelligence. The play explores the idea of coding a person’s thinking into a computer and raises questions about identity and what can be programmed.

As artificial intelligence has grown more sophisticated and widespread, the voices warning against the potential dangers of artificial intelligence grow louder.

Geoffrey Hinton, “the Godfather of AI,” recently resigned from Google following the rapid rise of ChatGPT and other chatbots, so he could “freely speak out about the risks of AI,” he told the New York Times. Hinton, who helped lay the groundwork for today’s generative AI, was an engineering fellow at Google for over a decade. According to the Times, a part of him regrets his life’s work after seeing the danger generative AI poses. He worries about misinformation; that the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore. He also fears that AIs ability to automate tasks will replace not just drudge work, but upend the entire job market.

“Without regulation or transparency, companies risk losing control of a potent technology. I don’t think they should scale this up more until they have understood whether they can control it,” said Hinton.

I am reminded of Robert Oppenheimer, in charge of the Manhattan Project and known as the “father of the atomic bomb,” who watched the first atomic bomb explode on July 16, 1945. He later remarked that the explosion brought to his mind words from the Hindu scripture BhagavadGita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, one of the most advanced AI research companies, has acknowledged that the company is scared of the risks posed by its chatbot system, ChatGPT. “We’ve got to be careful here,” he said in an interview with ABC News, mentioning the potential for AI to produce misinformation.

That’s yet another expert calling for AI development to hit the pause button. Then there is Stephen Hawking’s chilling statement: “The development of artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”

Like the subway, AI is a public good, given its capacity to complete tasks far more efficiently than human operators. Today, there are tons of applications and uses of artificial intelligence in various fields such as in marketing, health care, banking, finance, etc.

But both its benefits and dangers will affect everyone, even people who don’t personally use AI. For example, misinformation and fake news already pose serious threats to democracies, but AI has the potential to exacerbate the problem by spreading “fake news” faster and more effectively than people can.

In his program notes at Arena Stage 57 years ago, Loring Mandel wrote, “If we define Man as one who learns, we can point to computers which also learn and continuously improve their performance without human help. If we define Man as one who propagates his race in his own image, we can point to computerized machines which reproduce themselves endlessly, like the bewitched broom stick in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. If we define Man from Machine in terms of ultimate control over his creation, we may be up the creek yet again.”

His closing words for “Project Immortality” were “There’s much less to fear from making machines into humans that from making humans into machines.”

John Bos has been trying to come to grips with what has happened to America over the past eight decades by “Connecting the Dots,” published every other Saturday in the Recorder. He is also a contributing writer for Green Energy Times. Questions and comments may be sent to john01370@gmail.com.

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