8 Inventions That Once Freaked People Out Way More Than A.I.
Sewing machines once turned women into sex-craved she-devils, and toilets were shit-exploding nightmares.
In 1939, leading physicists persuaded Albert Einstein to send President Roosevelt a letter warning him of the impending dangers regarding atomic energy. Although Einsten’s E = mc2 equation made atomic energy theoretically possible, he never worked on an atomic bomb project. Still, Einstein feared a large mass of uranium in the wrong hands could cause a destructive nuclear chain reaction.
Some of his fears were unfounded. In an interview with Newsweek, Einstein later said that he would have never signed that letter if he had “known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb.”
Of course, we all know how this tale of new tech ends. On Aug. 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped a nuclear weapon on Hiroshima, Japan, while Oppenheimer opined in Sanskrit scripture, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Today, we have a new destroyer of worlds — Artificial Intelligence. Recently, over 3000 Artificial Intelligence leaders, including Elon Musk, nailed their fears to the walls of the internet. The letter asked for a six-month moratorium on A.I. until safeguards were in place. The…
