Oppenheimer to Trump: Danyl McLauchlan on how tech titans & risk-takers are rocking politics

The movie is split into two timelines. The first, in colour, is called fission, set before and during the war and centred on J Robert Oppenheimer, father of the bomb. The second, in black and white, is fusion, depicting the post-war era, in which Strauss is the main character. The connection between the two is that after the war, Strauss had Oppenheimer’s security clearance withdrawn and his motivation is the suspicion that Oppenheimer said something to Albert Einstein that turned him against Strauss. But it all feels a little anticlimactic. The first film is about science, the bomb, apocalypse; the second is about bureaucratic manoeuvring, politics, gossip. What’s the message here?

Oppenheimer was based on a biography called American Prometheus, and reading it, you’re struck by the number of world historical geniuses with whom Oppie (to his friends) associated, as well as being one himself. You get some of this in the movie. At Princeton, he can run into Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel walking in the woods; in Europe, he encounters Niels Bohr then travels to Göttingen to meet Werner Heisenberg. But it doesn’t convey the astonishing density of genius at Los Alamos. Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard make brief appearances but running around in the background, off screen are John von Neumann and Richard Feynman, as well as numerous sundry Nobel laureates, who built the modern framework for our understanding of the world.

What happened to that culture of genius? The early- and mid-20th century was a period of astonishing scientific and technological breakthroughs – humans landed on the moon – but it slowed down sometime in the 1970s. Science marches on, new technologies come to market – our phones are cool – but the rate of truly transformational discoveries died away. My computer is faster than the prototypes designed by von Neumann but it still uses the same architecture he conceived in 1946.

This is the technological stagnation that some economists talk about, the sustained decline in the growth rate of productivity and innovation. There are so many more people trained in science, the world’s population is larger, research labs are everywhere, instead of in a handful of cities in Europe and the US. Why hasn’t scientific progress experienced a rapid acceleration?

There are many theories. One is that there was something unique about the intellectual culture of the West before the war, especially in Europe, especially among European Jews, and that society was systematically destroyed; turned to ash. Another is that people like Einstein, Gödel, von Neumann, etc, were smart but not unusually so. There are no “world historical geniuses” – that model of history is wrong. Instead, those discoveries became available because of new technologies and intellectual shifts, and those were just the people who happened to map out the idea space that opened up during that period. If it wasn’t them, it would have been someone else. The ideas were one-offs, low-hanging fruit. Our species picked that fruit and now here we are, grasping for breakthroughs that are harder to reach.

Lots of smart people endorse this explanation but Oppenheimer has a different theory. It suggests Oppenheimer’s pre-war world of genius was destroyed by the second subject of the film: the bureaucrat Lewis Strauss.

In August, the American statistician and political pundit Nate Silver published On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, a book identifying a growing divide in our intellectual class. On one side is the group Silver labels “the Village”. It’s the current intellectual establishment: the universities, much of the public sector and the mainstream media, the NGOs, the cultural class and their institutions. In conflict with the Village is “the River”, an emerging counter-elite who thrive on uncertainty and risk.

While the Village is conservative, conformist and left-wing, the River is contrarian, numerate, extremely competitive and increasingly aligned with the political right. Silver identifies its thought leaders as members of the tech industry – Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen – and locates its heartlands among professional gamblers, venture capital, the mathematical segments of the finance industry. The “Effective Altruists” are an important part of the River, so are the San Francisco Bay Area-based rationalist community, many AI researchers and parts of the cryptocurrency movement.

Silver dislikes the Village for the same reasons everyone else does – it is censorious, self-important, boring – but he thinks its influence will decline and the River’s will increase, so his primary goal is to document the River in all its many guises and flaws. He thinks there are two key intellectual habits common across most of his Riverians but deeply alien to nearly everyone else: probabilistic thinking and decoupling. And both of these are recurrent themes in Oppenheimer.