The 1983 hit about Matthew Broderick and a computer system 'playing' Thermonuclear War should be required viewing at the Pentagon right now.
Perhaps you’ve been reading what passes for the news over the last week or so: The government wants the machines to take over, they will soon have control of U.S. military operations, and we’re all going to die.
We’ll take a few steps back. The tech company Anthropic, best known as the “frontier lab” behind the kinder, friendlier, far-less-likely-to-spew-racist-garbage chatbot Claude,. There are, shall we say, some differences of opinion over how the current administration could — and should — use Anthropic’ssystem. Specifically, CEO Dario Amodei is wringing his hands over the potential lack of guardrails once the system is handed over.in which he noted that the company, which has a contract with the U.S. government and has deployed its artificial-intelligence models across several classified federal networks, has “never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in anmanner. However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values. Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today’s technology can safely and reliably do.”; and “fully autonomous weapons.” In plain speak, the term refers to AI systems having complete control over the targeting and usage of the military’s complete arsenal, including thermonuclear weaponry, and keeping human beings — remember them? — out of the loop. “Fully autonomous weapons cannot be relied upon to exercise the critical judgment that our highly trained, professional troops exhibit every day,” the memo states. “We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk. We have offered to work directly with the Department of War on R&D to improve the reliability of these systems, but they have not accepted this offer.”Those last six words explain where we’re at right now. Anthropic wants to amend its current contracts in order to avoid, y’know, a possible mecha-apocalypse. The Secretary of Defensehas stated that the U.S. government should be able to whatever the hell it wants with Anthropic’s software on the battlefield, Armageddon be damned. He is willing to declare the company a “supply chain risk,” and cancel any and all contracts. The president. Many critics, political pundits, and wags asked, somewhat rhetorically, whether anyone in the administration recalls how handing the responsibility of nuclear weaponry over to machines turned out in theAs any die-hard fan of Reagan-era cinema will tell you, the 1983 hit revolved around a Seattle computer nerd named David Lightman, played byas dorky but in a sorta cute, pre-Ferris Bueller way. He’s a wiseass in class, and a whiz at hacking into the school’s network and changing his grades. When he tries to help out his fellow failing student Jennifer by switching her F to an A, she balks. But the young woman is impressed by David’s brains and hisMeanwhile, over at the headquarters of the North American Aerospace Defense Command , everyone’s losing their shit over a recent training exercise. We’ve already seen an employee refuse to facilitate releasing ICBMs out of a U.S. missile silo during this drill; not even his partner pulling a gun on him will get him to potentially kill millions of people. Apparently, this reluctant mass murderer was not the only one failing to comply. Nearly a quarter of the men manning those remote control centers refused to turn their keys as well.Judge Quotes Bob Dylan in Scathing Rebuke of Hegseth’s Bid to Punish SenatorLuckily — “luckily” — one guy has a solution. He’s Dr. John McKittrick; given that’s he played by the decade’s go-to a-hole Dabney Coleman, you can immediately tell he’s a piece of work. McKittrick wants to outsource control of America’s nuclear arsenal to a supercomputer known as the War Operation Plan Response, or WOPR for short. This machine does nothing but run simulated plans of attack and/or responses to attacks 24/7. “It spends all of its time thinking about World War III,” he boasts . McKittrick is aware that the commander-in-chief is technically the one to dictate strategy in terms of international conflicts, but he’s convinced “the president will probably follow that war plan… once he makes that decision.” Long story short, David accidentally hacks into WOPR’s network, and faced with a menu of games that includes chess, checkers, poker, Fighter Combat, Air-to-Ground Actions, and Theaterwide Biotoxic and Chemical Warfare, he picks the most intriguing title: Thermonuclear Warfare. The enterprising youngster initiates a war game that the computer keeps playing even after he’s logged off, with very real stakes. He and Jennifer are forced to go on the run as the feds chase after them, and must eventually trick WOPR into a stalemate before everything goes boom. The story line between Broderick and Sheedy was something that new director John Badham was keen to put in the forefront. And while most moviegoers of a certain age easily think of WOPR’s computerized voice asking “Shall we play a game?” whenever someone brings upnow, the movie ended up becoming a huge hit less because of its topicality and more because it was tapping into a steadily growing demographic of adolescent audiences. The whole thing plays like a cross between a 1970s conspiracy thriller and the type of movie that would soon become John Hughes’ specialty. Call itBut the concept that a computerized system controlling U.S. military actions could be compromised had spooked the powers that be. Shortly afterwas screened at the White House in June of 1983, Ronald Reagan asked during a national security meeting if this sort of fanciful idea was possible. Several advisors humored the president’s request that they look into it. General John W. Vessey Jr., then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, came back a week later andIt turns out that a number of scientists and policy wonks had been studying this very idea for many years prior tobut it took the movie to make Reagan inquire and bring what had been niche hypotheticals into the broader political conversation. That teen flick would affect how the U.S. government dealt with cybersecurity and the notion of cyberwarfare for generations. Presented with a fictional worst-case scenario, the real-life counterparts in the military brass and inside NORAD began to look seriously into safeguards. They realized, like WOPR does in the film, that they were playing a zero-sum game. As did the general public — during one of the special features on the DVD release ofBadham noted that when the supercomputer announced at the end that “the only winning move is not to play,” audiences stood up and cheered. It might just be a good story, but we’ll take apocryphal over apocalyptic any day.See Robbie Williams Lead All-Star Ozzy Osbourne Tribute at 2026 Brit AwardsThe Real Guess Who Finally Have Their Name Back and Are Hitting the Road Which brings us back to Anthropic, and Hegseth, and our current moment. The AI company is demanding that basic morality and accountability be a factor in any use of their software, or they will refuse to license it. Hegseth countered with saying that nobody could tell him or the administration what to do, and he’d cancel all their contracts and just go find another AI company without a moral compass that won’t put up a fuss. The staring contest continues, even as the administration gets itself involved in a war.learned nothing from the movie? There is a sense that Hegseth and his cohort, if any of them have seen the film at all, stop watching it after the first 15 minutes or so. That would have been just long enough to see Dabney Coleman’s character say that expressing hesitation or remorse over millions of deaths was “headshrinker horseshit”; to hear someone note that “this trillion-dollar hardware is at the mercy of those men with the little brass keys,” and have Coleman reply, “…whose only problem is that they’re human beings”; and for him to essentially conclude that the only way to ensure victory in warfare was: “I think we outta take the men out of the loop.” Judging from what we’re seeing happen at the Pentagon now, these folks never got around to the last act, where Coleman sees that eliminating the human factor in warfare means potentially eliminating the human factor, period. They missed the whole part about the only winning move is not to play with this dangerous idea at all.Neil Sedaka, Legendary Singer-Songwriter Behind 'Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,' 'Bad Blood' and 'Love Will Keep Us Together,' Dies at 86César Awards Say Jim Carrey ‘Worked on His Speech in French for Months’ Amid Clone Conspiracy Theory: His ‘Visit Had Been Planned Since the Summer’
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