"Oppenheimer" Nolan Interview: Destroying mankind, atomic bombs are more terrifying than AI

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This may be the best time for the famous British director Christopher Nolan to release a new film.

After "Tenet" "succumbed" due to the new crown epidemic, the director's new film "Oppenheimer" is about to start filming in a month.

This film about the life of Robert Oppenheimer, the "Father of the Atomic Bomb", focuses on how a charismatic and intelligent man led the "smartest brain on earth" to overcome physics problems while inventing the world's The story of the most dangerous weapon.

The fear of "nuclear threats" that Nolan and his contemporaries grew up with has a new echo now.

**It’s just that this time the atomic bomb has a new name, AI. **

ChatGPT technology has made artificial intelligence popular again, and the fear and excitement about new technologies are in the same trend. Hundreds of AI experts issued a joint letter stating that artificial intelligence may pose a threat to "extinction of humanity."

Wired recently published a long interview with director Christopher Nolan, in which the director explained his views on the current hotly discussed "AI threat" and the comparison between artificial intelligence and nuclear threats 70 years ago.

Nolan, who once used love to save mankind in "Interstellar", believes that the biggest threat to AI is that human beings have an instinctive desire to hold their creations on the altar, and then get rid of all the responsibilities they need to bear. **

The director pointedly pointed out that compared to the struggle and resistance of Oppenheimer's generation of scientists between science and those in power, the current "seeking supervision" of AI practitioners is "hypocritical."

At the same time, as an old-school filmmaker who is obsessed with film, Nolan has expectations for the development of generative AI in the field of film and television creation, but what he wants to do is to "give actors a real atmosphere and environment."

"The greatest danger to mankind is to give up responsibility." Nolan said in an interview.

标题：How Christopher Nolan Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AI

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Author: MARIA STRESHINSKY

Compiler: Jing Yu

The following is the original text of the interview, edited by the editor without changing the original meaning:

01 Destroy the world, the first atomic bomb

**Q: It feels like your work with Emma (Nolan’s wife and his longtime producer) has been, in some ways, preparing for “Oppenheimer.” **

NOLAN: That's how I feel about this movie.

I feel this way about every project I do. Because I'm trying to build on what I've learned before. Whenever you finish a movie, there are always some questions left unanswered. So, in the next movie, you pick up where things left off.

In "Oppenheimer," very literally, Oppenheimer was mentioned in "Tenet," Nolan's previous film.

**Q: So he's been in your mind for a while. **

Nolan: Oppenheimer's story has been with me for many years. It's an incredible idea - someone is trying to find a connection between theory and the real world through calculations, and then there's a very small chance that they're going to destroy the entire world. However, they pressed the button anyway.

**Q: Very dramatic. **

Nolan: I mean, this is literally the most dramatic moment in all of human history.

**Q: A lot of people may not know that when we dropped the bombs in 1945, it was not only a horrific moment, but it was also the moment when people understood that humans now had the ability to wipe out the entire human race. **

**Nolan:**My feeling about Oppenheimer is that a lot of people know the name, know that he is connected to the atomic bomb, and there are some complicated things that happened in the relationship of American history, and there is nothing else.

Frankly, to me, **that's the ideal audience for my films. Those who know nothing will have the craziest experience. **Because it's a crazy story.

**Q: You mean his personal story? **

**NOLAN:**The audience should know, because he's one of the most important people ever.

Nolan’s favorite actor Cillian Murphy plays Oppenheimer in the film | Douban Movies

**Q: There is a line in the movie where someone said to Oppenheimer that you can make anyone do anything. Something like this. He's a great manager who knows everything, and in that room there are scientists doing X and in another room those scientists are doing Y, and he's a guy who keeps it all in his head. **

Nolan: He knows how to inspire people through the drama of his characters, projecting his own light. He gave all scientists, officials, and everyone a goal to focus on.

**Q: He has real charisma. **

Nolan: Charming, that's the perfect word. It allowed everything to take shape, and the movie touches on that a lot, and it was his charisma that allowed these scholars, these theorists, to come together and build something so huge and so important with their own hands. It's a miracle.

**Q: Speaking of building something huge, I was at the TED conference in Vancouver recently and one of the most interesting sessions was a series of talks about generative artificial intelligence. Many speakers mentioned atomic bombs and nuclear weapons. The final speaker was a technologist - he spoke about the inevitable weaponization of artificial intelligence. **

He ended his speech by saying that the only way to maintain world order is to have better AI weapons. That's a deterrent. That sounds a lot like what people think of the atomic bomb. It feels like your film has found the perfect time to release it.

Nolan: I think that relationship is an interesting question. This is different. But it’s the best metaphor—and that’s why I used it in “Tenet”—about the dangers of unthinkingly unleashing a new technology on the world. This is a cautionary tale. We can learn from this.

Having said that,** I do believe that the atomic bomb is unique in terms of world changing and endangering technologies. **

**Q: And the origins of these technologies are not the same? **

Nolan: There is a fundamental difference.

Scientists who study the splitting of the atom have been trying to explain to governments that (nuclear energy) is a fact of nature that comes from God, or whoever created the world. It's just about the knowledge of nature that it inevitably will happen. Nobody can hide it, we didn't create it and we don't own it. That's how they see it.

**Q: In other words, they felt like they were just revealing something that was already there. **

Nolan: And I think it's hard for you to make that argument about artificial intelligence. Of course, someone is bound to do that.

Q: You must have grown up in the shadow of the bomb.

I grew up in the UK in the 1980s and we had a series of movements like nuclear disarmament and people were very, very aware of the threat of nuclear weapons. When I was 13, my friends and I believed that we would eventually die in a nuclear apocalypse.

Q: But you didn't, the world moved on.

The other day I was talking about this with Steven Spielberg, who grew up with the threat of the Cuban Missile Crisis in the 60s. same same.

There have been times in human history when the danger of nuclear war was so palpable and alarming to us that we understood it all too well. Of course, we can only worry about it for so long before moving on and worrying about other things. The problem is, the danger doesn't actually go away.

**Q: Yes. I mean, I feel like a month ago we were all concerned that some countries might actually use nuclear weapons. **

Nolan: What I remember in the 1980s was that the fear of nuclear war had receded and was replaced by the fear of environmental destruction. **It's almost like humans can't remain fearful of a single threat for long, we have a complicated relationship with fear. **

Yes, certain countries have been using this apocalyptic threat and this fear to wave the flag. This is very disturbing.

Director Nolan’s work photos｜Universal Pictures

02 The most dangerous thing is to put AI on the altar

**Q: As disturbing as the threat of AI doomsday? **

Nolan: Well, the growth of AI in weapons systems, and the problems it would create, was so obvious so many years ago that few journalists bothered to write about it. **Now there's a chatbot that writes an article for the local newspaper and suddenly it's a crisis. **

**Q: Those of us in the media have been doing this for years. blindly pursue. Some of us are writing about artificial intelligence because it could cost us our jobs. **

Nolan: That's part of the problem. For me, **artificial intelligence is a very simple problem, it's like the word algorithm. We see companies use algorithms, and now artificial intelligence, as a means of avoiding responsibility for their actions. **

**Q: Please explain a few more sentences. **

Nolan: If we accept the idea that AI is omnipotent, we are accepting that it can relieve people of responsibility for their actions - militarily, socioeconomically, etc.

**The greatest danger of AI is that we get ourselves off the hook by ascribing these god-like properties to it. **

I don't know what the mythological basis for this is,** but throughout history humans have had this tendency to create false idols, to fashion something in our own image and then say we have god-like powers because we made these things. **

**Q: This feels very, very right. It's like we're at that tipping point. **

Nolan: Exactly.

**Q: With these large language models, machines may even start learning on their own in the next step. **

Nolan: There is an interesting article in the Los Angeles Times about ChatGPT and OpenAI. It's basically ChatGPT a sales pitch and OpenAI is now a private company. They have the greatest sales machine in the world, and it's a very dangerous thing. Maybe we shouldn't push it to the masses because now everyone wants an AI assistant.

That doesn't mean there isn't real danger here, because I think there is. But personally, and this is just my opinion, I think the danger lies in the abdication of responsibility.

**Q: People have always said that there needs to be an international agency to regulate AI. **

Nolan: But this is the oldest political ploy by tech companies. Right? This is, you know, what SBF did with FTX [the cryptocurrency exchange collapse scandal]; Zuckerberg has been asking to be regulated for years. Because they know that our elected bureaucrats cannot understand these issues at all.

**Q: As we've seen from the congressional hearings? **

Nolan: What can they say? I mean, this is very professional stuff, people in power versus creators and Oppenheimer - let me bring it back to Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer's problem was that he valued the postwar role of scientists as experts who had to figure out how to control nuclear power. But when you see what happened to him, you understand that that would never be allowed to happen.

**This is the very complicated relationship between science and those in power, and it has never been laid bare as brutally as in Oppenheimer's story. I think there are various lessons to be learned from this. **

Oppenheimer also needs to deal with the relationship between those in power and science｜Total Film

**Q: For example? **

NOLAN: So he's trying to work from within the system, rather than turning around and saying, you know, what we need is love, or we don't. His approach was very practical, but he was beaten nonetheless. It's very complicated, **I think these "inventors" now, they say "we need to be regulated" is very hypocritical. **

**Q: Oppenheimer wanted science to be shared. **

Nolan: He used the word Condor. Be honest.

**Q: His thoughts seemed to have changed with the advent of the hydrogen bomb? **

Nolan: No, he also believes in the hydrogen bomb. This is kind of interesting because in a way, it's a bit of a spoiler. But on the other hand, that's history, you can Google it.

At this important moment, as the hydrogen bomb program progressed, he began giving a speech in which he said, "I wish I could tell you what I know. I can't. If you knew what I know, you would understand that we must share information. Essentially, this is the only way we can avoid destroying the world.”

So frankness is the most practical means in his opinion. He believes that the United Nations will be a powerful institution in the future, with real capabilities for action. He believed that global control of atomic energy was the only way to ensure world peace. Obviously, that didn't happen.

**Q: He did not foresee what is happening now, the slow decline of democracies. **

Nolan: I don’t think he saw that at all, it was a very optimistic moment.

**Q: This is why there is a worldwide artificial intelligence management agency. **

Nolan: Yes. But that's the problem when dealing with tech companies that refuse to be restricted by geography.

Institutionally, technology companies are encouraged and allowed to circumvent government regulation. This has become a "morality".

By the way, this makes me think Silicon Valley is evil and all these people are horrible. I do not think so. It's just the system(), that's how it works.

**Q: On the level of security issues, the manufacture of nuclear weapons requires certain elements, but AI does not have this restriction. **

**Nolan:**During World War II, the British nuclear bomb program was very complicated. They have many great scientists. But Churchill's government realized they just didn't have the resources. So they gave everything they had to the Americans. They said, you have size, you have far away from the front line, and you have an industrial base.

In my research, I read a statistic about the number of Americans involved in building the first atomic bomb - probably around 500,000. Several companies are involved, and this is a huge physical process, which is why today, it is easy to be discovered when a country secretly conducts nuclear tests. So there are a few things that give us a little bit of assurance that this process can be managed.

And I don't think any of those limitations apply to artificial intelligence.

**Q: Yes, not really for AI - especially when some of the things we're talking about about AI are a "softer" threat. Rapidly spreading disinformation, technological unemployment. **

Nolan: Exactly, but I don't -- I think artificial intelligence can still be a very powerful tool. I'm optimistic about it, I'm really optimistic.

**But we must see it as a tool, and the person who wields it must still remain accountable for wielding that tool. If we give artificial intelligence the status of humans, as we have done to corporations at some point, then yes, we will have huge problems. **

03 AI is good, but stick to tradition

**Q: Do you see beauty in artificial intelligence, especially in filmmaking? **

Nolan: Oh, of course. Entire machine learning is applied to deepfake technology, which is a remarkable advancement in visual effects and audio. In the long run, in terms of environmental creation, such as building a door or window. If a large amount of data such as the appearance of things, the reflection of things, etc. are compiled into a database, it will be a very powerful tool.

**Q: Will you use AI to create? **

Nolan: I am a very old-school "analog" filmmaker. I shot on film to try to give the actors a complete reality.

My stance on technology, as it relates to my work, is that I want to use technology where it does best. For example, if we do a stunt, a dangerous stunt. You can do it with a more visible coercion and then erase it later, something like that.

**Q: Meaning this will improve the convenience and efficiency of visual effects. **

Nolan: This is not a blank slate, it starts from a more detailed and data-driven idea. It might finally break down the barrier between animation and photography because it's a hybrid.

If you tell an artist to, say, paint a picture of an astronaut, they're inventing it from memory or reference. With AI, it's a different approach, you're actually using the entire history of the image. **

**Q: Use real images. **

**Nolan:**Using real images, but in a completely, fundamentally reconstructed way - which of course raises major artist copyright issues, which have to be properly dealt with.

The film tries to restore the exchange scene between Oppenheimer and Einstein｜Universal Pictures

**Q: Let’s get back to science and your film. In a quote from the December 2014 issue of WIRED, which you guest-edited, you said, “The relationship between storytelling and the scientific method fascinates me. It’s not really about intellectual understanding. That’s A sense of grasping something." Tell me about your love of science. **

Nolan: Well, I've always been interested in problems in astronomy and physics. I explored this hobby in Interstellar. When my brother (Jonathan Nolan) was writing the script, he would look at Einstein's thought experiments, and he found that there was a special sense of melancholy to some of them, and that had to do with parts of time.

For example, after one twin was taken away and brought back, the other grew up a little, did you know? **Einstein was thinking about physics, and how you do these thought experiments, and how you formulate these ideas, has a very same "literary quality". The visualization process required by physicists is not unlike that required for literary creation. **

**Q: Did you feel that way during the editing phase of the film? **

Nolan: I feel that way at every stage of filmmaking. A lot of my work is trying to express intuition and feeling about the shape of things. This can be difficult and complex.

**Q: I find that if I'm working on a story and I don't know the structure, the flow, there's something wrong. I can't talk about this work in a meaningful way. **

Nolan: I think about structure and patterns in a very geographical or geometric way. Over the years, **I tried to take a scratch-from-scratch approach to structure, but in the end it was a very instinctive process: Does this feeling have a narrative shape, and how does it take shape? **I was fascinated to realize that physicists carry out a very similar process. Really interesting.

**Q: Maybe it's an homage to Interstellar, but physicists always seem to love physics so much. **

Nolan: I am passionate about the pursuit of truth and the scientific method. I hate to see it misrepresented by scientists in the media or media speaking on behalf of scientists. The pure scientific method, and the idea that science constantly seeks to refute itself, makes it more capable of advancing the human mind than religion or anything else.

**Q: Before this interview, I watched your film with my mother. She felt your film might have a very anti-negativism message. "Dunkirk," "Interstellar," "Batman." Or, is this optimism? **

Nolan: The ending of "Inception" is exactly like this. Someone had a nihilistic view of that ending, right? But at the same time, he also looked forward, to be with his children. This ambiguity is not an emotional one. To the viewer, it's an intellectual blur.

Interestingly, I think there's an interesting relationship to explore between the endings of Inception and Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer had a complicated ending, mixed feelings.

**Q: What has the early audience response been like? **

**Nolan: Some people leave movies in an absolutely devastated state. **They were speechless. Those fears that exist on a historical and factual level are all represented in the movie. But the love for the characters, the love for the relationships, is as strong as in all my previous work.

The director's home in Los Angeles, filmed by his son｜MAGNUS NOLAN

**Q: There is also the complexity of the subject. **

Nolan: Oppenheimer's story is a collection of impossible problems, impossible ethical dilemmas, and paradoxes. There are no easy answers in his stories, only difficult questions, and that's what makes them so engaging.

I think we can find a lot of optimism in the film, but there's this overriding question hanging over the top. I felt it was necessary to ask some questions at the end to get people on their minds and spark discussion.

**Q: What was going through Oppenheimer’s mind before and after the atomic bomb was dropped? What do you think he would think? **

NOLAN: The answer is in the film. I wrote this script in the first person. This is what I said to Cillian (Cillian Murphy, who plays Oppenheimer in the film): You are the eyes of the audience. He did it. For most of the story, we never get beyond his experience. This is my best attempt at conveying the answer to this question.

**Q: I'm a little nervous about seeing the complete work. **

Nolan: I think you may have to wait a long time. It's an intense experience because it's an intense story. I showed it to a filmmaker recently and he said it was a horror movie, which I didn't object to.

It's funny that you used the word nihilism earlier, I don't think my work can be related to nihilism. But **as I started finishing this film, I started to feel this color, not in my other films, pure darkness. It's there, and the movie fights it. **

**Q: Will it affect you? did you sleep well? **

Nolan: I'm sleeping well now and feel relieved to have finished the production. But I thoroughly enjoyed watching this movie. I think you'll understand when you see this movie. Being attracted to scary things is a complicated feeling, you know? This is how the horror space unfolds.

**Q: Have your children watched it? **

NOLAN: Yes.

**Q: Did they know anything about Oppenheimer before? **

NOLAN: When I started writing the script, I told one of my sons, and he literally said to me, "But no one really worries about that anymore, nukes." Two years later, he's not. said. The world has changed again.

This is a lesson for all of us, but especially for young people.

**The world is changing rapidly. **