No Need for Retirement When Utopia Is Around the Corner

I’ve mentioned before my interest in the history and development of nuclear weapons. Currently, I’m reading The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg (of Pentagon Papers renown). In the first chapter, Ellsberg talks about his time working at the RAND Corporation during the missile gap years when the U.S. thought it was falling behind the Soviet Union in nuclear capabilities. Many of his descriptions sound strikingly similar to the rhetoric coming out of places like Anthropic. For example, note the religious overtones of working at a corporation: I loved RAND, where I ended up spending ten years [...] Much, I imagined, like members of a religious order would, I shared with my colleagues a sense of brotherhood, living and working with others for a transcendent cause. They were insiders: burdened with the responsibility of knowledge others did not possess. precisely in my early missile-gap years at RAND and as a consultant in Washington, there was our…