{"id":236887,"date":"2026-05-10T19:05:56","date_gmt":"2026-05-11T00:05:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/can-we-survive-technology-by-john-von-neumann"},"modified":"2026-05-10T19:05:56","modified_gmt":"2026-05-11T00:05:56","slug":"can-we-survive-technology-by-john-von-neumann","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/can-we-survive-technology-by-john-von-neumann","title":{"rendered":"\u201cCan We Survive Technology?\u201d by John von Neumann"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/can-we-survive-technology-by-john-von-neumann2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>This is an essay written by <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/John_von_Neumann\">John von Neumann<\/a> in 1955, which I think is fairly described as being about global catastrophic risks from emerging technologies. It discusses a bunch of specific technologies that seemed like a big deal in 1955 \u2014 which is interesting in itself as a list of predictions; nuclear power! increased automation! weather control? \u2014 but explicitly tries to draw a general lesson.<\/p>\n<p>Von Neumann is regarded as one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, and was involved in the Manhattan project in addition to inventing zillions of other things.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m posting here because a) I think the essay is worth reading in its own right, and b) I find it interesting to see what the past\u2019s intellectuals thought of issues related transformative technology, and how their perspective differs\/is similar to ours. Notably, I disagree with several of the conclusions (e.g. von Neumann seems to think differential technological development is doomed).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is an essay written by John von Neumann in 1955, which I think is fairly described as being about global catastrophic risks from emerging technologies. It discusses a bunch of specific technologies that seemed like a big deal in 1955 \u2014 which is interesting in itself as a list of predictions; nuclear power! increased [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[873,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-236887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nuclear-energy","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/709"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236887\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}