I detect sarcasm. Y’all think those same minds weren’t participating in any shit? Great minds led to climate change after all. Great minds are behind average rich chumps like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos. Great minds enable horrific things throughout history. It wasn’t stupid people developing plastics and chemicals through the last century. So let’s remove the idea that any of these people are inherently good.

Beyond that, compartmentalized knowledge is kind of the whole schtick of military intelligence. They’re good at it. Arguably that’s the whole core framework all military hierarchy is built on, otherwise it’s just militia. We’ve built cities in secret before, military bases exist in secret all over the place. And many of those secrets involved quite literally the greatest minds of the century. Hard to keep quiet about bombs though, right? That was going to come to light. What if it weren’t a bomb though? What if it could stay quiet?

Over and over and over history shows us great minds faced with the ethical problems of developing weapons of war and what do they do? Arrive at the nearly universally the same conclusions. Bigger weapons mean fewer wars, so they develop them. Archimedes to Oppenheimer, Da Vinci to Einstein. Tesla. Von Braun. Seriously all of them were weapons makers for the same idyllic reasons, “ending war”.

But were they wrong? Isn’t war much less than it ever was?

I’m a fan of looking to history for answers about our future because human beings - despite all the technological and social changes - really haven’t had the time to truly change in even five thousand years. The brains still work largely the same as always, we’re just given more tools to work with.