Niall Ferguson
When the late Henry Kissinger — who died a year ago, on Nov. 29 — published his essay “How the Enlightenment Ends” in June 2018, many were surprised that the elder statesman’s elder statesman had a view on artificial intelligence.
Kissinger had just turned 95. AI was not yet the hot topic it would become after OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022.
As Kissinger’s biographer, however, I wasn’t surprised that AI gripped his attention.
He had, after all, come to prominence in 1957 with a book about a new and world-changing technology.
“Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy” was a book so thoroughly researched that it won the approval even of Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project.
Contrary to his unwarranted reputation as a warmonger, Kissinger was strongly motivated throughout his adult life by the imperative to avoid World War III.
He understood that the technology of nuclear fission would make another world war an even greater conflagration.
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