The Thrill of Wanting AI to Destroy the World

T he sky streaked orange and red as my mother drove us home to Albuquerque through the Tijeras Pass, which separates the Sandia Mountains to the north from the Manzanos to the south.

“Look out for mushroom clouds,” my father said to her.

“If you see them, turn around.” He did this every time we returned to town from the rugged canyon to the east, but the sunsets always egged him on.

According to legend, a part of the Manzanos, whose foothills descend into Kirtland Air Force Base and then Sandia National Laboratories, had been hollowed out to hold live nuclear warheads.

My father insisted that, in the event of a nuclear attack, Albuquerque was slated to receive two bombs from the sky, one each for these secret government sites.

He delivered this information as if it were a law of physics or the known terms of an international treaty.

I was a child, so I took it as such, staring bug-eyed at the red sky that might evaporate me.

Nearly two decades later, I looked up at the clear blue one above Los Angeles from behind the wheel of my own car, worried about different missiles.

I had gone into my dot-com job early, and I was the only one there when the planes hit the Twin Towers.

The internet, barely functional on a good day, broke completely; to listen to the news, I had to turn on a transistor radio that someone had left in their cubicle.

We sent everyone home early that morning.

I recalled an article published a handful of years earlier, just before the stark-white, cliffside Getty Center opened in Brentwood.

The writer had theorized that the Getty might finally give Los Angeles a monument worthy of destruction in an alien attack. (Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day , released the previous year, had settled for the Library Tower, a bland downtown high-rise.) Nuclear war was a massive threat, and a real one.

During the Cold War, every morning the sun rose under the shadow of destruction.