William Shockley

... that's the point.

I think for me, a role model is John Bardeen, who was a theoretical physicist, uh, focused on semiconductor charge transport, and working with, uh, Brattain and, and Shockley, they invented the transistor, won the Nobel Prize, changed the world.

You know, if, if you can aspire to that level of science and technology, I think that's a model that we like to, like to think about.

So put another way, we'd like to generate knowledge for the ages, but technology for today.

There's hardly any technology, any built infrastructure, that is free from sin.

Every microchip you use is filled with billions of linear descendants of William Shockley's silicon transistors.

Shockley was a monster, a virulent racist and eugenicist who spent his Nobel Prize bounty in efforts to pay black women to have their tubes tied as part of a disgusting racist project.

Going further back, Europe's roads owe their existence to Rome's imperial conquest, a bloody campaign that included mass enslavement and the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians.

Optimizing open models is a matter for collaborative open effort, not closed labs fueled by investors' centabillions.

AI has technopolitics, but those politics are neither inevitable nor immutable.

Sam Altman's lurking presence in a language model is no more politically disqualifying than William Shockley's residue in your microchips.

AI today might be a defective tomato harvester, immiserating workers and driving out good tomatoes with bad.

Major historical inventions.

The transistor, 1947, invented by Jan Bardeen, William Shockley, and Walter Brayton, launching the solid-state electronics revolution.

Information theory, formulated by Claude Shannon, setting the mathematical basis for the digital age.

The laser, fundamental principles were first published and patented by Bell Labs researchers.

Uh, my parents were faculty, and there's a, a little neighborhood, uh, where all your, all your neighbors are, are other professors.

Um, my neighbor was, uh, William Shockley, the inventor-

That's crazy.

Yeah

Yeah, and I will – just from my own personal perspective on watching the film, you can't unsee this.

Once you know and once you begin to understand William Shockley and eugenics and European racism and superiority and colonialism and – All of this stuff is laid bare and it's not – you're not pulling from tangential relationships.

This is where it is.

This is where it came from.

But the origins of that term were an attempt to raise philanthropic funding for certain kinds of mathematical research.

And John McCarthy is the character who kind of coins this term as a sort of flashy, sexy term that he can raise money underneath.

And always the project in his mind was to create human-level intelligence.

And it's super laughable that computers can produce human-type intelligence.

Why it's so weird.

I mean, one layer that I don't touch on in the film, but we can all agree with is this kind of idea that we see becoming repopularized, which is the kind of new frontier attitude of American expansionism.

And so when you start there with that, you know, area, then we have that first layer of capture and erasure, right? And then we have the character William Shockley in our film, who I won't spoil it by giving any more information than that.

But, you know, he's somebody who grew up in the Bay Area and after his service in the war, he came back and created a... technology company that then a lot of spawned a lot of other technology companies um creating the semiconductor and microchips and there's we don't talk about it in the film at all but there's also a legacy of land poisoning and environmental degradation that's a direct result of this enterprise being the industry in silicon valley

But it's pretty unusual.

Maybe William Shockley, I guess, Shockley Semiconductors, I don't know.

But I think

we're going to start to see

So Fairchild was created by eight individuals who left this company called Shockley Semiconductors.

William Shockley helped create the integrated circuits.

He creates a company in Silicon Valley, one of the first semiconductor companies, one of the first technology companies, and they're from the East Coast.

And usually all technology companies would be on the East Coast at this point.