Aug 2, 2023 2 min read

Two summer movie blockbusters have recently opened at your local multiplex, if you still have one.

One movie concerns with the life and times of Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, the quantum physicist and self-admitted man who could destroy the world. The other was Barbie, the legendary blonde created by Mattel in 1959 as an imitation of what young girls perceived as the ideal of young womanhood, and boys considered the idea of the girl they wanted to hook up with and marry.

This was before the women’s liberation movement. Dwight Eisenhower was president. Sometime during the 1960s, Barbie — between being nurse, stewardess, cowgirl, ballerina, or whatever outfit Mattel was selling — met Ken, the love of her life.

And now, after all these years, Barbie and Ken are still ageless and have their own blockbuster. 

Oppenheimer was a true genius. To his fellow scientists, he wasn’t the best mathematician or physicist of the time, but like Albert Einstein, he could conceptualize what different complex calculations, when combined, could create; hence the atomic bomb.

Oppenheimer was appointed to head the development of “the bomb” at his old camping spot in New Mexico. The town of Los Alamos was built in several months in the desert to keep the Russians from stealing the secret. President Harry S. Truman ended the war with Japan with two massive explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The true age of innocence ended that fateful summer morning in 1945 at Hiroshima. Mankind could now destroy itself.

And now we face two more threats that are as equally dangerous as nuclear destruction —  the burning up of the planet and artificial intelligence.

One day Barbie and Ken could really be created by AI.

Paul Lesako

Carmichaels