AI is the rage. In the past two years, ChatGPT and other generative AI platforms have made it so. But AI was already here and here to stay. In 2017, Stanford computer scientist Andrew Ng referred to AI as “the new electricity.” According to Daniele Rus, the first woman to lead MIT’s AI Lab, “dig into every industry, and you’ll find AI changing the nature of work.” Stephen Hawking said of AI in 2016,...

There was remarkably little fanfare for the 70th anniversary of President Eisenhower’s December 8, 1953 “Atoms for Peace” speech before the United Nations. Seven months before that anniversary, Time Magazine featured an essay headlined, “Nuclear Energy’s Moment Has Come,” by Charles Oppenheimer, grandson of the man who led the Manhattan Project. History, however, shows that scientists of Eisenhower’s era believed that moment had already arrived. Only four years after Eisenhower’s speech, America’s first nuclear-electric generating plant was...