"All sounds good. Except when you look who wrote it"

How the history of CERN can inform international AI R&D efforts

Intro

The centre for future generations did some important thinking on how a CERN for AI could function. Like, in practical, mechanistic detail. We should thank them.¹

As always, somebody dislikes that others can just do stuff. In this case:

Ah, the myth of academic credentials being a necessary hallmark of a good idea. It is all too common. Not just in Australia — Professor Toby Walsh F-A-A F-T-S-E’s home — but especially also in Europe.

Outsmarting ourselves without disempowering all of humanity will require immense effort. Superhuman AI would likely be our last invention. A lot of genius is required for a handover of the economy to AIs.² Let’s maybe dedicate all available brain power to advancing safely.³

We need to build hard and think even harder - from hardware to software security, information security, and societal resilience. Humans, even our smartest, build and think better when heavily clustered. Europe has untapped potential for harboring such an international endeavour. Unfortunately, right now, Europe actively scatters most of its smartest people (or worse, provides reasons to leave).⁴

Time to dispell some myths, lest we’ll all have to move to Washington DC or the San Francisco Bay Area soon. You can still just do stuff in Europe if you look closely enough. The fact that many people aren’t doing stuff is but a cultural failure, compounded by overupdates on WWII. Stop being scared of yourself and start building the society that holds the balance.

Despite current policy failures, Europe is closer to a “CERN for AI” than Professor Toby Walsh F-A-A F-T-S-E from Australia can imagine.⁵ I’d like to help make it happen and thought CERN’s conception is a good starting point. But most of the official explainers weren’t adding up — something diplomatic was going on. I figured I could provide some better sketches due to our work experience.

So, let's look at how CERN got done, ackshually.

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Big CERN

Here’s my summary of how CERN explains its history in an impressive act of historical diplomacy:

1. Raoul Dautry, Pierre Auger, Lew Kowarski, Edoardo Amaldi, and Niels Bohr spent the 1940s dreaming of Making European Science Great Again.

2. At the 1949 European Cultural Conference in Lausanne, 57-year-old French Nobel laureate Louis de Broglie proposes the creation of a “multi-national laboratory”.

3. Five months later Isidor Rabi, an equally Nobel-prized American colleague, authorizes UNESCO to initiate a regional research lab.

4. 21 months later, 11 countries sign an agreement birthing the acronym ‘CERN’.

5. Three months later, they start writing on a convention and scouting out Danish, Dutch, Swiss, and French grounds for the location, quickly settling on Geneva.

6. Another 13 months later and the financing and a convention are hashed out — it’s time to build (and ratify)!

From a speech in December 1949 to the complete ratification of the convention, it took almost 4.5 years for the twelve founding states to negotiate and ratify the now-called “European Organization for Nuclear Research”.⁶

Imagine everything that must have happened in 26 months of acronym-pregnancy. And then another 16 months of labour. Oh the poor surrogate! And another hard part must have been figuring out you want a child in the first place. So uh, what actually caused all of this to happen? We’ll have to dig deep into this immaculate conception of geopolitical finesse.

Epistemic status: ~propaganda. Instead of post-rationalizing a research approach, indulge me for storytime. I’m putting all of the relevant public sources into this footnote.⁷ Systematic referencing would have kept me from publishing indefinitely. It would also mostly have been cargocult science. This piece is a patchwork of inferences made from 20h of conscious effort, heavily drawing on our work experience. Wherever there are links in the text, it’s links that I only use once.⁸ Imagine everything else to be linked to one of the sources in footnote 7.

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Anecdotes

Louis de Broglie was an elder French statesman of physics. In revolutionary French fashion, Louis was concerned with decline. In this lesser-known case, Louis appears to have been concerned with the vanishing grandeur of European physics. And in classical fashion, this late Louis also did not care to step down but contented himself with lending prestige from the ivory tower. He didn’t do much for CERN.

As far as I can tell, the heavy lifting for CERN’s conception was done by its first and only "General Secretary": Edoardo Amaldi. 16 years De Broglie’s junior, Amaldi put together many conceptual pieces and maintained a critical network. His motivations appear to me as highly underrated for anyone attempting similar feats. They might also explain why even CERN’s Wikipedia only mentions him once: he understood that he was part of something much bigger.

To Amaldi, CERN was about the future of humanity.

At the very start of his career, Amaldi immediately experienced true human excellence as part of Enrico Fermi's "Via Panisperna boys". They discovered slow neutrinos - crucial for sustaining nuclear chain reactions. The basis for the cleanest and safest source of quasi-abundant energy! Imagine the hype of making this discovery - VPboiz4lyfe!

Unfortunately, but to no surprise, Fermi’s wife and two out of seven VP boys were Jewish. Between 1936 and 1938, three VP boys leave for North America. Another one “disappears” after four years of depression.⁹

With the Via Panisperna boys broken up, Amaldi is left yearning for a breakthrough squad. Despite briefly getting drafted to the African front, Amaldi mostly manages to stay out of the war. Rather than sitting it out, he even attempts to exploit fascist megalomania: in the lead-up to the 1942 World's Fair, he pitches an accelerator to Mussolini’s government (the fair was only canceled in June 1941).

Amaldi views science as the ultimate force for cross-cultural convergence and seeks to cluster his colleagues. In 1942, his idealism makes him decide to avoid fission research to stay out of war efforts. Despite dwindling opportunities, Amaldi feels a strong duty to give back to his motherland and shepherd the survival of peaceful, Italian science.

In 1946, Fermi offers him a professorship in Chicago. Shocked by Fermi’s secrecy due to purported military interests, Amaldi rejects once more. For the next years, Amaldi and his colleague Gilberto Bernardini try to rebuild the Italian physics community. On a tight budget, this means doing things at small scale. Many of the most talented colleagues continue to leave for the much better resourced US.

To stop the brain drain, a monumental project would be needed. Witnessing US nuclear research on a trip in 1946, the idea of a European accelerator shapes up. But Amaldi is convinced that science has to happen without military involvement. Once back back from his trip, Amaldi’s research group examines the infrastructure needs and costs of building and running a facility.

While focused on building up Italian physics, Amaldi - now the de facto face of Italian post-war physics - continuously advocates for a shared accelerator. But scientists around Europe lack the political insight or ambition to pull it off. It takes France - harboring ambitions to become a nuclear power - to publish a national investigation into the military facilities necessary to build out energy and weapons.¹⁰

In December 1949 at the European Cultural Conference in Lausanne, a French government official reads out a statement from Louis de Broglie that purportedly “initiates” CERN. That’s right, de Broglie, claimed to be one of the main characters of CERN’s official history, wasn’t anywhere near CERN’s founding.¹¹

A month before de Broglie’s announcement, various Nordic countries, led by Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, had advanced a similar proposal for collaboration. Everyone agreed that American expertise is needed. But most thought the Americans aren’t willing to help.¹² Neither the Nordics, nor the French, planned to include Western Germany.

Meanwhile, Amaldi’s old friend Bernardini moves to the US and shares Amaldi’s accelerator plans with Isidor Isaac Rabi. Rabi built up the Brookhaven National Laboratory and worked in Los Alamos. Well aware of defense realities, Rabi sees Amaldi’s plans as an opportunity to stabilize Europe in service of the US.

To ensure the others include West Germany and slow down European nuclear weaponization, the US has to act fast. The communists are feared to gain ground in French politics. To rein in Europe’s potential, the Marshall Plan has to succeed at reintegration. And as the Soviets are now clearly on track, the fear of handing out nuclear secrets diminished.

A facility the scale of CERN — without test reactors — would slow down the spread of nuclear weapons while accelerating science that accelerates American science.

Cognizant of French political force, Rabi engages with fellow physicist Pierre Auger, director of UNESCO's science division close to French politicians. With Auger’s institutional backing, Rabi convinces the US Foreign Service to sponsor a UNESCO resolution he drafted - plausibly with help from the Department of Defense.

Before presenting the UNESCO resolution, Rabi meets with Amaldi. Somebody neutral and competent has to spearhead the implementation. Amaldi is a qualified, reliable candidate with a vision, technical understanding, and a large network.

At the fifth UNESCO General Conference, held in Florence in June 1950, Rabi tables a resolution for UNESCO to "assist and encourage the formation of regional research laboratories…"

The next years, Amaldi and Auger campaign through Europe. On their grand tour, they convince governments and academics alike that the ambitions laid out are worth pursuing. Niels Bohr, biased by his personal plans, questions the feasibility of applied research at such scale. The British question the opportunity cost. But Amaldi’s plan and — occasionally passion — eventually convince the British nobility.

Having secured key political allies, buy-in eventually cascades in 1952. After plenty of work sessions and council meetings, it’s official: the council moves from Copenhagen to Switzerland in 1954. The construction begins. CERN’s history, from here on, is much less abstruse.

Shortly after launching CERN, Amaldi — of course — gets involved in Pugwash. You get my point: He’s a genuinely hardworking goody two-shoes, this Amaldi.

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So what to make of this?

I.e. what do I make of this?

1. CERN was an outlier in diplomatic success - and accurately attributing credit can be opposed to getting things done.

2. US defense interests are powerful, yes. But they’re also insufficient. Even right after WWII, among the allies, it wasn’t obvious how to put 2+2 together.

3. The French played a key role in CERN’s conception only in so far as their push for nuclear weapons likely made it easier for Rabi to convince DoD of support. In the actual conception of CERN, however, the French only seem to have played a secondary role.

4. The US did well not to figure prominently in CERN’s inception but leverage proxies. It was probably similarly important to stay out of the annals for the French to assume ownership. This might successfully have delayed French nuclear weapons by 2-10 years.

5. While Amaldi was in some sense “exploited” by the US, it is easy to underestimate his role in pushing things through. Anecdata says he was the convincing force, not Auger. And fighting for due credit would plausibly have kept him from doing more useful things.

The cosmopolitans won because they didn’t let pride get in their way. They didn’t bother asking for respect. They simply did it because they thought it was right.

But let’s get back to where we started: academic credentialism and building CERN 2.0.

The above is evidence of how excellence has little to do with journals or conferences. Beyond a modicum of intelligence, doing great things mostly has to do with doing the hard work, knowing the right people, and showing integrity. Including in politics. In the olden days, few people were privileged. Nowadays, however, you don’t even need a university degree to obtain these features and go do stuff.¹³

Listening to the experts certainly isn’t always the best path either: CERN’s staff currently hopes to build a >$20bn toy for… their comfy retirement. You’d think all that compute could be put to better use. Switzerland might also find a better way to remain internationally relevant. Let’s not focus any of Europe’s smartest people on what looks likely to be quite literally a pipe dream.

It is the next Amaldis that will make CERN for AI happen. The De Broglies and credentials are still helpful, of course, but in a world of digitized trust networks, they’re becoming less and less crucial.

Amaldi was able to take an immense amount of responsibility on himself because he had community support and his vision was clear: the securitization of science in the US would not help bring about a better world. Whether he was right is a topic for another time.

At CERN's official 30th anniversary in 1984, Rabi said:

I expected that Europe, which was the cradle of science, once brought back into the path, would achieve some very great things. I hope that the scientists at CERN will remember that they have other duties than exploring further into particle physics. They represent the combination of centuries and centuries of investigation study, and scholarship to show the power of the human spirit. So, I appeal to them not to consider themselves as technicians but as guardians of this flame of European unity so that Europe can help preserve the peace of the world.

1. Thank you, cfg! Now we can have more productive discussions about which aspects concretely need workshopping.

2. youtube.com/watch?v=2Abk1jAONjw

3. All available brain power that’s not already used for crucial societal functions, of course. Even if you include the private sector, “core AI people” alone won’t cut it. We’ll need all hands on deck for this transition.

4. Yes, the French are an exception. No worries, enough of this post is about the French, we’ll get there.

5. With all due respect: Toby, maybe it’s time to move. Glorifying last century's academia is pretty “non-core AI”.

6. OERN wasn’t as swanky, so they kept CERN - to my big disappointment.

7. https://cds.cern.ch/record/151765/files/CERN-CHS-1.pdf
https://cds.cern.ch/record/151766/files/CERN-CHS-2.pdf
https://cds.cern.ch/record/151764/files/CERN-CHS-3.pdf
https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-004-0225-z
https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/58/4/87/394407/Cern-s-Early-History-Revisited
https://cerncourier.com/a/edoardo-amaldi-a-true-statesman-of-science/
https://ep-news.web.cern.ch/content/interview-ugo-amaldi-reflections-cerns-70-year-legacy-and-european-collaboration

8. As you might have figured out by now, other footnotes and links are mostly tongue-in-cheek or dangerous rabbit holes. You’re welcome.

9. According to my questionable research, yes, this is a euphemism for “one of the most promising physicists of the last century jumped off a ferry to kill himself”.

10. Yes, eerily similar to the AI sitch. But beware the man of one story.

11. Yes, the homie Louis wasn’t even at the conference! The French used his name for their strategic advantage.

12. DéjAI vu much?

13. Source: trust me, bro. Maybe in the 1940s, it was mostly academics, aristocrats, clerics and a few industrialists who were privileged enough to have time to think about mundane things like “do I think better when surrounded by all of my smartest friends?” With a few decades of additional progress, these deep insights even come to high school dropouts in Australia. If someone could please get it published at NeurIPS, Toby Walsh would appreciate it.