Genesis Mission
5/19/202624 min
The Genesis Mission is a national effort to accelerate discovery by uniting AI, supercomputing, experiments, and the infrastructure of the national laboratories. This episode explores the problem Genesis is trying to solve, the growing gap between the pace of scientific discovery and the scale of the challenges facing the nation. At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, this vision is turning into a reality through infrastructure, workforce training, and governance.
Guests featured (in order of appearance):
- Dario Gil - Department of Energy Undersecretary for Science and the Director of the Genesis Mission
- Rob Neely - Associate Director for Weapon Simulation and Computing, LLNL
- Lori Diachin - Principal Deputy for Computing, LLNL
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Big Ideas Lab is a Mission.org original series.
Executive Produced by Levi Hanusch.
Sound Design, Music Edit and Mix by Matthew Powell.
Script by Caroline Kidd
Story Editing by Levi Hanusch.
Audio Engineering and Editing by Matthew Powell.
Narrated by Matthew Powell.
Video Production by Levi Hanusch.
Brought to you in partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
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Clips
Showing 10 of 14Transcript preview
First 90 secondsMatthew Powell0:01
[crowd murmuring] In the late 1670s, voices rose in a room full of arguments in Paris. At the edge of it all sat Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. To him, the arguments felt predictable. [sighs] Not wrong, just imprecise. Because days earlier, he'd been at a workshop, gears turning, and a machine that didn't argue, just rules producing answers. The contrast stayed with him. The problem wasn't the ideas, it was the language. What if reasoning worked like the machine? Not argued, but broken into symbols. He wrote his thoughts into words, quote, "When controversies arise-" "It will suffice to say, let us calculate."
Dario Gil· Guest0:53
He already envisioned converting all knowledge into a binary representation, and imagined calculators, machines, that would take that binary representation and calculate with it, and he envisioned that as a possibility of then problem-solving.
Matthew Powell1:13
A vision from the 17th century.
Dario Gil· Guest1:15
So that was already hundreds of years ago. Problem is they didn't have the technology to make it happen.
Matthew Powell1:20
Even now, science can model parts of reality. Computers can process data, but no system has been able