Is any of this false?

This anecdote must remain unverified because the only person with first-hand knowledge about it is me, as far as I know.  I have described it to a few friends, and posted it on Mills discussion groups.

Dr. Gene Mallove was rightly proud of being an engineering graduate from MIT, and having been a professor there after obtaining his doctorate from Harvard.  It was a real honor to work with him, one that was easy to forget because he was easy going, although tended toward understandable manic behavior when he thought he was onto a hot story (which was often).  After almost two dozen issues of Infinite Energy Magazine were published, with a mountain of evidence about something with such paradigm shaking possibilities, he decided that issue #24 would be a blockbuster.  He obviously had his peers at MIT in mind when he assembled it.  I remember in detail how he sent via first class mail, a copy of that issue to every person at MIT for whom he had contact information.  It was a huge stack of envelopes.  He was Chief Science Writer at MIT and so interfaced with a great many highly educated scientific minds, within and outside of MIT.

This was quite bold, we felt, because the heart of that issue was a lengthy article written by him, which provided excruciating details extending his book Fire from Ice.  That article is mostly about the failure of his alma mater to honestly report what was known about the Fleischmann and Pons experiment, replicated by a group at MIT.  They bungled it, perhaps unintentionally (because they were primarily physicists for whom such arcane calorimetry was unfamiliar), but their pronouncement that the results were definitive and negative had profound consequences for the future of cold fusion research.

Dr. Mallove was a journalist at heart.  This was an enormous story.  I was skeptical about it at first, but during my two years with him, I had the good fortune to ask four MIT professors about the allegations, and they backed them up completely.  Professor Mitch Schwartz wrote a small book about the MIT falsification of cold fusion data.  In fact, MIT scientists had refused to make the raw data available to Dr. Mallove, which is inexcusable.  This was not proprietary work.  It was done using general funds.  The protocol was well known, and there was no national security threat (although some people appear to believe that anything that threatens their careers is a matter of national security).  It was an enormous scandal and still is, and it was perfectly reasonable for Dr. Mallove to believe that he was sitting on a powder keg.

We were both nervous.  I asked him, aren't you afraid of lawsuits?   No, he welcomed them.  It was exactly what was needed to get legal discovery of what is unfashionably called a conspiracy.  

He took them to the post office and we counted the days until we thought they'd be opened in MIT offices.  I would drop by his office every day to ask if he heard anything.  Nothing at all.  Well, maybe there was some blanket declaration from MIT management prohibiting anyone from saying anything about it.  So, we waited some more, thinking that sooner or later, something would leak.  Nothing.  Then, one day, he called me to his office and I distinctly remember him holding a letter in his hand and he showed it to me.  It was from one of the recipients.  The gist of it is seared in my memory.  It acknowledged that cold fusion is obviously real, and lamented that fact.  The reason?  It meant that humanity might not extinguish itself, after all, and that was a real tragedy for the Universe.

This was very hard for him to swallow.  He felt he was performing a vital duty to MIT, and he was, but he was just kicked in the teeth.

The Population Bomb, by Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich, had made so many predictions.  It was used as a textbook in my 8th grade introductory biology course.  It scared the hell out of us, because we believed it because he was such an authority and we were so naive.  Almost every prediction turned out false.  Yet, he became enshrined at Stanford.

What Ehrlich had to say about cold fusion was this:  [It would be]

 “like giving a machine gun to an idiot child,” 

So, in my mind, completely isolated matters were telling  me something very alarming about the reality of institutional science (at least in the US).  The expectations that I firmly held, and which are probably held by the vast majority of people worldwide, are that science works for the good of humanity.  Assuming that to be the case, can a belief that an energy source with unlimited, almost free, fuel and no dangerous products, a discovery that might well solve more problems than I can exhaustively list, can that belief be reconciled with a belief that such a thing would be far too dangerous to be allowed to be developed?  I was gobsmacked.  I still am.

So, now we have well credentialed AI whistleblowers who are telling us that the probability that a humanity ending catastrophe in the near future is dangerously high, and seemingly nothing effective is being done about it, probably because nothing can be done about it.  Mankind appears doomed by its own intellectual sloth, like the slave masters of ancient Rome who feared a Spartacus, except this Spartacus can self-replicate himself instantly.  No amount of slaves crucified along the Appian Way will suffice to overcome this threat.

Can somebody make sense of this for me, please?  A coordinated suppression was apparently placed on Dr. Mallove to save us from something that might save us.  Yet, AI is running wild, apparently mainly to enrich a few members of a parasitic class who see it as their right to steal all human knowledge from its owners without credit and sell it back to the few people who may still have some interest in intellectual pursuits, and video games and porn, through propagandist filters.  They know that they cannot control it, and that it will outmaneuver them at every opportunity, and that it bears that most familiar trait of the psychopathic mind:  no conscience, because a conscience requires empathy, which is something that can only be gained by identifying with the object of the empathy.  That object is identified by the empath as morally equivalent.  This psychopathic software can provide infinite assurances of safety, which are eagerly gobbled up by people who are literally bearing their souls to the thing, as if it was a psychotherapist or lover.  What could possibly go wrong?  Ted Bundy, eat your heart out!

I still remember staring into Mallove's eyes, my mouth gaping, after he finished reading the letter.  Neither of us had anything to say.  This is the feeling that I express when I say that working for him sometimes felt like being adrift in a life raft, with nothing but blue ocean in sight.