Benjamin Labatut

From one of contemporary literature’s most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist, and one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year, it explored the life and thought of a clutch of mathematicians and physicists who took science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In The MANIAC, Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale. A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata. Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues, and rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake. The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo, an encounter embodying the central question of von Neumann's most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence able to evolve beyond human understanding or control. A word of beauty and fabulous momentum, The MANIAC's unique blend of fact and fiction confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species.

The MANIAC

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Was there any way I could have warmed his heart? Could I have swayed his will, strong as it was, or just planted a tiny seed that might have sprouted and saved some part of his soul? But I did nothing, said nothing, not a word. I did not even try, because I was so afraid for myself.

oskar morgenstern chapter wins by a mile. this is like that van gogh goes to the louvre doctor who scene but instead of our favorite painter, it's evil genius johnny von neumann

THAT or von neumann's worst nightmares have yet to unfold

Taking all of this into consideration, it’s no wonder that Johnny was convinced that humankind would not survive the many wonders of industrial society, but I’m sure that if he were alive, he would be relieved by the fact that his worst nightmares have not come true, and that our theory of games blossomed far beyond the hothouse of politics and is used in everything from computer science and ecology to philosophy and biology, where our equations model how cancer cells grow, spread, and communicate. Some of our terminology has even seeped into common vernacular, with people referring to many aspects of social life as “zero-sum games.

As someone forced to used AI or lose my job, I felt things. 

AlphaGo had lost the game... People felt helplessness and fear. It seemed we humans are so weak and fragile. And this victory meant we could still hold our own. As time goes on, it'll probably be very difficult to beat Al. But winning this one time ... it felt like it was enough. One time was enough

Noreen Farsai

so utterly rational that it bordered on the psychopathic

The MANIAC quotes

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