The MANIAC
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4.8 • 8 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
<p>From the author of When We Cease to Understand the World: a dazzling, kaleidoscopic book about the destructive chaos lurking in the history of computing and AI
Johnny von Neumann was an enigma. As a young man, he stunned those around him with his monomaniacal pursuit of the unshakeable foundations of mathematics. But when his faith in this all-encompassing system crumbled, he began to put his prodigious intellect to use for those in power. As he designed unfathomable computer systems and aided the development of the atomic bomb, his work pushed increasingly into areas that were beyond human comprehension and control - and that threatened human destruction.
In The MANIAC, Benjamín Labatut braids fact with fiction in a scintillating journey to the very fringes of rational thought, right to the point where it tips over into chaos. Stretching back to early twentieth-century conflict over contradictions in physics and up to advances in artificial intelligence that outpace the human, this is a mind-bending story of the mad dreams of reason.</p>
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After the slender yet incendiary When We Cease to Understand the World, Labatut returns with a sensational epic of the Hungarian American physicist and computer scientist John von Neumann. The title refers to a computer that ran calculations on atomic weapons at Los Alamos, and to von Neumann himself, whose theories and experiments brought about a new reality for humanity—and one defined by its potential annihilation. It was von Neumann, the originator of the concept of mutually assured destruction, who helped accelerate American investment in nuclear weapons and insisted the U.S. should not fall behind the Soviets in the arms race. Labatut brackets von Neumann's story with those of two other real-life figures: the darkly brilliant Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest—whose depression led him to murder his disabled son and then kill himself in 1933—and South Korean Go champion Lee Sedol, who retired in 2019 after losing multiple matches to AI, which he describes on a talk show as "an entity that cannot be defeated." Labatut mesmerizes in his accessible depictions of complex scientific material and in his inspired portraits of the innovators. In his previous book, Labatut grappled with the ways in which scientific breakthroughs offered new means of experiencing reality; this one succeeds at showing how acts of genius might break the world forever. Readers won't be able to turn away.
Customer Reviews
MANIAC Frames the Ancestry of AI
Labatut pulls off the rare feat of producing a work of fiction that brilliantly illuminates a hyper-topical subject: artificial intelligence. Through the imagined reminiscences of real historical figures, The MANIAC reconstructs a complex mosaic of John von Neumann, the computational titan who stood at the birthplace of modern computing. This human element—rich with intimate, plausible gossip—illuminates von Neumann's terrifying genius without veering into hagiography.
The second half of the book takes a bold, calculated risk, leaping sixty years past von Neumann’s death to trace the rise of DeepMind and AlphaGo. Yet, the two halves synergize flawlessly.
Ultimately, The MANIAC is a work of art, not a popular science manual. Readers will not walk away with a technical understanding of AI, nor a clear roadmap of its future potentialities. Instead, they will be exposed to its deeply volatile, emotionally charged ancestry. By anchoring an emerging, still-sketchy force in human history, I found this book strangely comforting.