The Maniac
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Average rating4.5
From one of literature’s most exciting new voices, a story centered around one of the great geniuses of the modern age, the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the uncanny circuit of his mind deep into our own time’s most haunting dilemmas. 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 modern science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In The MANIAC, Labatut has created a masterpiece on an even more epic scale, with the protean figure of John von Neumann in its foreground. A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people that surrounded him from his early school days until the end of his life, von Neumann transformed every field he touched, essentially inventing the game theory, the first programable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata. He was a paradoxical character, at times childish and amoral, at times wise and astonishingly far-seeing. The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych bookended by a suicidal Austrian physicist, Paul Ehrenfest, and the matchup between a Korean Go master and an artificial intelligence system, both artfully connected to the main section, which presents the astounding life and ideas of von Neumann through a chorus of family members and friends, as well as gifted scientists, such as Richard Feynman, Theodore von Karman, and Eugene Wigner, who outline the evolution of a mind beyond any we have known, and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake. The MANIAC begins in Europe, in the 1930s, with the story of a brilliant and tortured Austrian physicist, Paul Ehrenfest, one of Einstein’s closest friends, who fell into despair when he looked at the darkness slowly enveloping the world as mathematics invaded physics and science and technology became tyrannical forces; it ends almost a hundred years later, as we witness the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo, an encounter that showcases the limits of human and non-human creativity and embodies the central question of von Neumann’s most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence that could evolve beyond our understanding or control. A work of staggering beauty and momentum, The MANIAC brings us, head and heart, into contact with the deepest questions we face as a species.
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Al voltant primer de la vida de John Von Neumann i del seu entorn científic i familiar, Benjamin Labatut construeix una excel·lentíssima història novel·lada dels grans canvis científics que portaren a l'aparició de les a hores d'ara omnipresents computadores. Com a cloenda ens explica la història de la IA AlphaGo.
Not as bewitching as [b:When We Cease to Understand the World 62069739 When We Cease to Understand the World Benjamín Labatut https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1661332705l/62069739.SX50.jpg 84341168], especially not if you've read [b:Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe 12625589 Turing's Cathedral The Origins of the Digital Universe George Dyson https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1322700777l/12625589.SX50.jpg 17677574] and watched the AlphaGo documentary. But the writing is still great, and Labatut gives his unique haunting touch to von Neumann's life and legacy.
What is the meaning of an idea?
There is the thing itself, born in the mind, an association that springs to life as the result of neurons firing, thoughts connected to other thoughts connected to prior knowledge connected to desire connected to the conscious and unconscious, a web of chemical reactions stitched together, constructing a piece of the self, the most intimate piece, which resides in the unknowable part of our identity, built upon language but also on sensory experience, the two things together, sometimes one used to describe the other, silently, in our minds as we name the things we see, as we connect them, as the alchemy of thinking creates a new, unique thought.
It is that, but it is also how we externalize it, how we describe it in the world and, once described, how it is taken up by other minds, perhaps made manifest in some form— an object, an action, a theory, words, language.
It is that, too, but also the result of that externalization in other minds as they collaborate with it, build upon the original, carry it forward, mutate it, replicate it, expand upon it or reduce it to nothing. It can lay dormant, only to be picked up later, it can be everything from an instantly forgotten notion, a mere whim, to the framework of knowledge itself— science, from a single connection between two thoughts to an incalculable network of ideas that generate something powerful and new, a world-shifting ideal, a process for thinking, for quantifying understanding, for building systems of thought that can transform human experience and, thus, history.
Benjamín Labatut's The MANIAC is a book that explores the tangible, knowable history of the development of modern computational systems and the human beings that helped create them, a stunning piece of writing that is both a historical recounting of how science found itself at the center of the arms race for nuclear supremacy and thus, the story of how an idea was realized in our world, inspiring an entirely new form of computational power.
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