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A review by _walter_
The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut
5.0
Exquisite. Gripping. Foreboding.
Reader beware: If you are not measured and careful not to let your eyes get ahead of themselves, Labatut’s words will take hold of your system like the meanest popsicle you’ve ever had. One second you are savoring every lick completely unaware, then BAM! Blinding brain-freeze and back-of-the-neck chills.
If you are like me, you’ll keep going back for seconds.
Ok, so what is it? It’s fiction. It’s based on fact. It’s poetic. It’s philosophical. It’s instructive. It’s destructive. It’s “stream of consciousness”. It’s second-hand accounts. It’s very real.
It’s engrossing, too. So by the time you reach the final pages you could look back and see how it was all inevitable, really. All the lives, and one life’s work. We can see it now, looking back. But only the MANIAC could see it back then.
That’s what it is. What’s it about?
It’s about the life and work of John Von Neumann, self-replicating machines, Gödel, incompleteness, virtual universes, AlphaGo. It’s also about unfathomable monstrosities and mutually assured destruction (MAD):
They say that great technology is “frozen experience” - all the knowledge captured and embodied during its creation. So that is, in essence, Von Neumann’s legacy: a force of intellect so powerful that it birthed ideas as brilliant and destructive as they are enduring. Bombs. Computers. AI. A mind frozen for future generations.
Highest possible recommendation!
Reader beware: If you are not measured and careful not to let your eyes get ahead of themselves, Labatut’s words will take hold of your system like the meanest popsicle you’ve ever had. One second you are savoring every lick completely unaware, then BAM! Blinding brain-freeze and back-of-the-neck chills.
If you are like me, you’ll keep going back for seconds.
Ok, so what is it? It’s fiction. It’s based on fact. It’s poetic. It’s philosophical. It’s instructive. It’s destructive. It’s “stream of consciousness”. It’s second-hand accounts. It’s very real.
It’s engrossing, too. So by the time you reach the final pages you could look back and see how it was all inevitable, really. All the lives, and one life’s work. We can see it now, looking back. But only the MANIAC could see it back then.
That’s what it is. What’s it about?
It’s about the life and work of John Von Neumann, self-replicating machines, Gödel, incompleteness, virtual universes, AlphaGo. It’s also about unfathomable monstrosities and mutually assured destruction (MAD):
“So those cursed things came alive within the digital circuits of a computer before exploding into our world.”
They say that great technology is “frozen experience” - all the knowledge captured and embodied during its creation. So that is, in essence, Von Neumann’s legacy: a force of intellect so powerful that it birthed ideas as brilliant and destructive as they are enduring. Bombs. Computers. AI. A mind frozen for future generations.
It's scary how science works. Just think about this for a second: the most creative and the most destructive of human inventions arose at exactly the same time. So much of the high-tech world we live in today, with its conquest of space and extraordinary advances in biology and medicine, were spurred on by one man's monomania and the need to develop electronic computers to calculate whether an H-bomb could be built or not.
Or think about Ulam. This Polish mathematician who almost died, who had one foot/both feet in the grave, but then from his deranged imagination we get this unbelievable technique that opens up a new domain in mathematical physics just at the right moment, with just the right technology waiting for it.
And then the world catches fire.
Highest possible recommendation!