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marc129 's review for:
The MANIAC
by Benjamín Labatut
informative
medium-paced
A fascinating, interesting, and above all intriguing book about people I had barely heard of. Of course, the part about John von Neumann (1903-1957) is by far the most appealing. And that was also the reason why I read this book. I knew that the Hungarian-American mathematician Von Neumann was one of the founders of cybernetics, the study of very complex systems, but that is only addressed indirectly in this book. Labatut focuses on the unlikely genius that was von Neumann, his contribution to the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, and his steps towards artificial intelligence. In the form of docu-fiction, and via all kinds of people who knew him from close or further away, we get a kaleidoscopic portrait of an impressive, but enigmatic man. That formula has been cleverly applied, with of course also a lot of contradictory information and views. This is not a hagiography, because the view we get of the man von Neumann is not always flattering. Moreover, the very extensive von Neumann section is preceded by a short section on the Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest (1880-1931), and an extensive epilogue on the development of the first AI systems that defeated human grandmasters in both chess and go.
As said, all fascinating and interesting, but you are left with the question of where exactly Labatut was heading with this book: is it purely documentary (raising up a forgotten history)?, is it a warning against groundbreaking, but unstable geniuses? Or a warning against Artificial Intelligence itself? I am not sure. And I had a similar ambiguous feeling with his previous well-known work, ‘When we cease to understand the world’, which focused on the downside of great scientific inventions and insights. Perhaps this weakness is precisely its strength, and Labatut deliberately leaves room for the reader to develop his own interpretation.