Three years after Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World debuted as a bestselling translation of historical metafiction in 2020, The Maniac was released, a foreboding novel of the same genre following the story of John von Neumann, the polymath who envisioned the age of AI as early as 1952.
The Maniac is a fictionalized biography, written from various perspectives of the great thinkers who surrounded the Hungarian physicist, mathematician, computer scientist, and engineer. Labatut, a Chilean author who argues John von Neumann was the “smartest human being of the 20th century,” conveys the story chronologically with theoretical discoveries at the center. From the discovery of quantum physics by Heisenberg and Paul Ehrenfest building beyond Einstein, to Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, Georg Cantor’s hierarchy of infinities, Turing’s code, Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb, all the way through Von Neumann’s computer and theoretical digital automata, Labatut casts the novel with all of the early twentieth-century characters whose contributions facilitated the technological universe we now know, ending with Demis Hassabis’ DeepMind AI today.
“But my treasure, that sudden glimpse of the future was not bestowed on me by the gods. It was given by that new deity, the one we now worship before with bowed heads and look down upon with glazed eyes; my pythoness was a computer.”
The novel’s moniker, The Maniac, not only refers to John von Neumann’s computing machine — the Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator, and Computer, or MANIAC for short — but also the “monomania” of the man who spent his final days obsessively theorizing the future of self-replicating machines that would evolve on their own.
Labatut’s shifting narrators, from Von Neumann’s rival physicists to his own wife and daughter, encapsulate a strained life of almost compulsive striving, with his love life and long-term friendships continually worn down by his obsessive work.
“Progress will become incomprehensibly rapid and complicated. . . . The danger is intrinsic. For progress there is no cure.”
Von Neumann’s wife, Klára Dán, during his work on the Manhattan Project, describes how “Johnny loved America almost as much as I despised it. That country did something to him. All that maddening, unthinking optimism, all that cheerful naivete under which they hid their cruelty, it brought out the worst in him.”
Nils Aall Barricelli, the mathematician who used Von Neumann’s computer to simulate the earliest “algorithmic organisms,” recalls his insatiable mania: “I asked him how he thought to bring together his ideas on computation, self-replicating machines, and cellular automata with his newfound interest in the brain and the mechanism of thought, and his reply has lingered with me for decades. . . . ‘Cavemen created the gods,’ he said. ‘I see no reason why we shouldn’t do the same.’”
A kind of foreboding pervades the book, as Labatut casts Von Neumann as the mad scientist archetype, contrasting his singular ability to strive without fear of moral consequences with the fears of other geniuses like Einstein, who famously viewed inventions of “progress” holistically, humanely. Labatut presents the age-old conundrum: just because we could, doesn’t mean we should.
In a presumably fictional final letter to Eugene Wigner, Von Neumann writes: “Technology, after all, is a human excretion, and should not be considered as something Other. It is a part of us, just like the web is part of the spider. However, it seems that the ever-accelerating progress of technology gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity, a tipping point in the history of the race beyond which human affairs as we know them cannot continue. Progress will become incomprehensibly rapid and complicated. . . . The danger is intrinsic. For progress there is no cure.”
For progress there is no cure.
While Labatut’s writing comes off as a quite plausible rendering of John von Neumann’s personality, feelings, conjectures, and thought processes, likely gleaned through von Neumann’s direct writings themselves, the use of historical metafiction to tell the story cannot be overlooked while reading it. This aspect of The Maniac positions the novel in a sort of gray area, highlighting the theoretical, social, and philosophical aspects of its contents more than factual depiction. These historical discoveries and subsequent technological inventions occurred, but we cannot know how their inventors felt, thought, or coped with them for certain.
The most compelling aspect of the novel is the central motive of raising awareness of AI’s development in lieu of previous inventions that surpassed initial hypothetical use like the atomic bomb, throwing into question how theory manifests in real sociopolitical change in an approachable work of metafiction with a narrative voice.
Labatut’s heart of the matter comes into searing focus toward the end, when Von Neumann is long gone and Demis Hassabis invents DeepMind in 2010, the earliest artificial intelligence that surpasses human ability after training itself to play the game Go. AI is realized to be a sort of black box of algorithmic neural networks that cannot be traced even by its own programmers, as Lee Sedol, the Go game master admits in his historical loss, “With the debut of AI . . . even if I become the best that the world has ever known, there is an entity that cannot be defeated.”
Benjamín Labatut’s The Maniac is a modern take on the fictionalized backstories of the genesis of algorithmic technologies that pervade our workplaces, schools, and governments of today. If you’ve enjoyed work with themes similar to When We Cease to Understand The World by Labatut and translated into English by Nathan West, American Prometheus by Kai Bird, or The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher, consider adding The Maniac to your bookshelf.
