Maniac, Benjamín Labatut

A disturbing triptych about the dreams of the 20th century and the nightmares of the 21st, MANIAC explores the limits of reason by tracing the path from the foundations of mathematics to the delusions of artificial intelligence. Guided by the enigmatic figure of John von Neumann, a modern Prometheus who did more than anyone to create the world we inhabit and advance the future that is coming, in this book Benjamín Labatut delves into the firestorms of atomic bombs, the deadly strategies of the Cold War, and the birth of the digital universe.

The work begins with a shot: in 1933, Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and close friend of Einstein, ended his own son's life before committing suicide, convinced that the soul of science had been corrupted by the same evil that propelled the rise of Nazism. Some of Ehrenfest's fears come true in the central character of the volume, the Hungarian mathematician von Neumann, a being endowed with a brain so extraordinary that his colleagues considered him the next step in human evolution.

During a meteoric career, von Neumann laid the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics, helped design nuclear bombs, developed game theory, and created the first modern computer. At the end of his life, having become a key cog in the military-industrial complex, he unleashed a creative impulse that led him to contemplate ideas that could threaten the primacy of our species: "There is no cure for progress," he said after foreseeing the arrival of an essential singularity, a turning point in history beyond which human affairs as we know them could not continue.

MANIAC culminates with the battle between a man and a machine: Lee Sedol, a Go grandmaster, challenges the artificial intelligence program AlphaGo in five agonizing games that serve as a warning about the challenges we will have to face as our technological creations acquire ever greater independence.

After that unclassifiable phenomenon that was When We Cease to Understand the World, MANIAC confirms Benjamín Labatut as one of the most original voices in contemporary literature.