The Maniac

De: Benjamin Labatut

Narrado por: Gergo Danka, Eva Magyar

Named One of the 10 Best Books of 2023 by The Washington Post and Publishers Weekly • One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2023 • A National Bestseller • A New York Times Editor's Choice pick • Nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

“Captivating and unclassifiable, at once a historical novel and a philosophical foray . . . Labatut is a writer of thrilling originality. The MANIAC is a work of dark, eerie and singular beauty.”—The Washington Post

“Darkly absorbing . . . A brooding, heady narrative that is addictively interesting.”—Wall Street Journal

From one of contemporary literature’s most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI

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 science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In The MANIAC, Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale.

A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata. Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues, and rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake.

The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo, an encounter embodying the central question of von Neumann's most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence able to evolve beyond human understanding or control.

A work of beauty and fabulous momentum, The MANIAC confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species.

©2023 Benjamin Labatut (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

“Labatut’s latest virtuosic effort, at once a historical novel and a philosophical foray, is a thematic sequel, an exploration of what results when we take reason to even further extremes . . . A contemporary writer of thrilling originality . . . The MANIAC is a work of dark, eerie and singular beauty.”—Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post

“What [Labatut] brings to the page is something almost indescribably layered and complex that feels like a genre unto itself . . . Labatut has an uncanny ability to inhabit the psyche of these subjects—even though he’s conjuring up their recollections, they still come across as wholly reliable narrators. There is so much depth and profundity within their reminiscing, so much foreshadowing of the present moment when it seems AI is all we’re hearing about.”—Allison Arieff, San Francisco Chronicle

“The novel’s final section, a thrilling human-versus-machine matchup, points to what von Neumann had wrought—and reflects the warnings of Labatut’s Wigner. Although its science never strays from what’s been reported in the real world and although Labatut honors the discipline of historical fiction, The MANIAC qualifies as science fiction, at least as practiced by Mary Shelley and her adaptors. Neither Shelley nor Labatut includes in their work a scene of a scientist shouting, ‘It’s alive!’ as some cursed creation lumbers to life. But the warning of that moment powers The MANIAC as surely as electricity enlivened Frankenstein’s monster, a breakthrough who, in every telling, boasts the capacity to break us.”—Alan Scherstuhl, Scientific American

Enjoyed the stylistic choices and learned a lot

I didn’t quite understand what this book was so the first quarter was trying to figure out if it was a collection of essays, who organized etc…. The stylistic choices were great in how to tell and made the historical facts be live and feel present. I really appreciated the deep dive into the mental issues of some of our greatest minds. The Go portion was good but felt like an entirely departure book. I get the connection but was a weird tack on to me.

Fascinating survey of a complicated person with ties to contemporary issues

I enjoyed the device of using different figures in von Neumann’s life to tell his story and theirs.

Excellent story well narrated

Timely and moving story spanning Turing to VonNeuman to deep reinforcement learning algorithms, Demis, and Alpha zero

Thought provoking

Couldn’t stop listening to audio version. The Maniac brought back memories of H.A.L. from 2001. We should worry more about the irrational & rational impulses of the technocrats and scrutinize the promises & algorithms they make—and regulate AI!

Captivating

Absolutely brilliant, creating gods like a cave man. I was utterly absorbed. I even went as far as purchasing the hard copy. Enjoy!

Brilliant

The book is both riveting and enlightening and succeeds in providing important historical context about the genesis of the computer to the awe inspiring but frightening reality of AI.

Presages a transfer of power to machine life

Presages a transfer of power to machine life. Beginning with a factionalized but accurate biography of John Von Nueman. He is presented as the ultimate example of a human mathematical prodigy. He grasps instantly what it took other great mathematicians weeks to understand. At the end of his life in the fifties he becomes obsessed with the idea of developing a machine life that will evolve. Although he is responsible for developing the first large scale mechanical computer in order to facilitate development of the hydrogen bomb he fails at his attempt to design his machine that will evolve.
The book then moves ahead half a century to tell the story of the computer that became the best Go player on the world. Out achieved its preeminence by learning and evolving.
The reader is left to wonder what next.

Worth it for the first half

First half was great. Second fourth fine, but the last quarter (Go part) felt like another book entirely with no ties back to the beginning

Readability and insight to science.

An absolutely captivating study of human nature and it’s interaction with science. The potential dangers of AI and the future of mankind. An easy read that I didn’t want to end.

The power of A.I.

First part of book was incoherent, hard to follow. Best part of book was last 2 hours, which was about A.I.