Biographies are a waste of time. There’s little to be gleaned from the lives of those we admire. The details of someone’s childhood or their private lives rarely hold any explanatory power for their achievements. If there is any generalizable insight, it can be summarized in a few paragraphs.
The Maniac by Benjamín Labatut is an exception. It’s mostly about John von Neumann and his contributions to pure and applied mathematics, the Manhattan project, the development of the programmable computer, game theory and cellular automata. In Labatut’s words, he was the smartest human being of the 20th century. An alien among us.
One theme in The Maniac is how vast intellects, whether they inhabit brains like von Neumann’s or digital substrates like today’s artificial intelligences, appear alien and inspire fear. The decisions of those minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish (H. G. Wells) can be incomprehensible, and even if we comprehend, they appear cool and unsympathetic. Did von Neumann cause the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, or was this always the inevitable outcome of the Cold War, and he was just the first to realize it once he started working on game theory?
Even if The Maniac didn’t open up those perspectives, it’d still be worth reading just because of how well Labatut writes. It is a biography, but it’s written and reads like a novel. It’s Labatut’s first book in English, and I’m already looking forward to the next one.
You insist that there is something a machine cannot do. If you tell me precisely what it is a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that.
John von Neumann
Nehaveigur 