Benjamín Labatut

The MANIAC: In which Benjamin Labatut displays superior intelligence and superior English prose skills (as compared to me on both counts) while writing in his third language. The last part of the book focused on the breaking of the spirits of Go and chess masters when bested by AI. I know how they feel.

I am not entirely sure how to talk about this book. I guess I will start by saying that though I thoroughly enjoyed the visual and aural spectacle of the movie Oppenheimer, I am on record as not liking the script for the film. There were a few issues for me. One was the entire inclusion of the Florence Pugh storyline. I acknowledge that Florence Pugh has exceptionally fine breasts, and finding a way to include them in any movie is good for box-office, but other than that it weakened the movie. It added bulk (not just time but superfluous subject matter) to an already bloated film. But I digress, my bigger issue, and the one that is relevant to this review, is that in the parts where things were not blowing up I sensed that there was a more interesting human story to be told than the one the Nolan brothers settled on, and I think this book contained it. Of course Oppenheimer has strong name recognition/brand value, and he is an interesting man, but he was not 1/10th as interesting as Johnny von Neumann (who was a part of many of the most notable advances in physics in the 20th century, including being one of the most productive members of the group of physicists at Los Alamos but who is acknowledged only in passing in the film Oppenheimer) and his buddies and special lady friends. And even more important, this book didn't stop with the A-bomb/H-bomb and the guilty feelings of the developers when they realized what they had wrought (that is included of course) but showed how we got to the modern computer/AI from the same bank of mathematics/physics work that gave us nuclear weapons. Labatut focuses in on how we are again justifying progress rather than thinking through the costs of some progress. Specifically, the author wants the reader to realize that like nuclear bombs, AI also has the capacity to destroy our humanity and in fact to destroy humanity writ large.

Von Neumann's story is only one of three in The MANIAC, but it is the one that owns the most real estate by far, and when someone makes this into a movie it should focus on that story. The first section of the book relates the agonizing tale of Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist who was destroyed by quantum mechanics (truly.) Ehrenfest went mad as he tried to make sense of QM in a way that made it rational and beneficial to humankind. He was unable to find a silver lining, was rendered unable to work, and came to the most tragic of ends. The last section shows us basically how AI makes humans obsolete, (illustrated by the contest between, arguably, the greatest Go player in history and AlphaGO, the go-conquering AI steamroller.) The first and third sections make for excellent reading, though the third section is less developed than it should be (but also this is tied up with the work I do, and it might be more than enough for an audience that doesn't wrestle with this sort of thing before breakfast most days.) That second section though -- that blew me away. The story is told by a host of narrators (I listened to this, and the audiobook cast was remarkable.) The narrators are all intimately tied to Johnny. Perhaps my favorite part was the section on von Neumann's invention of game theory (as told by the co-creator Oskar Morgenstern) but a close second was the portion narrated by his second wife (trust that they are the most toxic couple one can possibly imagine, and their destruction of one another and of themselves is as riveting as it is tragic.) I am not sure if the first and third sections were strictly necessary, but I do understand what Labatut wanted to say, and those sections help him say that.

The MANIAC is historical fiction, a genre I often find turgid and lumbering but which when done right is wonderful and shows us how fiction can do what straightforward historical reporting cannot. Here it is not just done right, it is incandescent.
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