the maniac (benjamin labatut)

Labatut’s novels read like documentaries. The Maniac is split into two parts. The first is a fictionalised biography of John von Neumann, the Hungarian genius who participated in the greatest advances in mathematics and physics in the twentieth century. Von Neumann was present at the birth of the atom bomb, the hydrogen bomb, the modern day computer and, as the novel goes on to explore in greater depth, the birth pangs of what is now known as artificial intelligence. Labatut goes under the hood of von Neumann’s curious mind, constructing a portrait of him from fictionalised accounts of those who worked with him and loved him. In so doing, the author presents both the man, his ideas and his flirtation with madness. One of the key takeaways of Labatut’s novels is the way in which genius, which shapes the world, is almost always a hair’s breadth away from what we might call madness. Both despair and exhilaration go hand in hand with the imaginative vision required to stretch humanity’s boundaries. The Maniac is in many ways a treatise on technology and the pernicious effect it can have. Where we tend to view technology as an unbridled good, Labatut, like von Neumann and many of the scientists who feature in the book, end up exercising extreme doubts about where the quest for technological advancement is taking humanity.

The second half of the book deals with the advancement of AI, framed around the success of a computer in defeating the world’s greatest go player. Much of von Neumann’s later life was taken up with the quest for self-replicating forms that might be used in some form by humanity to ensure its survival and the eventual conquest of the universe itself. The Maniac explores the perils inherent in creating machines which can outthink humans, a subject which has become increasingly topical, in its account of the computer’s victory. The beauty of Labatut’s work is that he leads the reader into this rarefied world, seemingly the arcane province of scientists and experts, and, holding our hand, encourages to jump into an inscrutable future. 

when we cease to understand the world (benjamín labatut, tr. adrian nathan west)

I am not sure how I came across Labatut’s spectacular text. It was only in the final section, when the word araucana cropped up, that I realised the writer would appear to occupy the same Southern Cone as me. I had assumed the book to be the work of some nebulous Frenchman, out to save the planet from the repercussions of the first world’s scientific acts of hari-kari. 

Labatut’s book is about the way in which the world has evolved and been formed over the course of the last century, and not, as the epilogue makes clear, for the better. The book looks at half a dozen or so high priests of science, including Heisenberg, Bohr and Schrödinger, and the way in which their theories interacted with their lives. We learn how these eminently masculine souls wrestled with their flesh and their minds to come up with ways of contemplating the world which not only seemed at first extra-terrestrial, but also laid down the matrix upon which, the book contends, modern technological society is structured. From computing to global warming.

This in itself, the writer’s capacity to convey ideas of enormous complexity in a graspable, human fashion, would be one achievement. However, When We Cease to Understand the world achieves something else. The longest chapter in the book deals with sub-atomic theory, the idea that an atomic particle is both a wave and a fixed point. How this seeming paradox came to be defined and what it means for the world. We start to read the book as a work of non-fiction. It is discussing real people, real events, real history. However, as the book evolves, it gradually starts to inhabit spaces that seem beyond the author’s objective knowing. The inside of a scientist’s mind. The secret world that only they can know. We, as readers, perhaps assume that the author has somehow obtained letters or a journal written by the scientist, to allow him, the author, this privileged access. Only as the book hurtles towards its atomic finale, do we start to glean that this is not a work of non-fiction, but a work of fiction. Or perhaps it is both fiction and non-fiction at the same time?