Synopsis
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.
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The MANIAC
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Pushkin Press (edition ), 2024
ISBN 10: 1782279822
ISBN 13: 9781782279822
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The MANIAC: BenjamÃn Labatut
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The Maniac
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Paperback. Condition: New. From the author of When We Cease to Understand the World: a thrilling, kaleidoscopic book about the destructive chaos lurking in the history of computing and AI'Monstrously good. Reads like a dark foundation myth about modern technology but told with the pace of a thriller' Mark HaddonIn a scintillating mix of fact and fiction, The MANIAC tells of the dark foundations of our modern world and the nascent era of AI.At its core is John von Neumann, a titan of science who revolutionised fields from game theory to computer systems and helped develop the atomic bomb. As illness unmoored his mind, his work pushed further into areas beyond human comprehension and control.With dazzling mastery, Benjamín Labatut weaves von Neumann's story together with the crises in physics at the beginning of the twentieth century and humanity's showdown with artificial intelligence a hundred years later. Innovative and disquieting, this book plunges us into the most profound questions of humanity, where reason teeters on the brink of chaos. Seller Inventory # LU-9781782279822
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Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. From the author of When We Cease to Understand the World: a thrilling, kaleidoscopic book about the destructive chaos lurking in the history of computing and AI'Monstrously good. Reads like a dark foundation myth about modern technology but told with the pace of a thriller' Mark HaddonIn a scintillating mix of fact and fiction, The MANIAC tells of the dark foundations of our modern world and the nascent era of AI.At its core is John von Neumann, a titan of science who revolutionised fields from game theory to computer systems and helped develop the atomic bomb. As illness unmoored his mind, his work pushed further into areas beyond human comprehension and control.With dazzling mastery, Benjamin Labatut weaves von Neumann's story together with the crises in physics at the beginning of the twentieth century and humanity's showdown with artificial intelligence a hundred years later. Innovative and disquieting, this book plunges us into the most profound questions of humanity, where reason teeters on the brink of chaos. The author of When We Cease to Understand the World: a dazzling, kaleidoscopic book about the destructive chaos lurking in the history of computing and AI. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9781782279822
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The MANIAC
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