The MANIAC
Benjamin Labatut · 2023
Three stories (physicist Paul Ehrenfest, John von Neumann, AlphaGo) circle the question of what happens when the human mind creates something it can no longer understand. Labatut's hybrid of fiction and nonfiction about the terror of intelligence is the most urgent book about AI written in novelistic form.
The case against
Each witness in the von Neumann chorus, wife, colleague, rival, speaks in the same hushed apocalyptic register, which is Labatut's own. The fiction-or-fact blur means you can never tell which chilling detail is real and which is engineered. And the closing AlphaGo section is straight reportage you may have already read elsewhere, stapled to the novel by theme alone.
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