By Benjamín Labatut
Genius, machines, and the limits of reason
Subject
Themes
The twentieth century produced ideas so powerful that the minds behind them could barely survive the encounter. Across three interlocking portraits, a single question persists: what happens to human beings when their own creations surpass them?
The twentieth century produced ideas so powerful that the minds behind them could barely survive the encounter. Across three interlocking portraits, a single question persists: what happens to human beings when their own creations surpass them? Paul Ehrenfest, the Austrian physicist known as the…
The MANIAC occupies a distinctive position in contemporary fiction as a work that refuses to behave like a conventional novel while insisting on the powers of literary imagination. Published in 2023, it follows Labatut's earlier When We Ceased to Understand the World (2020), which similarly blurred…
The incompleteness of human understanding haunts every section of the narrative, from Paul Ehrenfest's inability to comprehend the new physics to Lee Sedol's confrontation with a machine that plays Go beyond the reach of human intuition. This is not a simple story of ignorance; the minds depicted…
Extraordinary intellectual ability, far from being a pure gift, manifests across the narrative as a condition that isolates its possessors from ordinary human experience and frequently destroys them. The minds depicted are not simply clever; they operate at a level that separates them categorically…
Von Neumann's dying insight that technology is not something Other but a part of us, just like the web is part of the spider, provides the key to understanding the narrative's treatment of humanity's relationship with its tools. From the Jacquard loom that captivates the young Janos to the AlphaGo…
Power without moral constraint is the defining characteristic of the twentieth century as depicted across all three sections. The narrative traces an arc from the splitting of the atom to the splitting of human confidence in its own supremacy, and at every stage, the capacity to act outstrips the…
Games function throughout the narrative not merely as pastimes or metaphors but as models through which the characters understand and interact with reality. The recurrence of games, from Kriegsspiel to Go to the game of existence itself, reveals a worldview in which life is fundamentally strategic,…
John von Neumann occupies the central panel of the triptych, and through the testimony of those who knew him, a portrait emerges of a figure who is simultaneously the most brilliant and the most terrifying mind of the twentieth century. Born Janos Neumann into Budapest's wealthy Jewish bourgeoisie,…
Paul Ehrenfest appears only in the opening section of the narrative, but his tragedy casts a long shadow over everything that follows. A theoretical physicist of genuine ability, he occupies the agonising position of being brilliant enough to understand the revolution taking place around him yet not…
Lee Sedol, the Strong Stone, arrives in the final section of the narrative as the human champion who must face the machine intelligence that von Neumann's legacy made possible. His story begins on the tiny island of Bigeumdo, where he learned Go from his father before he could read. By five, nobody…
Klara Dan von Neumann serves as one of the most intimate and unflinching witnesses to John von Neumann's character, offering testimony that strips away the legend of genius to reveal the deeply flawed man beneath. She first meets Johnny at a Monte Carlo casino, where he sits sulking over a failed…
Kurt Godel appears at the 1930 Konigsberg conference as a skeletal young Austrian who stutters out a remark that nobody except von Neumann understands, and in doing so demolishes the foundational programme to which von Neumann has devoted his early career. His incompleteness theorems prove that…
On the morning of 25 September 1933, Paul Ehrenfest walked into a children's institute in Amsterdam, shot his fifteen-year-old son Vassily in the head, and turned the gun on himself. Vassily had Down syndrome and had been moved from a German clinic to Amsterdam because the Nazis were no longer safe…
Nicholas von Neumann remembers the day their father brought home a Jacquard loom from the bank. While Nicholas quickly lost interest, his brother Janos became obsessed, bombarding their father with questions about how punched cards could transmit information. He played with the loom for two days…
Gabor Szego, von Neumann's first tutor, meets him in Berlin to discuss fleeing Nazi Germany. Von Neumann chooses Horcher, Berlin's finest restaurant, a place that will later become Himmler's favourite dining haunt. Over lunch, Szego senses the perverse influence of Hilbert on his former pupil, who…
Oskar Morgenstern recalls how game theory was born at a Princeton party where von Neumann, wearing a toy propeller cap, lost at poker to Stan Ulam. Overhearing von Neumann wonder how stock markets could function when run by idiots, Morgenstern approached him and they began collaborating on what…
Nils Aall Barricelli, a half-Norwegian, half-Italian scientist whom Bigelow calls fully insane, arrives at the Institute for Advanced Study and convinces von Neumann to grant him access to the MANIAC. Working at three in the morning in the computation cycles left over from hydrogen bomb…
After his cancer diagnosis, von Neumann undergoes a startling transformation. He develops feelings he has never experienced before: overwhelming empathy, deep concern for humanity's destiny, and an unquenchable thirst for spiritual matters. Gods are a biological necessity, he tells Wigner, as…
The legendary Emperor Yao, one of China's five mythical sage-kings, invented the game of Go to enlighten his monstrous son, Danzhu. Born of the goddess Yao-Mu's concubine, Danzhu was a creature of pure cruelty who ripped wings from birds, hobbled fawns for wolves, and murdered children in the…
At Seoul's Four Seasons Hotel, over two hundred journalists and sixty million television viewers watch as Lee Sedol places his first black stone. Across from him sits Aja Huang, DeepMind's programmer, relaying AlphaGo's moves with robotic stillness; Lee later recalls that Huang was like a puppet who…
Lee requests to play black in the fifth game, giving AlphaGo a slight advantage, wanting to prove he can win with either colour. Over two hundred million people follow worldwide. AlphaGo plays moves that look strange and ugly; the DeepMind team panics, convinced their programme is malfunctioning…
John von Neumann occupies the central panel of the triptych, and through the testimony of those who knew him, a portrait emerges of a figure who is simultaneously the most brilliant and the most terrifying mind of the twentieth century. Born Janos Neumann into Budapest's wealthy Jewish bourgeoisie,…
Paul Ehrenfest appears only in the opening section of the narrative, but his tragedy casts a long shadow over everything that follows. A theoretical physicist of genuine ability, he occupies the agonising position of being brilliant enough to understand the revolution taking place around him yet not…
Lee Sedol, the Strong Stone, arrives in the final section of the narrative as the human champion who must face the machine intelligence that von Neumann's legacy made possible. His story begins on the tiny island of Bigeumdo, where he learned Go from his father before he could read. By five, nobody…
Klara Dan von Neumann serves as one of the most intimate and unflinching witnesses to John von Neumann's character, offering testimony that strips away the legend of genius to reveal the deeply flawed man beneath. She first meets Johnny at a Monte Carlo casino, where he sits sulking over a failed…
Kurt Godel appears at the 1930 Konigsberg conference as a skeletal young Austrian who stutters out a remark that nobody except von Neumann understands, and in doing so demolishes the foundational programme to which von Neumann has devoted his early career. His incompleteness theorems prove that…
The twentieth century produced ideas so powerful that the minds behind them could barely survive the encounter. Across three interlocking portraits, a single question persists: what happens to human beings when their own creations surpass them?