Over a decade ago — pre-paywalls, ante-Uber, infancy of Instagram — Zadie Smith observed that with its fretting over likes and relationship status, its obsession with connection, and its equating of identity with a consumer profile, Facebook bears marks of having been “designed by a Harvard sophomore with a Harvard sophomore’s preoccupations.” Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind, so it’s colored in blue and white. Its stunted form of expression mirrors Zuckerberg’s own, with his frozen face and buffering affect. In using his technology, Facebook is “forcing you to interface with the mind of Mark Zuckerberg.”
Zuckerberg’s not the first or the last but rather one link in a chain. All forms of technology force us to interface with the minds of their creators. Benjamín Labatut’s The MANIAC presents the minds behind computers, atomic weapons, game theory, and AI. Through tracing the lives of Paul Ehrenfest, John von Neumann, and Lee Sedol, the novel traces how technology has reached its grisliest conclusions. AI makes use of a concept called forward-chaining, which describes how one links data together to advance toward a specific goal, and in some sense that’s how Labatut structures his novel. The ideas, predilections, and violence of these three men lead in a chain toward the forces that menace our present. To use their forms of technology, the novel argues, is in some sense to live in their minds. It’s these minds that lend the technological present its brilliance, and further a ruthless, brute force rationality, one that “care[s] not for style or beauty,” and prizes only power and advancement, regardless of the sacrifice.
Labatut is working in a tradition here. That technology mirrors the faults of its creators is one of humanity’s hoariest insights, often forgotten but old enough to have powered Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Hoarier yet: in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Enkidu himself is a created man, the gods’ own technology with the gods’ own faults. Labatut has updated the form and process since ancient Babylon in a kind of writing he describes as “more akin to walking and picking stuff up off the ground.” In both The MANIAC and his breakthrough narrative, When We Cease to Understand the World, Labatut assembles data from biographies, documentaries, and interviews with historical figures into a kind of neural novelistic network. The research he does isn’t particularly arcane, and it isn’t first-hand. Rather, as with the novels of David Markson or W. G. Sebald, the art is in the arrangement, how he interposes and aligns the data. This is what’s novel.
[left: Paul Ehrenfest] In its first section, slim and bloody, theoretical physicist Paul Ehrenfest kills himself and his special needs son on the first page. In addition to his “crippling depression,” Ehrenfest cannot cope with a question lurking behind his theoretical work: “What if nature cannot be cognized as a whole?” The limits of rationality torment him just as later they do von Neumann, and the novel connects this to violence. The prose describes Ehrenfest’s killings as “machinelike, propelled by a force he neither recognized nor understood.” This force is Ehrenfest’s mind, which the narrator observes “was fully porous, lacking, perhaps, some essential membrane” — a barrier between his radical ideas and the physical world. The realm of ideas, Ehrenfest’s deeds attest, is not entirely abstract. Its boundaries drip with blood.
Although Ehrenfest apparently “detested” him, no one figure’s life illustrates the violence of ideas more aptly than John von Neumann, the man the novel declares “the smartest human being of the 20th century.” Von Neumann was a child prodigy in Hungary and the DOD’s kept polymath as an adult, a central mind in the Manhattan Project, Game Theory, and one of the first computers (the “Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer”) from which this novel takes its name.
Despite the staggering horror and violence that von Neumann inspired — according to the novel, for example, von Neumann himself persuaded the military to detonate the nuclear bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki “higher up in the atmosphere, since that way the blast wave would cause incomparably larger damage” — his attitude was blithe, childlike, sociopathic. The novel’s other characters describe him as a man of coldness and power. “He truly saw life as a game,” Klára Dan, von Neumann’s second wife, observes. This is the figure who, by leaving behind the essential technology for the next century, “left us a part of his mind” to inhabit. The novel’s description of von Neumann’s mind is apposite also to his creations: “mercilessly logical, completely counterintuitive, and so utterly rational that it bordered on the psychopathic.”
[right: John von Neumann] Perhaps to counter a claustrophobia that could result from a prolonged stay in von Neumann’s mind, his is the only of the book’s three sections told from multiple perspectives. Fifteen different characters — his mother, Margit, his wives, Mariette and Klára, his daughter, Marina, Nobel Prize winners Richard Feynman and Eugene Wigner, and other colleagues and relations — narrate a chapter in the first person. They’re monologues, not soliloquies, in that they address an implied other in oblique ways. “You know I played against the MANIAC, right?” Richard Feynman asks. They’re low on scenes and full of raconteurial windups (“I will never forget the first time I laid eyes on him”) and name-dropping (Einstein, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, and even T. S. Eliot populate its anecdotes).
Maybe more than monologues, the von Neumann chapters read like interview transcripts. They should be delivered just-off-center into a camera’s lens. Reading this during the late summer months, I thought the Manhattan Project section in particular sounded something like if Christopher Nolan had read As I Lay Dying before writing Oppenheimer. The book makes more overt filmic references, though, to documentaries. A quotation from Adam Curtis’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head introduces the von Neumann section. In such a context, the doc’s title reads as an ironic reversal of the modern world’s current predicament. We can’t get out of von Neumann’s head. The references to documentaries contextualize and refine Labatut’s style in ways that aren’t obvious in When We Cease to Understand the World. The importance of juxtapositions, a light authorial touch, a union of the personal and the historical — these are the concerns of documentarians more than novelists. One can imagine Errol Morris describing his own process as “walking and picking stuff up off the ground.” The novel’s third section — following the world champion Go player Lee Sedol, who took on and bested an AI program — comes straight out of another documentary, 2017’s AlphaGo.
[left: Benjamin Labatut] The world of artificial intelligence is perhaps where von Neumann’s mind lingers least visibly. His ideas, Labatut’s prose explains, inspired one of the field’s biggest players. Although Sedol, an eccentric prodigy of “almost uncontrollable bravado,” reads as a sort of avatar for human achievement, the next link in the forward chain comes by way of his antagonist, Demis Hassabis. Years after a public humiliation in his own days as a chess prodigy, Hassabis becomes “obsessed by two of John von Neumann’s unfinished manuscripts” — those in which von Neumann outlined his theories for “self-reproducing automata.” Von Neumann’s theories inspire Hassabis to create the AI program, AlphaGo, that Lee Sedol plays against. Although Sedol does (and did, in 2016 — these verb tenses get wiggy with actual events), with one move of intuitive genius, steal a game off AlphaGo during the match, the victory is Pyrrhic. Sedol has given the program more data with which to improve. Furthermore, like von Neumann, Hassabis recognizes in his program that he “seemed to have externalized a small part of his own mind.” Hassabis is vengeful and hubristic and prodigious, and so is our AI.
Technology reflects its creators, and there are older forms of technology among us that do likewise. Novels are themselves a form of technology, invented artifices that bespeak an intelligence. If The MANIAC is a technology, then it’s Labatut’s mind it reflects, not von Neumann’s. The reader inhabits a mind that accretes and assembles data like a chatbot, arranges them into code in hopes of producing meaning. The modern literary or poetic mind is not just rhythmic but algorithmic, training its readers’ attention and perceptions by what it suggests. Labatut’s own novelistic algorithm trains in its readers a recognition of the violence of reason, a wariness of the forward-chaining of ideas, and an eye for the limits of cognition. It’s an algorithm that prefaces John von Neumann with Paul Ehrenfest, who realizes that technology cannot tame the universe’s “irreducible randomness.” To do so would be a “false epiphany […] so random to him that he did not need to sit down before his desk to know that his mistakes were too many to tally, his ambitions too large to anchor in reality, and his equations so flawed and incomplete that they could never be redeemed by experiment.” The MANIAC does not attempt such a redemption or strive for an epiphany. One is left, rather, with a sense of magic dispelled, an even coolness, a humility before advancement. Labatut’s is a technology that knows its own limits.
[Published by Penguin Press on October 3, 2023, 368 pages, $28.00 US hardcover]