The MANIAC: Benjamín Labatut - Softcover

Labatut, Benjamín

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1782279822 ISBN 13: 9781782279822

Publisher: Pushkin Press, 2024

Synopsis

From 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

‘Darkly intelligent and feverishly propulsive’ Observer
‘As engrossing as it is disturbing’ Financial Times

In 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.

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‘Reads like physicist Carlo Rovelli crossed with the cosmic horror of HP Lovecraft’ Sunday Times

‘Labatut is fast emerging as the most significant South American writer since Borges... There is no one writing like him anywhere in the world

About this title

About the Author

Benjamin Labatut is a Chilean author born in the Netherlands in 1980. He was raised in The Hague before settling in Chile, where he lives and works. His book When We Cease to Understand the World has been translated into over thirty languages: it was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, selected for Barack Obama's Summer Reading List and named a Guardian, New York Times and New Statesman Book of the Year. The MANIAC is Labatut's first book written in English. Labatut lives with his family in Santiago, Chile.

From the Back Cover

Johnny von Neumann was an enigma. As a young man, he stunned those around him with his monomaniacal pursuit of the unshakeable foundations of mathematics. But when his faith in this all-encompassing system crumbled, he began to put his prodigious intellect to use for those in power. As he designed unfathomable computer systems and aided the development of the atomic bomb, his work pushed increasingly into areas that were beyond human comprehension and control - and that threatened human destruction.

In The MANIAC, Benjamín Labatut braids fact with fiction in a scintillating journey to the very fringes of rational thought, right to the point where it tips over into chaos. Stretching back to early twentieth-century conflict over contradictions in physics and up to advances in artificial intelligence that outpace the human, this is a mind-bending story of the mad dreams of reason.

Edition details

• Publisher: Pushkin Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1782279822
• ISBN 13: 9781782279822
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368