One third of the way through The MANIAC, I found myself wondering why this book was not more popular: it seemed to be a perfect storm of formalism and postmodernism (it being told in a fugue-like oral history), scientistic reckoning (suddenly in vogue thanks to Oppenheimer), grappling with AI and AGI explicitly.

By the time I finished the book, I think I arrived at an answer: it's just not that fun or interesting of a read! The ostensible pleasure of a Greek chorus of larger-than-life scientists deifying von Neumann fades once you realize how the arc and voice of every character is so thin and uniform (compared with, say, HHhH or Autobiography of Red, where the experimental structure adds to the storytelling and diegesis rather than acts as a bit of showmanship). It is clear to understand why Labatut chose to write this book, and one quickly groks the thesis that the aforementioned Oppenheimer arguably delivered more succinctly and persuasively (our current runaway train of scientific progress is driven less by the desire to understand and improve the world and more by the desire to master it for the sake of mastery).

But you are left with prose that is all text, no subtext — the final part of the triptych perhaps most emblematic of this flaw, a New Yorker-tier play-by-play of Lee Sedol's five-part match against AlphaGo. It is a fun story, especially if you are not burdened by understanding of Monte Carlo tree search. You are told, page by page, exactly how to feel about the entire thing: awe, wonder, despair, hope, dread. Labatut takes care of all of that for you; nothing is left to interpretation.

★★★

Highlights

“All processes that are stable we shall predict. All processes that are unstable, we shall control,” he said, and I, for one, believed him, because I’d never seen him be wrong about anything else before.

Technology, after all, is a human excretion, and should not be considered as something Other. It is a part of us, just like the web is part of the spider.