Maniac

A disturbing triptych about the dreams of the 20th century and the nightmares of the 21st century, MANIAC explores the limits of reason, tracing the path from the foundations of mathematics to the delusions of artificial intelligence. Guided by the enigmatic figure of John von Neumann, a modern Prometheus who did more than anyone to create the world we inhabit and anticipate the future that is coming, in this book Benjamín Labatut immerses himself in the firestorms of atomic bombs, in the deadly strategies of the Cold War and the birth of the digital universe. The work begins with a gunshot: in 1933 Paul Ehrenfest, Austrian physicist and close friend of Einstein, ended the life of his own son before committing suicide, convinced that the soul of science had been corrupted by the same evil that drove the rise of Nazism. Some of Ehrenfest's fears come true in the volume's central character, the Hungarian mathematician von Neumann, a being endowed with a brain so extraordinary that his colleagues considered it the next step in human evolution. During a meteoric career, von Neumann laid the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics, helped design nuclear bombs, developed game theory, and created the first modern computer. At the end of his life, already converted into a key cog in the military-industrial complex, he gave free rein to a creative impulse that led him to contemplate ideas that could threaten the primacy of our species: "For progress there is no cure," he said after foreshadowing the arrival of an essential singularity, a turning point in history beyond which human affairs as we know them could not continue.