“I don’t like choral novels. I don’t like novels, period,” reflects Benjamín Labatut (Rotterdam, 1980) during a press conference in Barcelona. However, he has been forced to do something similar in Maniac (Anagrama) “because a singular narrator would have betrayed the essence of John von Neumann.” And that is something that the author did not want to do for anything in the world, since there is a lot of admiration that he feels for the Hungarian-American mathematician, whom he considers “the most intelligent human being of the 20th century.”
“He was a genius among geniuses” but also “the incarnation of the mathematical demon.” Because of people like him, the Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest, a close friend of Albert Einstein, committed suicide. He shot himself in the head just after shooting his son Vassily, who suffered from Down syndrome. He believed that both he and the fourteen-year-old were in danger.
“He found himself confronting Nazism as a political movement because it put his son’s life at risk; to a movement in modern science that put at risk the understanding of him and to a certain new rationality that was very foreign to his character” and that materializes with von Neumann, considered by his colleagues as the next step in human evolution. .
John von Neumann is the person behind modern computers. He also helped design nuclear bombs and developed game theory. Throughout his career, he unleashed a creative impulse that, over time, made him realize that it could threaten the primacy of the human species. “There is no cure for progress,” he ended by saying, aware that a historical moment was approaching in which humans would not be able to advance. A turning point in which Artificial Intelligence takes on a great role. “A new beauty and also a new terror,” says Labatut.
For now, “AI systems are predictive and, therefore, oracular. One cannot look inside and understand what is happening. The problem is that I think what we are going to see in the near future is people deifying these systems and dating them for attributes that they do not have. At the same time, there is going to be a fundamentalist condemnation in which, on the one hand, we will refuse to kneel before these new gods. And, on the other hand, we will have no choice. Wise people will have to know when to choose one of these two attitudes. Which one would I opt for? “I criticize on my knees,” acknowledges the author of A Terrible Greenness.
Labatut is critical of current reality although, he insists, in his books “I do not denounce science. What I’m trying to show is how it radiates sometimes. Nowadays we are irradiated with too much light that makes us lose nuances. A light that can be dangerous and toxic. Everything is burned and it is as if there was a desertification of the human soul at the hands of science. And, when something is too illuminated, it stops being mysterious.”
The writer recognizes that “it is good to live in the world of light, of reason, of technology, but if we do not know how to return again and again to the depths, to the caves, we miss half of the human phenomenon. Literature, for example, is a cave habit. “It is that ability to see inside the cave.”
How do you know when to go back to the depths? “It should be a habit. The difficult thing about being a modern human being is that we cannot leave individualism behind. We cannot ignore the things that science has shown us nor stop listening to the voices that speak in the silence and that echo in the churches. It is not necessary to believe in God, it is necessary to think about God. The same with science. “You don’t have to believe in it, you have to practice it,” says Labatut while he remembers his stay a few days ago at the Montserrat monastery.
“The first thing I did when I arrived in Barcelona was to go see the virgin. And she was there, practically alone, beyond some schoolchildren who were around and some Chinese tourists. That emptiness is what we are missing. “To be able to be alone.” On that excursion, the author acknowledges having found “the perfect balance” because, in addition to Moreneta, he also saw “the demon in the form of a goat,” which “fled when I tried to touch it.”
