This book begins with two shots. Paul Ehrenfest, an important theoretical physicist in quantum mechanics, entered the school of his son with Down syndrome in September 1933, shot him and shot himself in the head.
It is a dark story, contained in the first four lines of MANIAC, which does not reveal the central plot or the protagonists, but manages to function as an Aleph Zero. A first chapter or an astute prologue that contains the leitmotifs, tone, syntactic style and powerful narrative rhythm of Benjamín Labatut (Rotterdam, 1980), the Chilean writer whose successful previous delivery, Un verdor terrible (Anagrama, 2020, finalist of the Booker Prize), made him an essential author of the last decade.
In many ways, MANIAC is a continuation of Labatut’s recent work. Like Un verdor…, it resists categorization (it is at times a literary essay, at others a novel, a compilation of short stories or a fictionalized biography) and continues to explore the same obsessions: the links between reasoning and delirium, the limits of science and logic to understand the world, the dangers of scientific thinking but, also, the veneration of its great tragic figures. The thing is that exceptionalism is still at the epicenter. Labatut is interested in black holes: the catastrophe and wonder in singularities, the scientific geniuses who invented and discovered great things but who, in the process, created evil – a Bolaños gesture taken to science.
But in MANIAC there are also other proposals, fresh narratives, different from Un verdor… or The stone of madness (Anagrama, 2021). Its three-part structure begins with Ehrenfest and then continues with its longest portion: the story of our protagonist, John von Neumann, father of Artificial Intelligence.
We know him only through a photomontage: witness narrators – family, friends, colleagues – who create a portrait in choral voices. Then, the book closes with a third part that intones a stark narrator, a dizzying chronicle of what would be the last link in the times of AI, the moment in which the machine surpasses the human, the core story that makes this book a tremendously contingent artifact.
Because MANIAC is the story of a genesis. The narrativization (with real bases) of the first steps that humanity took towards the era of Artificial Intelligence, one that begins with Von Neumann’s invention of an intelligent computer (MANIAC, hence the title) and that goes on to a new phase when its creation manages to understand and decipher the complexity of human understanding. The third part recounts with extraordinary power that moment, when an AI manages to beat the best GO player, the most difficult and complex game in the world. It seems small, but for Labatut this defeat meant the beginning of a dangerous bond with machines. GO, in its unpredictable, chaotic and intuitive character, approaches the complexities of art.
This means that our invention has touched true human individuality, one of the most complex at least, to prevail over its opponent: the ability to create, with intellect and sensitivity.
It takes a certain literary skill to turn a book on quantum mechanics and mathematics into a devourable best-seller. Labatut has written a feverish, literary book that traces the AI ??family tree with admiration, but above all with skepticism, questioning our own ethics and sense of progress.
It warns us about our ambitions, it forces us to think carefully about how much it is convenient for us to know about our own existence, to ask ourselves, in the end, about the meaning of humanity.