Again, venturing out of my usual habit of reading only fiction, I decided to read this so-called fictionalized biography which has been making the rounds. It supposedly recounts the life of the legendary polymath John von Neumann but is really more general than that. It’s full of anecdotes about the circle of genius scientists around von Neumann and most significantly traces how his ideas led to what is today called AI. It’s not really a popular science book as it’s very thin in terms of scientific facts and most of that is common knowledge. What it does offer is the inside perspective of many of these famous personalities, at least as imagined by author Benjamin Labatut. It’s debatable how authentic these stories are true in spirit according to what we know about them and that has to be good enough.

The book actually begins dramatically with the story of the life of someone else entirely. Within the first few lines, we’re introduced to the physicist Paul Ehrenfest and how he died by first shooting his son who suffered from Down’s Syndrome and then killed himself. The rest of the book is pretty much like this, with anecdotes about amazingly brilliant people whose minds seem to operate on a higher plane than us mortals. Yet they are also tortured by inner demons and personal obsessions. Most of the book is about the life of John von Neumann from the perspective of those closest to him. Born of a rich, aristocratic family in Hungary, he was recognized as a genius since childhood excelled in all of his studies and was expected to do great things. He ambitiously participated in David Hilbert’s program to rigorously work out a rational basis for all of mathematics. But his efforts were nipped in the bud by yet another young genius Kurt Gödel. The rise of Nazism led von Neumann to move to the US along with many other scientists. There he participated in the Manhattan Project as an outside consultant and was the progenitor of what is know known as the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. He created the MANIAC, the first programmable computer after which this book was named, and which was used to simulate nuclear explosions. The last part of the book deals with the culmination of von Neumann’s ideas in the form of the AlphaGo program which managed to beat the best human players at the game of Go in 2016.

I’ve come across so much praise for the singular genius of von Neumann in my readings but I still struggled to pinpoint some particular, identifiable contribution that he made to the collective knowledge of humanity. It always seemed to me that his intellect greatly impressed the greatest minds of the 20th century and inspired many others but there is no famous scientific theory attached to his name. As this book points out, his first attempt to create a great work of his own ended in failure as he was thoroughly upstaged by Gödel. That seemed to have put an end to his own ambitions in mathematics and theoretical physics. The title of this book does put things into perspective. It isn’t calling him a maniac, instead it’s an acronym referring to the programmable computer he helped to develop. It was a crude and massive machine, yet it is the ancestor of the computers we use today as it is from the MANIAC I that they derive their basic architecture. Labatut draws a straight line from von Neumann’s childhood interest in mechanical toys, the weaving machine his father introduces to him that can be set to produce different patterns by feeding specially prepared punch cards, to the rise of computers, how they can be used to simulate simple automata to finally the AI we know of today. He truly was far ahead of his time as he was able to formulate the mechanisms that any being, whether organic or inorganic, must have in order to replicate before the discovery of DNA and RNA.

By this telling, more than even other theorists and researchers, von Neumann was beloved by what we would call today the military industrial complex. Unlike famously pacifist scientists like Einstein, von Neumann was amoral and enthusiastically participated in dreaming up ever more powerful weapons. It’s comical how towards the end of his life, he was attended by soldiers to catch every word he says and make sure he doesn’t spill any military secrets. I wonder if to this day there are contributions that he made that are unknown to the public because they are still classified. Certainly von Neumann was rich and enjoyed his wealth. The book describes his early life as a spoiled child of the aristocratic class in Hungary and later in the US, he was well-paid as a consultant. A chapter written from the perspective of Richard Feynman describes how he used to arrive for visits at the site of the Manhattan Project driving a different car every time. Another chapter claims that he appropriated the work of Nils Aall Barricelli, another scientist who is mostly forgotten today but is hailed by some as the father of digital life. There’s no doubt that von Neumann is a fascinating figure worthy of both recognition for his intellectual capacities and opprobrium for the ends to which he applied them.

So did I like this book? That’s sort of hard to say. As many others have pointed out, it’s kind of pin down what genre it even belongs in. Is it a novel? Not really. Nor it is really a biography of von Neumann. One way of looking at it is that it’s a simplified history of AI, albeit covering only a small slice of it. It’s certainly an entertaining read in that it keeps introducing a succession of otherworldly geniuses and breathlessly describes the incredible mental feats they are capable of. But it’s not really a book about the topics that these impressive people obsessed over. Labatut chooses the most dramatic anecdotes from the lives of these people and the discoveries they made, but that doesn’t add up to a systematic treatment of the subject. This may be a book about some the greatest minds in human history but it is itself rather shallow. Then of course there’s the question of how accurately it portrays the inner thoughts and feelings of these people. I’m sure that Labatut has done his research and tried to capture their voices as best he can. But at the end this is still his personal interpretation and he has obviously framed them to tell the most dramatic story that he can.

I had a lot of fun reading this but even I soon got tired of Labatut talking up impressive intellectual feats. In lieu of actually explaining what these feats entail, he frequently uses the testimony of other contemporary experts to persuade the reader of how important they are. I was also irked by Labatut’s often fatalist attitude towards scientific and technological development. On the one hand, he wants to impress upon us how difficult these achievements are. He uses terms like ‘breaking point’ to claim that somehow things cannot continue as they were without some sort of breakthrough. Yet he also vaguely insinuates that having done so, these geniuses have doomed all of humanity. The philosophy in this book is as superficial as its discussion of the science and I wouldn’t take it too seriously.