“These were no ordinary people, not ordinary at all.” So Klára Dan, pioneering computer scientist and mathematician, says of her husband John von Neumann and his colleagues: all mathematicians and scientists involved in the Manhattan Project. These extraordinary people, Dan tells us, are so brilliant, their genius tilts “the secret spinning axis of history.”
Over and over in Benjamín Labatut’s novel The Maniac, we are made to feel the wonderful, terrifying extent of von Neumann’s extraordinary brilliance. The novel follows von Neumann’s career from his work creating the atomic bomb through his work on artificial intelligence. A friend, Eugene Wigner, encapsulates best what the novel hopes to make us feel: “There are two kinds of people in the world: Jancsi von Neumann and the rest of us … Only he was fully awake.” The chorus of narrators agrees on the singularity of von Neumann’s seemingly superhuman capacity for reason. He was, quite simply, “the smartest human being of the 20th century.”
The Maniac is, primarily, a compendium of such fictionalized testimonies about the history-shaping power of human genius. As such, The Maniac is part of an ancient tradition—going back at least to Homer—that celebrates human exception. Whether in the Iliad or the contemporary biopic, talent can’t be taught, but is inherent to a select few individuals. And although these heroes, like Achilles, may have their flaws, history, it seems, is in their hands.
As satisfying as these stories of heroes and geniuses can be, they often obscure the root causes of technological, economic, social, and political change. This is not entirely the case with The Maniac. Although it has its fair share of hero worship, the novel also encourages us to think about that genius in the context of a long cultural history, among the other people with which it lived, and, crucially, next to what it cannot do.
The romantic depiction of von Neumann as a genius is offset by several features of the narrative. First, the novel is written as a series of testimonials given by people other than von Neumann (as noted above, these include his wife, Dan; his friend Wigner; and a range of other “chorus” members). This technique prevents us from isolating the hero from his larger human community; without those other lives, his story in the novel literally could not be told. Moreover, it lets us watch myth-making in action, inoculating us (somewhat) to claims that “only he was fully awake.”
Second, the novel alludes to Greek myth, both thematically and stylistically. Its narrators reference Prometheus, Pandora, and Leda, and the last section even narrates an epic match of the game Go not like a game of chess or checkers, but, instead, in a manner reminiscent of The Iliad. Consequently, Labatut shows that the techno-political predicaments narrated—from atom bombs to artificial intelligence—are, in fact, mainstays of a long, ongoing history of human storytelling.
Finally, the novel concludes with a story of the triumph of artificial over human intelligence. The hero von Neumann’s brilliance was spectacular; but by the end of the novel, that brilliance has faded all but completely into the technology it has helped create.
Ultimately, the novel achieves a complicated balance: it thrills us with the story of a mind like no other, it sobers us with historical and cultural context for that mind, and it suggests the limits of human brilliance altogether. It succeeds, then, in an important task: it remythologizes the category of human, helping us to sense the awful, strange beauty of human potential, but it does so while also guiding us away from blaming extraordinary individuals for the historical developments produced—if unevenly—by us all.
The lesson is a salient one in a time when it’s all too easy to feel the threat of AI as a never-before-seen force threatening human life and society, and when it’s all too convenient to blame a few uncommonly smart (or uncommonly rich) people for that threat. We might (and should) still ascribe special responsibility to those exceptional or powerful few. But the novel teaches us to do so not because they are fundamentally different from us—but because they’re the same.
The novel is structured as a triptych, the longest, central panel on von Neumann bookended by sections: first, about physicist Paul Ehrenfest and last, the Go player, Lee Sedol. The novel begins by narrating the stakes of the rise of quantum mechanics in the mid-1920s. For Ehrenfest, the discovery of “chance, indeterminacy, probability, and uncertainty” in the subatomic world was the terrible harbinger of a period of “strange new rationality,” “deranged reason,” and “mathematical plague.” Indeed, he even tells us that “Mathematics was hostile to life.”
Enter von Neumann, the most brilliant mathematician known to history. Again, we never hear from von Neumann himself. Instead, his career is drawn through a sequence of first-person testimonies delivered at some indefinite moment in the future. We hear from his friends, mother, brother, first and second wives, teachers, and colleagues. His brother, Nicholas Augustus, describes “Jancsi’s” early experience with a Jacquard loom, which provides the template for the computer he would come to invent. His first wife, Mariette Kövesi, describes his religious background (“he was completely secular, neither proud nor ashamed of being Jewish”). His teacher Gábor Szegő describes the costs of this secularism (“Spiritually, he was an ignoramus, yes, but he did have unquestionable faith in logic. Ah, but that type of faith is always dangerous! Especially if it is later betrayed. Nothing should be beyond question. Moses even questioned the Almighty!”)
“The Maniac” leaves us with an understanding that the story of AI and its interaction with humanity is one still, and forever, subject to human storytelling.
The book then turns to von Neumann’s participation on the Manhattan Project. Here we hear from Richard Feynman, who narrates the development of the atomic bomb and its difference from thermonuclear technology (the latter producing “a force five hundred times more powerful than the bombs we used to massacre a quarter of a million people in Japan”). Klára Dan describes von Neumann’s rift with Einstein over the nuclear dilemma (“Albert was a dove, the unofficial head of the disarmament movement, while Johnny was a hawk”). Oskar Morgenstern describes the development of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (“one of the many examples of how mankind can be made prisoner by reason”), and his collaboration with von Neumann on game theory.
The book next moves to von Neumann’s work on the MANIAC (Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer)—his update of the first Turing Machine (ENIAC). Von Neumann, we’re told, set two goals for his new computer. The first “was to destroy life as we know it,” by using the MANIAC to make a hydrogen bomb. The second “was to create a new type of life.”
This statement is the book’s hinge—appearing, appropriately, halfway through. From here on, we’re treated to von Neumann’s role in the development of technologies of artificial intelligence, and we’re invited to contemplate the significance of the fact that apocalyptic warfare and AI are connected in the history of our protagonist.
Von Neumann experienced significant cognitive decline in his older age. This process is presented tragically, his genius shriveling in full view of those who once witnessed its flourishing. Still, shreds of insight endured. The section concludes with von Neumann’s oracular, deathbed prescriptions for “what it would take for a computer, or some other mechanical entity, to begin to think and behave like a human being.” “He said that it would have to grow, not be built.” “He said that it would have to understand language, to read, to write, to speak.” “And he said that it would have to play, like a child.”
This last line segues us into the final third of the novel—“Lee, or the Delusions of Artificial Intelligence”—a dramatic retelling of the development of an artificial intelligence capable of beating a human master at the game of Go. There are two exceptional antagonists: Lee Sedol, heir to a lineage of human Go players stretching back to Chinese antiquity, and Demis Hassabis’s AlphaGo technology, heir to the mathematical lineage of von Neumann. In 2016, Lee played a famous five-match series against the computer, winning only one of the five games. Labatut’s narration of the episode is thrilling—and echoes Homer.
The war is fought as a series of battles, during which “Lee could feel the enormous pressure of having to represent the whole of humanity bearing down upon him.” While not an overt retelling of the Iliad, this Go match is narrated in a way that recalls the epic battle waged between the Greeks and the Trojans, as influenced by the Olympian gods. Lee is roundly beaten during the first three matches, the technology at one point playing a move so counterintuitive, the computer seemed to have achieved the sort of intuition Turing himself envisioned decades prior: “Two hours in, Huang [the human playing the tiles chosen by AlphaGo] placed white stone 102 on the tenth line, at the middle of the board, two squares from the left edge of the grid, and everything changed.” Labatut describes the move as being “not of this world” and the moment when future historians might locate “the first glimmer of a true artificial intelligence.”
The “sharp, sudden invasion” has literary precedent. Take, for instance, book 4 of the Iliad, when Athena first intervenes in battle on the side of the Greeks, making “weariless fire blaze from [Diomedes’s] shield and helmet.” So protected, Diomedes wreaks havoc on the now helpless Trojans. Shortly after Athena’s intervention, Pandarus and Aeneas debrief the experience of fighting against a (momentarily) unbeatable foe: “Not without god does he rage so, but some one / of the immortals, mantling in mist his shoulders, stands close beside him.” Fan Hui, a fellow Go player who also lost to a computer, empathizes similarly with Lee’s experience of the computer’s decisive move, knowing “full well just how uncanny it felt to play against a merciless, unfeeling opponent.”
In the fourth game of the series, however, Lee comes up with an inspired move of his own: “Like a bolt of lightning, Lee’s 78th stone tore AlphaGo’s position apart, striking at the heart of the board with a wedge move unlike anything anyone had seen before.” As if playing with the backing of Zeus himself, Lee is momentarily possessed of “God’s Touch.” He would go on to win the game, and “it was as if Lee Sedol had just won a victory for our entire species.”
But, like the Trojans, he would go on to lose the war. The computer recovers to win the final game, having already won the series, and changes the game of Go in the process. As Lee himself describes the fallout: “Go is a work of art made by two people. Now it’s totally different. After the advent of AI, the concept of Go itself has changed.”
And with it, so has the concept of human genius. If the first part of the The Maniac builds the myth of von Neumann, Lee’s defeat sets firm limits on the bounds of human intelligence. In light of this finale, the inimitable von Neumann seems more like one of us.
Labatut tells the story of AI by showing us how, at various scales, the structure of the predicament—like the structure of the technology—is precedented. Most obviously, Labatut does this by demonstrating similarities (and continuities) between the development of atomic weaponry and the development of artificial intelligence.
The dramatization of that historical precedent is a warning. By layering in various references to ancient myth, however, Labatut simultaneously teaches us that this warning given by the story of the atomic bomb is nothing new. While we might not have seen any given piece of intelligent technology before, we have heard its story. Since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus (1818), Prometheus has become the de facto mythic coordinate for cases where humans use technological intelligence to get in over their heads (Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer [2023], for instance, is based on a biography titled American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer). In The Maniac, the myth appears in Eugene Wigner’s recollections about the atomic bomb: “It was the joy of thinking the unthinkable and doing the impossible, pushing past all human limits by burning Prometheus’s give to its utmost incandescence.”
Shortly thereafter, however, Wigner recalls von Neumann’s own citation of a different myth: “Once, when he and I were discussing his theories of nuclear deterrence, he asked me if I knew what had remained inside Pandora’s box after she had opened it and let out all the evils and ills into the world.” Von Neumann’s answer is “Elpis,” “the daimona of hope,” which he prefers to translate as “expectation”: “Because we don’t know what comes after evil, do we? And sometimes the deadliest things, those that hold enough power to destroy us, can become, given time, the instruments of our salvation.”
A few pages later, Klára Dan invokes yet another myth to help make sense of her husband’s newfound interest, after the dropping of the bombs, in biology: “When the divine reaches down to touch the Earth, it is not a happy meeting of opposites, a joyous union between matter and spirit. It is rape. A violent begetting. A sudden invasion, a violence that must be later purified by sacrifice.”
And the final third of the novel, as I’ve described it, uses an ancient epic device to articulate the experience of warring against humanlike forces beyond our understanding or control.
The accretion of these ancient reference points gives us a variety of ways of thinking about our current juncture. Prometheus’s story suggests the unintended risks of building technology simply because we can. Pandora’s story (as interpreted by von Neumann) gives us a kind of dialectical vantage on the unintended benefits of courting those unintended risks. Leda’s story suggests that humanity will experience the violence of artificial-divine action in uneven ways.
And finally, Homer’s story gives us an appreciation for the tragedy of force. Here, I draw on Simone Weil’s 1940 reading of the Iliad, which begins:
The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to. For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors. To define force—it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.
For Weil, the Iliad provided a mirror for the coming horrors of World War II. In 2024, the poem, as Labatut helps us to see, provides a mirror for the coming horrors of a world in which, as things become more like humans, humans become more like things.
Lee’s aforementioned lament about the changing of Go continues: “Go is a work of art made by two people. Now it’s totally different. After the advent of AI, the concept of Go itself has changed. It is a devasting force. AlphaGo did not beat me, it crushed me … There is an entity that cannot be defeated.” In the face of such an unbeatable force, Lee retires from competition.
But as the novel’s short epilogue shows, other, younger players—subject to even greater artificially intelligent forces—continue to play. So while the concept of Go itself may have changed, it has not disappeared. Lee’s defeat is narrated as a point of no return; the technology reigns triumphant.
But we know—as readers of Homer, as readers of this novel, as players of Go, as ordinary or extraordinary humans—that the story does not end with that triumph. Odysseus will need to come home, new generations of human Go masters will continue to play games with one another, and new generations of exceptional mathematicians and scientists will continue to advance technology that will force us to ponder anew what makes us human—and why it matters.
The Maniac isn’t interested in speculating, in the manner of science fiction, about where AI leads: whether to utopia, dystopia, or somewhere in between. It leaves us, instead, with a simpler understanding: that the story of AI and its interaction with humanity is one still, and forever, subject to human storytelling. 