Post by Bruno Grippay

It was enough for me to listen to the writer Benjamín Labatut saying that “the atomic bomb and the artificial intelligence are two competing technologies aiming to eliminate human beings” to decide to read his latest book “The MANIAC”. It turned out to be a good move. His stunning novel reveals the blood ties between these two inventions through the engagement of several mathematicians from the last century whose lives were fascinating, notably if we consider their tragic ends. Von Neumann is the main protagonist of Labatut’s novel. He is presented as the “smartest human being of the twentieth century”. He appears to be nothing less than the father of the modern computing, the quantum mechanics, the theory of games, the artificial intelligence, the algorithms, the structure and function of DNA, the technological singularity, the digital life, as well as the equations activating the nuclear power. All along the novel, I remained fascinated by the genius of these scientists hovering at the border of insanity, consumed by their ambition to explain life by fondamental axioms or to promote mechanical and numerical entities at the expense of living beings. Our contemporary societies are infused by many of such scientific frenzy ideas and shaped by the technological developments resulting from the inventions of these researchers. This is great and scary at the same time. For instance, John von Neumann calculated that the bomb on Nagasaki would have its major impact and would kill more people if it detonates in the air instead of on the ground. He had zero emotional warmth for people. He was governed purely by efficiency and rationality. He would not care and never be interested whatsoever by the life of Sumiteru Taniguchi, a young Japanese boy who suffered hell after the explosion. His existence had zero value for the scientist in comparison to the bewitching computational madness. Sumiteru just started a job of postman and was proud to ride his bicycle to deliver the letters to the residents around his community in Nagasaki. At the moment of the weapon’s impact, he was climbing a hill with his bag full of letters. His life of ordeal and adversity is recounted to us by the author Peter Townsend. In the early 1980s, Peter wrote a poignant book to testify and leave to us an imperishable memory of this wounded existence. Peter and Sumiteru might not have been the brightest minds of the world, but their friendship and narrative have infinitely more value to me than all the mathematical formulas concocted by all these scientists' wellsprings of knowledge. In this article, I explore the intertwined stories of these different characters.