---
title: "The MANIAC"
type: Book
date: 2024-11-02
rating: 5
author: "Benjamín Labatut"
genre:
year: 2023
status: Finished
tags:
image: the-maniac.jpg
colorSortKey: [0, 22, 0]
---


One third of the way through _The MANIAC_, I found myself wondering why this book was not _more_ popular: it seemed to be a perfect storm of formalism and postmodernism (it being told in a fugue-like oral history), scientistic reckoning (suddenly in vogue thanks to [[oppenheimer]]), grappling with AI and AGI _explicitly_.

By the time I finished the book, I think I arrived at an answer: it's just not that fun or interesting of a read! The ostensible pleasure of a Greek chorus of larger-than-life scientists deifying von Neumann fades once you realize how the arc and voice of every character is so thin and uniform (compared with, say, [[hhhh]] or [[Autobiography of Red]], where the experimental structure _adds_ to the storytelling and diegesis rather than acts as a bit of showmanship). It is clear to understand _why_ Labatut chose to write this book, and one quickly groks the thesis that the aforementioned _Oppenheimer_ arguably delivered more succinctly and persuasively (our current runaway train of scientific progress is driven less by the desire to understand and improve the world and more by the desire to master it for the sake of mastery).

But you are left with prose that is all text, no subtext — the final part of the triptych perhaps most emblematic of this flaw, a New Yorker-tier play-by-play of Lee Sedol's five-part match against AlphaGo. It is a fun story, especially if you are not burdened by understanding of Monte Carlo tree search. You are told, page by page, exactly how to feel about the entire thing: awe, wonder, despair, hope, dread. Labatut takes care of all of that for you; nothing is left to interpretation.