2024-01-15 23:42:32
A little more than 100 years ago, the German sociologist Max Weber warned that the advance of science would cause the “disenchantment” of the world.
He was referring to a world without mystery, without the unknown or the transcendent and, therefore, without meaning: a world governed by the shadowy law of what he called “instrumental rationality”, where everything is a means to achieve an end and nothing It is an end in itself.
Weber feared that science and technology would reduce human existence to cold calculation and utilitarian practicality, and destroy any activity that did not have immediate, measurable, and pragmatic effects.
MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut is a not entirely fictional account of scientific advances since Weber issued his warning. And, in a strange and disturbing way, it shows how wrong his prediction was.
MANIAC, by Benjamín Labatut, published in Spain by Anagrama. Anagram, CC BY
The science that has spawned everything from nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence to Silicon Valley and neoliberal economics is anything but practical and mundane. It unfolds at a level of mathematical abstraction and philosophical speculation that only a small handful of human beings can understand. It works by breaking all the rules of common sense and everything that might seem useful in the everyday world, thriving on its inconsistencies and irrationalities.
In fact, and as the title of Labatut suggests, it exists on the thin border between the rational and the irrational, that place where thought becomes madness, where the world does not lose all its meaning, as Weber imagined, but is filled of infinite meanings, full of messages that only a paranoid mind could discern.
If science closes the gates of heaven, we could say that it opens wide the gates of hell.
The limits of logic
Labatut’s novel invites us to consider a series of figures in the history of 20th century science whose personal lives reflected the madness of what they were discovering.
The Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest could not help but compare the irrationality of the new science with the irrationality of the nascent Nazi regime. His descent into madness led him, in 1933, to murder his disabled son before committing suicide.
In 1931, the mathematician and logician Kurt Gödel developed the incompleteness theorems that installed an inconsistency at the basis of all mathematics. It is sometimes said that his debilitating psychosis was not the effect but the cause of his discovery.
Self-taught computer scientist and engineer Klára Dan was behind some of the most important technological advances of the 20th century. In 1963, at age 52, she drove from her home in La Jolla, California, to the beach, where she waded into the surf and drowned.
But for Labatut, the most compelling of these figures (to the point that most of MANIAC consists of an elaborate character sketch) is the genius Hungarian mathematician Neumann János Lajos, or, as he came to be called after moving to the United States , John von Neumann.
Labatut presents von Neumann as “the most intelligent human being of the 20th century.” And the evidence for this statement is numerous.
Von Neumann invented the modern computer, provided the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics, and completed the equations necessary to make the atomic bomb possible.
John von Neumann (1903-57). Los Alamos National Library, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
He was also the father of Game Theory, key to neoliberal economics, but which served to justify the Cold War strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD. This proposed that the only way to avoid the annihilation of all human existence was to arm two superpowers with the ability to do it many times over.
Von Neumann predicted and helped anticipate the arrival of the digital age. He foresaw self-reproducing machines, artificial intelligence, and the Singularity, that mythical moment when technology will finally absorb and subordinate humanity.
It’s hard to imagine that just one individual human mind could be behind much of the technological world we all live in now. According to Labatut, almost everyone who knew von Neumann saw him as a different species, a higher stage of human evolution, an extraterrestrial being, even a god.
“There are two kinds of people in this world,” Labatut has von Neumann collaborator Eugene Wigner say at the beginning of the novel: “Jansci von Neumann and the rest of us.”
“Most mathematicians prove what they can,” Wigner declares a little later. “Von Neumann shows what he wants.”
an inhuman mind
To reinforce this image of von Neumann as a god, Labatut never writes from von Neumann’s perspective nor does he claim to have access to the inner workings of his mind. Instead, she structures his novel as a series of almost breathless first-person accounts from those who knew him or encountered him, like the testimony of witnesses to a miracle… or a catastrophe.
Thus, in addition to Wigner, we hear from von Neumann’s mother, Margit Kann von Neumann, his brother Nicholas Augustus von Neumann, his first wife Mariette Kövesi, his first teacher George Pólya, the mathematician and engineer Theodore von Kármán, the American physicist Richard Feynman, economist Oskar Morgenstern, and many more.
They all seem to have the same basic impression of the man: a disconcertingly great genius, whose singular intellectual powers seemed to place him beyond good and evil, and led him to despise mere human morality with callous indifference.
This explains the enthusiasm with which von Neumann threw himself into the military applications of his ideas, and the shamelessness with which he became, as Labatut says, “a mind for hire,” willing to “charge exorbitant fees to sit with people.” from IBM, RCA, the CIA or the RAND Corporation, sometimes for no more than a couple of minutes.”
If von Neumann was a god, he was not a benevolent Christian god at all. He was more like the Greek gods of Olympus or the wrathful Yahweh of the Old Testament. Or perhaps he was simply a demon: willful, arbitrary, and capable of horrible acts of destruction.
Richard Feynman. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
mechanical gods
But unlike most gods, von Neumann was not immortal. Like many of those around him, he died tragically young, shortly after his 53rd birthday, the victim of virulent brain cancer.
In MANIAC, Labatut suggests that the algorithms that now dominate much of our lives could be considered the descendants of von Neumann. They are mechanical gods who are not bound by the limits of flesh and blood.
The novel has a second act of sorts, in which Labatut leaves von Neumann behind and tells the story of the ancient game Go, and the moment when machines became capable of beating the world’s best human players, Lee Sedol and Ke Jie.
For Labatut, the fact that machines systematically beat humans in the most complex games we can imagine constitutes a fundamental turning point. We can only tremble before these new gods in the same way that our ancestors did before the old ones: with fear and trepidation.
The gift of fiction
Despite these apocalyptic fantasies, I would like to suggest that something else is going on here too, just beneath the surface.
MANIAC is deceptively presented as a collection of facts and an account of events that actually happened. But it’s not that at all. It is a novel: the invention of another great mind, that of Labatut.
Benjamin Labatut. AloysusAcker, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
It places the facts of human experience within a container of fiction. Scientific and technological discoveries are encompassed in something deeper: a story.
In that sense, MANIAC’s fictional form belies its apocalyptic content. Machines may dominate the real world, but as Labatut’s novel attests, humans can invent fiction that dominates that domination.
“You insist that there is something a machine cannot do,” von Neumann once declared, with characteristic arrogance. “If you tell me precisely what a machine can’t do, then I can always make a machine that does just that.”
“Well,” we might have replied, “what you can’t do is anything without being told what to do.” What it cannot do is what Labatut’s novel does, in fact all novels, all fictions, all stories: tell us things that can never be verified, create truths that have no stable foundation or weave entire worlds out of nothing. .
#science #opens #gates #hell