Gratuit avec l’offre d'essai
Écouter avec l’offre
-
The Maniac
- Lu par : Gergo Danka, Eva Magyar
- Durée : 9 h et 51 min
Impossible d'ajouter des articles
Échec de l’élimination de la liste d'envies.
Impossible de suivre le podcast
Impossible de ne plus suivre le podcast
2,95 €/mois pendant 3 mois
The Maniac
Acheter pour 28,28 €
Aucun moyen de paiement n'est renseigné par défaut.
Désolés ! Le mode de paiement sélectionné n'est pas autorisé pour cette vente.
Vous êtes membre Amazon Prime ?
Bénéficiez automatiquement de 2 livres audio offerts.Bonne écoute !
Description
Named One of the 10 Best Books of 2023 by The Washington Post and Publishers Weekly • One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2023 • A National Bestseller • A New York Times Editor's Choice pick • Nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
“Captivating and unclassifiable, at once a historical novel and a philosophical foray . . . Labatut is a writer of thrilling originality. The MANIAC is a work of dark, eerie and singular beauty.”—The Washington Post
“Darkly absorbing . . . A brooding, heady narrative that is addictively interesting.”—Wall Street Journal
From one of contemporary literature’s most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI
Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist, and one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year, it explored the life and thought of a clutch of mathematicians and physicists who took science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In The MANIAC, Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale.
A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata. Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues, and rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake.
The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo, an encounter embodying the central question of von Neumann's most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence able to evolve beyond human understanding or control.
A work of beauty and fabulous momentum, The MANIAC confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species.
Commentaires
“Labatut’s latest virtuosic effort, at once a historical novel and a philosophical foray, is a thematic sequel, an exploration of what results when we take reason to even further extremes . . . A contemporary writer of thrilling originality . . . The MANIAC is a work of dark, eerie and singular beauty.”—Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post
“What [Labatut] brings to the page is something almost indescribably layered and complex that feels like a genre unto itself . . . Labatut has an uncanny ability to inhabit the psyche of these subjects—even though he’s conjuring up their recollections, they still come across as wholly reliable narrators. There is so much depth and profundity within their reminiscing, so much foreshadowing of the present moment when it seems AI is all we’re hearing about.”—Allison Arieff, San Francisco Chronicle
“The novel’s final section, a thrilling human-versus-machine matchup, points to what von Neumann had wrought—and reflects the warnings of Labatut’s Wigner. Although its science never strays from what’s been reported in the real world and although Labatut honors the discipline of historical fiction, The MANIAC qualifies as science fiction, at least as practiced by Mary Shelley and her adaptors. Neither Shelley nor Labatut includes in their work a scene of a scientist shouting, ‘It’s alive!’ as some cursed creation lumbers to life. But the warning of that moment powers The MANIAC as surely as electricity enlivened Frankenstein’s monster, a breakthrough who, in every telling, boasts the capacity to break us.”—Alan Scherstuhl, Scientific American
