THE MANIAC

the author of When We Cease to Understand the World a dazzling kaleidoscopic book about the destructive chaos lurking in the history of computing and AI Monstrously good Reads like a dark foundation myth about modern technology but told with the pace of a thriller Mark HaddonJohn von Neumann was a titan of science A Hungarian wunderkind who revolutionized every field he touched his mathematical powers were so exceptional that Hans Bethe a Nobel Prize winning physicist thought he might represent the next step in human evolution After seeking the foundations of mathematics during his youth in Germany von Neumann emigrated to the United States where he became entangled in the power games of the Cold War he designed the world s first programmable computer invented game theory pioneered AI and digital life and helped create the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki He was the darling of the military industrial complex but when illness unmoored his mind his work pushed further into areas beyond human comprehension and control The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych about the dark foundations of our modern world and the nascent era of AI It begins with Paul Ehrenfest an Austrian physicist and close friend of Ein