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368 pages, Hardcover
First published October 3, 2023
With the creation of the atom bomb physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge that they cannot lose ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer.
By its very nature the hydrogen bomb cannot be confined to a military objective, but becomes a weapon which, in every practical effect, is almost one of genocide ~ Enrico Fermi.
In a second, battle-hardened soldiers who had fought and bled in World War II dropped to their knees and prayed. They sensed that something unspeakably wrong was occurring when they saw their bones appear as shadows through their flesh ~ on the testing of the first hydrogen bomb that was 700 times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
At around the same time von Neumann became enamored with biology and self-replication, Alan Turing considered what it would take to birth a nonhuman intelligence.
He knew the real challenge was not building the thing but asking it the right questions in a language intelligible to the machine. And he was the only one who spoke the language.
We christened our machine the Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer.
MANIAC, for short.
He was a fifty-three-year-old Jewish mathematician who had emigrated from Hungary to America in 1937, and yet at his bedside, hanging on his every word, sat Rear Admiral Lewis Strauss, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission; the Secretary of Defense; the Secretaries of Air, Army, and Navy; and the military Chiefs of Staff — all waiting for a final spark, one more idea from the mind that had birthed the modern computer, laid down the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics, written the equations for the implosion of the atomic bomb, fathered the Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, heralded the arrival of digital life, self-reproducing machines, artificial intelligence, and the technological singularity, and promised them godlike control over the Earth’s climate, now wasting away before their eyes, screaming in agony, lost in delirium, dying, just like any other man.
The thing about my husband that people don’t understand is that he truly saw life as a game, he regarded all human endeavors, no matter how deadly or serious, in that spirit. He once told me that, just as wild animals play when they are young in preparation for lethal circumstances arising later in their lives, mathematics may be, to a large extent, nothing but a strange and wonderful collection of games, an enterprise whose real purpose, beyond any one stated outright, is to slowly work changes in the individual and collective human psyche, as a way to prepare us for a future that nobody can imagine.
“A novel to me is just the worst possible form,” Labatut says. “If I was a dictator, I would outlaw them.”
[What is it then?]
“Nothing. A book. A novel is just a novel. But books are wonderful, books are weird, books are rare. To write a book is a difficult thing. I know I did it with my last book—I am absolutely sure of that. I think I failed with this one. People will call it a novel, and I will be ashamed.”
His melancholy and humor, the density of information that they hold, the beauty of his prose—which has a deeply strange effect, somniferous and hallucinogenic, that prevents you from remembering everything you’ve read, no matter how much you try—make him a complete exception. His oeuvre is an unreachable monolith, a summit that exits our world. In my opinion, he’s the best writer of the 20th century.
‘Go players speak of groups of stones as "alive," "dead," or "unsettled." There are stones that cut, stones that kill, and stones that commit suicide. Players must be able to read the board, peering into the future with their mind's eye to determine if a group of stones will live or die.'
‘Boy, did I miscalculate! The flash was unlike anything — I was sure that I'd been blinded. In that first fraction of a second, I could see nothing but light, solid white light filling my eyes and obliterating my mind, a terrible opaque brightness that had erased the entire world. The enormity of the light was indescribable, it gave me no time to react. I snapped my head back and looked away and then I saw all the mountain ridges illuminated in scaring colours, gold, purple, violet, grey, and blue, every peak and crevasse was lit up with a clarity and beauty that had to be seen, it really can't be imagined.’
‘And then, as suddenly as it began, it was over. The heat dissipated and the light was gone. I suddenly heard people cheering and clapping and laughing, so many people celebrating and screaming with joy. But not all of us. Some of us were quiet. Some were even praying as they looked up at the ominous mushroom cloud hanging over us, with all the radioactivity glowing purplish and alien inside it, rising higher and higher into the stratosphere while the terrifying thunder from the blast kept echoing back and forth, over and over again, bouncing along the mountains, like a bell tolling for the end of the world.’
‘Technology, after all, is a human excretion, and should not be considered as something Other. It is a part of us, just like the web is part of the spider. However, it seems that the ever-accelerating progress of technology gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity, a tipping point in the history of the race beyond which human affairs as we know them cannot continue. Progress will become incomprehensibly rapid and complicated. Technological power as such is always an ambivalent achievement, and science is neutral all through, providing only means of control applicable to any purpose, and indifferent to all. It is not the particularly perverse destructiveness of one specific invention that creates danger. The danger is intrinsic. For progress there is no cure.’
‘Do you like the sound of dead leaves beneath your feet? I do a dark wood that was dangerous to walk in during mating season, because the stags would patrol the paths and chase after intruders with their antlers down, eyes blind with lust and rage, trampling the wild- flowers of spring, delicate yellow trout lilies and purple violets that grew beneath the canopy of aspen, grey birch, dogwood, and beech.’
'I dozed off in the cab, and when I awoke I could see long trails of lights stream past the windows, my vision still blurred by pharmacopoeia and my mind reeling from the eerie displays of the hypnagogia that I have suffered from a very young age, dancing phosphenes and other slight distortions of perception that occur during the onset of sleep, when you fall into that strange state of threshold consciousness between wakefulness and dream.'
‘Are we responsible for the things we create? Are we tied to them by the same chain that seems to bind all human actions? Whether it is fortunate or not, self-replicating machines and von Neumann probes remain beyond our reach. Creating them requires great leaps in miniaturisation, propulsion systems, and advanced artificial intelligence, but we cannot deny that we are slowly inching toward a moment in history when our relationship with technology will be fundamentally altered, as the creatures of our imagination slowly begin to take real form, and we are faced with the responsibility to not only create but also care for them.'