Why we’re seduced by nature’s toxins, horror stories for winter solstice, and more books out this month
by Benjamin LabatutBlending fact and fiction, Chilean novelist Benjamin Labatut's century-spanning history of the rise of AI explores the minds of the scientists who dreamed of machines able to learn, evolve and self-replicate without human guidance. It also tells the stories of the scientists who feared this kind of progress.
Or perhaps that's perfectly appropriate. The von Neumann section, constituting the bulk of the book, is blessedly lighter. Labatut draws in a host of voices—von Neumann's wife, children, colleagues, rivals—to tell the story of the development of a brilliant mind but also of reason as “the destructive influence” that the novel's fictional Ehrenfest so feared.
Labatut bluntly states his themes in the voices of the luminaries who narrate his chapters. Here his version of physicist Eugene Wigner declares, “It seems 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.”
These weapons were forged during an evolutionary arms race that raged on well before humans existed. Plants developed toxins to defend themselves from predators. Predators in turn adapted to those toxins to gain an advantage in their fight for survival. But at our earliest opportunity, humans also sought to profit from these substances: scrapings from a Neandertal's teeth show traces of toxins that held medicinal value, including the bases for aspirin and penicillin.
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