Book Review: 'The Maniac,' by Benjamín Labatut - The New York Times - 0 views
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it quickly becomes clear that what “The Maniac” is really trying to get a lock on is our current age of digital-informational mastery and subjection
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When von Neumann proclaims that, thanks to his computational advances, “all processes that are stable we shall predict” and “all processes that are unstable we shall control,” we’re being prompted to reflect on today’s ubiquitous predictive-slash-determinative algorithms.
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When he publishes a paper about the feasibility of a self-reproducing machine — “you need to have a mechanism, not only of copying a being, but of copying the instructions that specify that being” — few contemporary readers will fail to home straight in on the fraught subject of A.I.
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