MANIAC. Benjamin Labatout

The astonishing story of the eccentric polymath John von Neumann: through the impact of his extraordinary legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the 20th century to the birth of artificial intelligence.

John von Neumann was a child prodigy whose abilities terrified those around him. He changed everything he touched: he invented game theory and the first programmable computer, and he pioneered artificial intelligence, digital life, and mobile pay phones.

From the testimony of Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who despaired at seeing science and technology become tools of tyranny, to the confrontation between South Korean Go master Lee Sedol and the artificial intelligence program AlphaGo, which embodies the central question of von Neumann's most ambitious unfinished project: creating a self-replicating machine - an intelligence capable of evolving beyond human understanding and control.