The MANIAC

by Benjamín Labatut

my husband had burrowed into the highest echelons of power and attached himself there like a fat little tick.

His optimism regarding the possibility that we could accurately predict the weather was entirely based on the capabilities provided by computers such as his MANIAC: “All processes that are stable we shall predict. All processes that are unstable, we shall control,”

It later turned out that weather systems are so fundamentally chaotic that even the most advanced weather models are merely speculative beyond a couple of weeks,

Billions of people still had unwavering faith in God, and their complete irrationality and incurable superstitions showed no signs of becoming weaker. Janos did not agree: “Those gods are living dead. They have lost their glory. They cannot give sense to the world because they are remnants, broken relics that we still carry around with us, just as sickly and powerless as those horse-drawn buggies you see in the streets of New York. Just because they are still here does not mean they are of any use.

Their progress, at first, would be slow and silent. But then they would spawn and burst into our lives like so many hungry locusts, fighting for their rightful place in the world, carving their own path toward the future while carrying, in some deep corner of their digital souls, a trace whisper of my spirit, a small part of me, the man who had laid down their logical foundations.”

It is a very small comfort to think that the interests of humanity might one day change, the present curiosity in science may cease, and entirely different things may occupy the human mind. Technology, after all, is a human excretion, and should not be considered as something Other.

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.

Near midnight on July 15, 1958, Julian Bigelow arrived at the Institute for Advanced Study, walked down the stairs that led to the MANIAC,