[0] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/44425/turings-cathe...

Not to mention Nikola Tesla about 20 years prior.

> When several of them turned up at Los Alamos and realized they had gone to high school together, Szilard joked that Hungary was a cover story for a Martian landing.

What if there actually are people who go to Mars in the future but regret it and the only way for them to come back to Earth is to invent a time machine and be reborn as a mathematical supergenius. That would explain this at least:

> At six, Janos (the OG hungarian name for Johnny) could divide eight-digit numbers in his head and hold a conversation in ancient Greek. He later added Latin, French, German, English, and Yiddish. The rumor was that he remembered everything he ever read. Many years later Herman Goldstine decided to test this by asking him to recite "A Tale of Two Cities." Von Neumann started on chapter one and had to be asked to stop fifteen minutes later.

Not only does it capture the alien-like genius of the protagonist, but also described his particular emotional and social character in a way that I have not seen written elsewhere. Highly recommended.

"Can we survive technology?" got me thinking about our industry's upheaval. Software engineering's receiving the disruption it so proudly inflicted on other industries.. not reaping what it sowed; rather just the natural order of things.

Acceptance and moving with change is all that can work. Obstructing; denying; ignoring progress.. you'll lose your edge, your relevance, your value to others, and your job. Progress won't wait for us to like it. We must move fast enough to survive change.

Junior engineers for example? Suddenly too junior to be hired? Great! They, and you, can access multiple answer boxes with every PhD ever, and with a bit of creativity, they can leverage that. The best will survive on their own - the rest we should help along. Let's create tools and structures and institutions and help junior engineers finish their education to marketable levels. Let's help them find efficiencies and get there in the same duration. We shouldn't compel companies to preserve a hiring pipeline; now should we incrementally upgrade university educations. Better to go to kids in schools & universities and stimulate their creativity, get them using new tools in new ways, finding efficiencies - because that's what today and tomorrow's jobs will be about. Institutions will adopt the good ideas in time.

We have a responsibility to invest in - and invent - ways of bringing people along.

I also wrote about why I liked the book so much:

https://henrikwarne.com/2024/07/07/john-von-neumann-the-man-...

This is why he was dismissed in so far as foreign policy was concerned, where nuance and patience takes precedence over cold, calculating game theory. Not only would it not have been feasible (Russia is huge), but it would have led to follow on effects by possibly pulling the US into potentially another world war. This is evidence you can be a genius in some areas and wrong in others.

This gives a sense of embellishment by a clueless layman who think very smart people can memorize every single thing they ever do. Computers memorize well, very smart humans, it’s not clear if they memorize any better than a man of the street. I was struck by a fields medalist recent comment that he sometimes struggle remembering proofs he wrote himself in the past.

That is a strange thing to say, especially now.

Clearly, there is a reason Von Neumann spent so much time on this 'zero-sum' formulation of the problem, specifically in economics. Clearly he must have believed this was representative to a significant extent, especially given his interest in pragmatic problems.

It would make no sense for an intelligent person to work on an economics problem which doesn't model reality.

The house always wins.

So much content out there atm nudging very hard for AI regulation.