von Neumann
Article
von Neumann is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between July 13, 2022 and April 08, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “reading von Neumann biographies: figuring out what one can or can’t believe about a figure”; “Bhattacharya quotes von Neumann’s own explanation”; “What Was Von Neumann’s Education Like?“. It most often appears alongside America, Einstein, Russia.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 5
- Issue count: 5
- First seen: July 13, 2022
- Last seen: April 08, 2025
Appears In
- Book Review: The Man From The Future
- Why I Am Not (As Much Of) A Doomer (As Some People)
- Altruism And Vitalism As Fellow Travelers
- Interview Day At Thiel Capital
- My Takeaways From AI 2027
Related Pages
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- America (3 shared issues)
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- Einstein (3 shared issues)
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- Russia (3 shared issues)
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- Cold War (2 shared issues)
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- Hitler (2 shared issues)
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- Holocaust (2 shared issues)
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- Katja Grace (2 shared issues)
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- Leo Szilard (2 shared issues)
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- Steve Jobs (2 shared issues)
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- Teller (2 shared issues)
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- Ukraine (2 shared issues)
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- United States (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
John von Neumann invented the digital computer. The fields of game theory and cellular automata. Important pieces of modern economics, set theory, and particle physics. A substantial part of the technology behind the atom and hydrogen bombs. Several whole fields of mathematics I hadn’t previously heard of, like “operator algebras”, “continuous geometry”, and “ergodic theory”.
This bothered me enough that I turned to a second von Neumann biography, Norman MacRae’s John Von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered The Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, And Much More. I was delighted to find that MacRae had a completely straightforward explanation I had never heard before.
Inline links: John Von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered The Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, And Much More
Most surprising, at least to me, John von Neumann was reportedly quite fun to be around - the life of the party. He used his prodigious memory not just for mathematical theorems but for an almost limitless amount of jokes and gossip. You can find a list of his favorite jokes in his brother’s biography. Here’s one:
Maybe they’ll have internal goals, and they won’t be aligned with ours in some relevant distribution, but we’ll be so much more powerful than they are that they’ll do what we want, either through coercion or negotiation. The world-killer needs to be very smart - smart enough to invent superweapons entirely on its own under hostile conditions. Even great human geniuses like Einstein or von Neumann were not that smart. So these intermediate AIs will include ones that are as smart as great human geniuses, and maybe far beyond. (if you’re imagining specific years, imagine human-genius-level AI in the 2030s and world-killers in the 2040s - not some scenario with many centuries in between) So whether we’re prepared for the world-killer depends on whether we can formulate a strategy in conjunction with somewhat cooperative AIs who are at least as smart as great human geniuses: Maybe millions of these intermediate AIs, each as smart as Einstein, working for centuries of subjective time, can solve the alignment problem. Then we can make sure any potential world-killers are well-aligned.
Eliezer Yudkowsky takes the other end, saying that it might be possible for someone only a little smarter than the smartest human geniuses. He imagines, for example, a von Neumann level AI learning enough about nanotechnology to secrety train a nanobot-design AI. Such an AI might work very well - a chemical weapons designing AI was able to invent many existing chemical weapons - and some that might be worse - within a few hours.
Inline links: a chemical weapons designing AI
An obvious counterexample to this is all the extremely successful people from privileged upbringings. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg all had great childhoods. So did Caesar and Napoleon. So did Einstein and von Neumann. Meanwhile, there are millions of poor people and war victims who have lived lives of constant horrible trauma without much benefit. If success and creativity were proportional to suffering, the West would have to ban refugees from the Gaza Strip, lest they take all the spots in the best colleges and form an elite billionaire overclass.
“All the good superweapons are invented by Jews. Einstein and Oppenheimer made the A-bomb. Teller and von Neumann made the H-bomb. Samuel Cohen made the neutron bomb, Leo Szilard made the cobalt bomb, et cetera. Even the world-destroying AIs are being invented by Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, et cetera.”
Likewise, if you’re America, you’ve got nukes, and you know Russia will get nukes next year, what do you do? You can either nuke them now and automatically win, or you give up your advantage and have the whole Cold War. Von Neumann really wanted to nuke them in 1947 and win automatically. We didn’t do that because we weren’t psychos, but the logic is sound.