The only recipe for surviving technological change, von Neumann concluded, was relying on “human qualities.” But what are those qualities? What is “human” about them? And how can they help us achieve the political forms and ideals necessary to ensure our survival? Von Neumann and his powers of logic did not address those questions. On the contrary, he encouraged us to imagine a strict identity between mathematics and the human, and he gave us the tools to extend one particular kind of human activity—games of strategy—into ever-greater domains of life. Today, game theory and its computational algorithms govern not only our nuclear strategy but also many parts of our working world (Uber, Lyft, and many others), our social lives (Meta, TikTok) and love affairs (Tinder), our access to information (Google), and even our sense of play. Von Neumann’s ideas about human psychology provided the founding charter for the algorithmic “gamification” of the world as we know it. By concealing the distance between logic and the complexity of being rather than minding the gap, his axiomatized “psychology” heightened the very dangers he feared.
What does minding the gap look like? The first step is simply to notice that there is one, as J. Robert Oppenheimer did in 1960, a few years after von Neumann’s death. “What are we to make of a civilization,” he asked, “which has always regarded ethics as an essential part of human life, and…which has not been able to talk about the prospect of killing almost everybody, except in prudential and game-theoretical terms?” Oppenheimer had collaborated with von Neumann for many years, first leading the Manhattan Project, which produced the atom bomb, and then as director of the Institute for Advanced Study. This did not prevent him from realizing the dangers of reducing the human to a series of axioms, or from despairing—like Cassandra—of the possibility of making his warnings heard.
I suspect that both von Neumann and Bhattacharya would agree that we need logic and technology, but that we also need a better understanding of the human if we are to survive. If the human is not entirely reducible to logic or algorithm, then that understanding cannot come from mathematics and technology alone. What quests for knowledge can produce it? What kinds of inquiries, collaborations, and research institutions are necessary if humanity is to “keep pace”? The Man From the Future does not ask these questions, but it may provoke others to do so.