Our dominion over reason and intellectual life superficially appears to be threatened by the machines. But agency and culpability remain ours. Before we can face the problems that revolutionary technology poses for the future, or even the possibility of a tech-enabled apocalypse, we must carve out spaces in our lives where the use of technology does not crowd out our sense of moral responsibility and agency.

I think Wendell Berry, the poet-farmer, said it best in one of his poems, where he urges us to “every day do something that won’t compute.” This is what you and I can do when we pray, work, think, read, and befriend without recourse to the crutches of technology.

Benjamín Labatut’s The MANIAC probes the mind and legacy of John von Neumann.