Review of Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari – Rage Against the Machine | Science and Nature Books

IWhat comes to mind when you think of the impending AI apocalypse? If you're into sci-fi movie clichés, you might imagine killer robots (with or without thick Austrian accents) rising up to take down their arrogant creators. Or maybe, along the lines of The matrixyou will opt for terrifying machines that will suck energy from our bodies while distracting us with a simulated reality.

For Yuval Noah Harari, who has spent much of his time worrying about AI over the past decade, the threat is less fantastical and more insidious. “To manipulate humans, it is not necessary to physically connect brains to computers,” he writes in his gripping new book. Nexus“For thousands of years, prophets, poets and politicians have used language to manipulate and reshape society. Now, computers are learning how to do it. And they won’t need to send killer robots to shoot us. They could manipulate human beings into pulling the trigger.”

Language – and the human capacity to weave with it vast stories that span the globe – is central to the Israeli historian, now on his fourth popular science book, understanding our species and its vulnerabilities. In his 2014 mega-hit Sapiens (In his book The New York Times (originally published in Hebrew in 2011), he argued that humans became dominant because they learned to cooperate in large numbers, thanks to a new aptitude for storytelling. That aptitude, which allowed our ancestors to believe in completely imaginary things, lies at the root of our religions, economies and nations, all of which would dissolve if our narrative faculties were somehow disabled.

Sapiens It has sold 25 million copies to date, a testament to Harari's own storytelling prowess, though it has had its share of detractors. Academics questioned its accuracy and the idea of ​​cramming 70,000 years of human history into 450 pages. Sitcoms mocked Harari superfans who wave the book around like a modern-day Bible. Sapiens lies in its dizzying scope but, as 2020 New Yorker profile As Harari pointed out, the detached focus can have the effect of minimizing the importance of current issues.

Nexus It could be seen as a rebuke to that criticism. Although it takes its own whirlwind journey through the millennia, jumping back and forth in time and between continents, it is very concerned with what is happening today.

If stories were central to the scheme of things, SapiensIn this case, we are talking about information networks, which Harari sees as the basic structures that underpin our societies. “Power always arises from cooperation between large numbers of human beings,” he writes, and the “glue” that holds these networks of cooperation together is information, which “many philosophers and biologists” consider “the basic element of reality.”

But information does not reliably tell the truth about the world. More often, Harari stresses, it gives rise to fictions, fantasies and mass delusions, which lead to such catastrophic events as Nazism and Stalinism. a wise manWhy, despite all our evolutionary successes, is human beings so perennially self-destructive? “The fault,” according to Harari, “lies not in our nature, but in our information networks.”

In looking at how information has led us astray in the past, Harari has no shortage of examples to draw on. One of the bloodiest and most memorable is Witches HammerWritten by Dominican friar Heinrich Kramer in Austria in the 1480s. A guide to unmasking and murdering witches in deliriously horrific ways, the book would not have travelled very far had the printing press not been invented a few decades earlier, allowing Kramer's unhinged ideas to spread across Europe and fuel a witch-hunting frenzy.

Harari’s basic argument is that information revolutions can lead to periods of human flourishing, but they always come at a cost. When we invent shiny new technologies that transmit words and ideas farther and faster than ever before, much of the information that comes out is either junk or downright dangerous. It doesn’t help that when it comes to maintaining social order, fictions tend to be more reliable binding agents than truths.

What’s scary about the AI ​​revolution isn’t just that we’ll be overwhelmed by disinformation from chatbots, or that the powers that be will use it to analyse data about our private lives. Unlike earlier technologies like books and radios, Harari writes: “AI is the first tool capable of making decisions and generating ideas on its own.” We saw an early warning of this in Myanmar in 2016-17, when Facebook’s algorithms, tasked with maximising user engagement, responded Promoting hateful propaganda against the Rohingya which fueled mass murder and ethnic cleansing.

Harari makes a strong case for why we should consider these algorithms to be autonomous agents, and how if we are not careful, humans could become tools for AI to manipulate with ever more terrifying force. Unless we take immediate action, this burgeoning “alien intelligence,” as he prefers to call it, could unleash catastrophes we cannot even imagine, including the destruction of human civilization.

This pessimistic view of AI is nothing new: doomsayers like Eliezer Yudkowsky have been warning of its apocalyptic potential for years, and even the AI ​​industry has begun to voice its concerns. What Harari aims to add to the debate is a long-term view. By applying his perspective to previous information revolutions and showing how different forms of government have reacted to them, he believes we can prepare for the earthquakes to come.

Nexus The book has some curious blind spots – it’s odd that, in a critique of a technology largely driven by profit-driven corporations, capitalism is barely mentioned. But whether or not you agree with the historical framework Harari lays out for AI, it’s hard not to be impressed by the meticulous way he constructs it, peppering what could be a fairly dry analysis with vivid examples, such as the story of Cher Ami, a World War I carrier pigeon, which is used here to tease out the fundamentally elusive nature of information. As in previous books, he relies heavily on lists (“the two main challenges”, “the five basic principles”) and binaries (truth versus order, democracy versus dictatorship), but this serves to organise his thinking rather than dull the writing.

The solutions he proposes to restrict AI's power range from the sensible (banning bots from impersonating humans) to the laughable (encouraging artists and bureaucrats to “cooperate” to help the rest of us understand the computer network), but Nexus It functions primarily as a diagnosis and a call to action, and in those terms it is widely successful. If it sells as well as Sapiens If we do, we will be a little better equipped as a species to deal with the rise of the machines.