TOAs befits a writer whose breakthrough work, Sapiens, was a history of the entire human race, Yuval Noah Harari is a master of sententious generalization. “Human life,” he writes here, “is a balancing act between striving to improve ourselves and accepting who we were.” Is it? Is that all it is? Elsewhere, one might be surprised to read: “The ancient Romans had a clear understanding of what democracy means.” No doubt the Romans would have been happy to know that, 2,000 years in the future, they would receive a gold star for their understanding of eternally stable political concepts from Yuval Noah Harari.
In his 2018 book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Harari wrote: “Liberals fail to understand how history has deviated from its pre-ordained course and lack an alternative prism through which to interpret reality. Disorientation leads them to think in apocalyptic terms.” It seems that, in the intervening years, Harari himself has become a liberal, because this book deals with the apocalyptic scenario of how the “computer network” – everything from digital surveillance capitalism to social media algorithms to artificial intelligence – could destroy civilization and usher in the “end of human history.” Take that, Fukuyama.
Like Malcolm Gladwell, Harari has a passionate need to be seen to be refuting conventional wisdom. Many people think, for example, that the printing press made a crucial contribution to the rise of modern science. Not so, Harari insists: after all, the printing press also enabled the spread of fake news, such as books about witches, and that is why Gutenberg is partly responsible for the gruesome torture and murder of those accused of witchcraft across Europe. Silly as this may sound, he also misses the fundamental point: because the scientific method is cumulative, modern science could only emerge once the results of earlier experimenters were widely available to those who followed them. Only through the ladder of the printing press could early modern scientists stand on the shoulders of giants.
But perhaps I have fallen prey to what Harari calls “the naïve view of information,” which shifts subtly throughout the book as rhetorical circumstances dictate until it becomes a kind of Frankenstein strawman. The naïve view of information includes the idea that “it is essentially a good thing, and the more we have, the better,” which many people believe and which is hard to argue with, but it also supposedly holds that sufficient information leads ineluctably to political wisdom and that the free flow of information leads inevitably to truth, propositions that almost no one believes. “Knowing that e=mc2 rarely resolves political disagreements,” Harari says, to no one.
We already know this from the history of dictatorial and totalitarian governments and their attempts at information gathering and control, a history from which Harari draws dozens of chilling and colourful anecdotes to persuade the reader of the falsity of a patently ridiculous view.
What, then, can modern computers do that should worry us so much? Harari is peculiarly credulous about the capabilities of what is now marketed as “AI.” No one has yet seen a chatbot create new ideas, as Harari thinks they can, let alone generate art that isn’t simply a probabilistic recombination of patterns in its training data (“Computers can make cultural innovations,” he writes in one of the many passages next to which I scrawled “citation needed”). Meanwhile, at some point in the future, what Harari calls “our new AI overlords” will apparently acquire terrifying, godlike powers. In his crystal ball, an AI overlord might decide to engineer a new pandemic virus, or a new kind of money, while flooding the world’s information networks with fake news or incitements to revolt.
Meanwhile, the fall of a “silicon curtain” prophesied here is not a problem of AI per se, but of geopolitics: extrapolating from China’s Great Firewall, which prevents most Chinese citizens from accessing sites like Google and Wikipedia, Harari assumes that over time, Chinese and American computer systems could be completely prevented from interoperating or even communicating with each other, thereby “ending the idea of a single shared human reality.” Worrying if true. Vladimir Putin’s violent irredentism in Ukraine, Harari notes, is partly inspired by his belief in a partisan version of Russian history, showing the danger of a lack of shared myths. However, this is a feature of almost every war since the beginning of time, so I’m not sure we can blame computers for it.
So what can we do to save human civilization and our shared reality? Simple, Harari concludes: subject algorithms and artificial intelligence to strong official regulation and focus on “building institutions with strong self-correcting mechanisms.” Remain liberal democracies? It’s a somewhat lackluster conclusion for a book that has adopted an end-of-times tone.
Annoyingly, Nexus also contains many all-too-brief but fascinating discussions on topics ranging from the process by which the books that make up the modern Bible were canonized, to the role of Facebook’s “news feed” in fueling the 2016-17 Myanmar massacres, to the facial recognition system used by Iran to detect unveiled women.
There are a few brilliant pages, in particular, on the plight of Jews in fascist Romania, including Harari's own grandfather, who in 1938 was forced to produce documents proving his right to citizenship, which in many cases had been destroyed by municipal authorities. When Harari is not in his oracular pontificating mode, he can be an excellent writer of narratives. But we must assume that what his readers want is oracular pontificating.
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