Book: NEXUS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF INFORMATION NETWORKS FROM THE STONE AGE TO AI

Author: Yuval Noah Harari

Published by: Fern

Price: Rs 1,099

We like to think of ourselves as rational beings who want to put truth above all else. Yet, the truth is that we are also social animals. In times of social change, we seek security in groups and in stories.

In his new book, Yuval Noah Harari argues that it would be beneficial to adopt an unorthodox definition of ‘information’. It can be seen as a “social nexus”, capable of putting people into “formation”. “Information sometimes represents reality, and sometimes doesn’t. But it always connects. This is its fundamental characteristic,” writes the Israeli author. The Bible, he mentions, “has done a poor job in
representing the reality of human origins, migrations and epidemics, it has nevertheless been very effective in connecting billions of people.”

He complained in Sapiens (2014, first published in Hebrew in 2011) that humans have “produced little that we can be proud of”. His next books, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2015) and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018), zeroed in on the future with a degree of restlessness. In his latest book, Harari says that the availability of more information has led to the inception of Artificial Intelligence and the result can be apocalyptic. “If we mishandle it, AI might extinguish not only the human dominion on earth but the light of consciousness itself, turning the universe into a realm of utter darkness. It is our responsibility to prevent this,” he writes.

This from a man who is admired in the Silicon Valley. Bill Gates had called Sapiens “provocative”. When Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, appeared before the US Congress remotely in 2020, he was before a bookshelf that had two of Harari’s books. The Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, too, has interviewed the writer with a monastic glow.

Harari has been worried about AI for the past decade. The threat is not fantastical, he says, because we have already been programmed to be manipulated. “In order to manipulate humans there is no need to physically hook brains to computers. 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 to pull the trigger.”

The shrewd observation comes with the roll of his eyes and pen, pointing to the arrival of the movable-type printing press. The “dull” mathematics of Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543) failed to sell the small print run of about 400 copies while Heinrich Kramer’s The Hammer of the Witches (1486), a bloodthirsty guide to witch-hunting, was a bestseller at a time when the concept didn’t exist. In fact, even today, Kramer’s ideas “continue to shape the world” and many current theories about “a global satanic conspiracy, like QAnon” draw on his fantasies.

AI is here to make the economics of the Information Age experience an upward climb. The United States of America has already lost one-third of its newspapers since 2005. With AI spreading its tentacles, chatbots can reproduce content synthetically instead of a Google or Bing search sending users to external sites.

Detracting from Harari’s crisp writing is a set of pallid recommendations. He proposes “benevolence” (“when a computer network collects information on me, that information should be used to help me rather than manipulate me”), decentralisation (“a democratic society should never allow all its information to be concentrated in one place”), accountability, and some respite from algorithmic surveillance. However virtuous, this advice is unsurprising.

A large democracy brings with it mass media, mass education and mass culture. Harari builds up a super narrative around how AI can fracture our institutions. This is no TED talk; it’s an absorbing vision of how we are rabbits caught in the headlights of AI.