As if we Israelis did not have enough things to trouble us, author and historian Yuval Noah Harari has published a new troubling book. It is another “brief history” – only 518 long pages. This time, a history of information networks. The focus is on information driven by artificial intelligence. And the prognosis, according to Harari, is very bad, indeed. To reach his hair-raising jeremiads, you must read several hundred pages of history about less lethal information networks.
The book’s title is Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. Artificial intelligence poses an “existential crisis,” Harari claims. And our fractious, divided world is ill-equipped to confront it.
“After 100,000 years of discoveries, inventions, and conquests, humanity has pushed itself into an existential crisis. We are on the verge of ecological collapse…we are busy creating new technologies that have the potential to escape our control and enslave or annihilate us. Yet instead of our species uniting to deal with these existential challenges, global cooperation is becoming more difficult…and a new world war does not seem impossible.”
The problem, Harari argues, is not necessarily information itself. Information networks have in the past brought good things. The problem is perhaps that we have been asking the wrong questions.
“All the information has not given us answers to the big questions of life: Who are we? What should we aspire to? What is a good life, and how shall we live it?…Humans today have a lot more information and power than in the Stone Age, but it is far from certain that we understand ourselves and our role in the universe much better.”
In what sense, then, is the crisis now facing humanity driven by information?
“It is an information problem. Information is the glue that holds networks together. But for tens of thousands of years, Sapiens built and maintained large networks by inventing and spreading fictions, fantasies, and delusions…e.g., Naziism and Stalinism, held together by exceptionally deluded ideas.”
Harari is right. Ideas can indeed cause massive damage. Such as the fanatical and murderous religion-based ideas Israel’s neighbors seem to apply blindly and wrong-headedly.
What dangers emerge from artificial intelligence?
Mainly, that it will take over. “AI could supercharge existing human conflicts, dividing humanity against itself,” he writes. “We might find ourselves cocooned by a web of unfathomable algorithms that manage our lives... even re-engineer our bodies and minds. If a 21st-century totalitarian network succeeds in conquering the world, it may be run by non-human intelligence.”
Harari warns: “All humans together are threatened by the totalitarian potential of non-human intelligence.”
Winston Churchill spoke memorably about the Iron Curtain, dividing the Western democracies from the Soviet dictatorships. Harari now speaks about the Silicon Curtain, dividing those nations that have advanced AI and those that do not.
“The silicon-based computers that dominate the new information network function in radically different ways. Silicon chips can create spies that never sleep, financiers that never forget, and despots that never die. How will this change society, economics, and politics?”
A reviewer highlighted a key point Harari makes: The difference between democracies and dictatorships lies in how they handle information. Dictatorships are far more concerned with controlling data than with testing its truth value. Democracies, by contrast, are open and transparent networks in which citizens can evaluate bad data and reject or correct it.
Harari has become world famous with a series of books on the history of everything. His 2011 book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind has sold over 25 million copies – an astonishing achievement. His next book, Homo Deus, explored our future. It was rather bleak.
Harari has been sounding the alarm bells about AI for years. At a Frontiers Forum event, he warned us how AI uses language to seduce us: “ New AI tools are gaining the ability to develop deep and intimate relationships with human beings.”
Human nature, he wrote, will be transformed in the 21st century; technology is uncoupling, disconnecting, intelligence from consciousness. We have data-processing networks that know our feelings better than we know them ourselves. Algorithms trap us in social media. When this happens, what it means to be human may have changed forever.
“All of these [AI] abilities together as a package boil down to one very, very big thing: The ability to manipulate and to generate language, whether with words or images or sounds. AI is gaining mastery of language at a level that surpasses the average human ability. And by gaining mastery of language, AI is seizing the master key, unlocking the doors of all our institutions, from banks to temples. Because language is the tool that we use to give instructions to our bank and also to inspire heavenly visions in our minds.”
In his new book, Harari poses this trillion-dollar question – especially painful as we view the year-long insanity of death and destruction on Israel’s borders and within them:
“Why are we so good at accumulating information and power but far less successful at acquiring wisdom? If we Sapiens are so wise, why are we so self-destructive?”
I agree with Harari on this: We Sapiens are demonstrably and collectively not wise, though among us there are many wise people. Problem is, here in Israel and around the world we just do not listen to the wise or elect them to positions of influence.
It is high time we did. The core problem is not AI technology but how self-seeking, greedy human beings seek to use it.■
The writer heads the Zvi Griliches Research Data Center at S. Neaman Institute, Technion. He blogs at www.timnovate.wordpress.com.
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
Yuval Noah Harari
Random House, 2024
518 pages; $35