Killian Fox in The Guardian: What jumps to mind when you think about the impending AI apocalypse? If you’re partial to sci-fi movie cliches, you may envisage killer robots (with or without thick Austrian accents) rising up to terminate their hubristic creators. Or perhaps, a la The Matrix, you’ll go for scary machines sucking energy out of our bodies as they distract us with a simulated reality.
For Yuval Noah Harari, who has spent a lot of time worrying about AI over the past decade, the threat is less fantastical and more insidious. “In order to manipulate humans, there is no need to physically hook brains to computers,” he writes in his engrossing 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 to pull the trigger.”
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Language – and the human ability to spin it into vast, globe-encircling yarns – is fundamental to how the Israeli historian, now on his fourth popular science book, understands our species and its vulnerabilities.
In his 2014 mega-hit Sapiens (originally published in Hebrew in 2011), he argued that humans became dominant because they learned to cooperate in large numbers, thanks to a newfound aptitude for telling stories. That aptitude, which enabled 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-spinning faculties were somehow switched off.
Sapiens has sold 25m copies to date – a testament to Harari’s own storytelling prowess – though it’s had its share of detractors. Academics questioned its accuracy and the idea of cramming 70,000 years of human history into 450 pages. Sitcoms poked fun at Harari superfans who wave the book around like a modern-day bible. The appeal of Sapiens lies in its dizzying scope but, as a 2020 New Yorker profile pointed out, Harari’s zoomed-out approach can have the effect of minimising the importance of current affairs.
Nexus could be seen as a rebuke to that criticism. Though it executes its own breakneck dash through the millennia, hopping back and forth in time and between continents, it is very much concerned about what’s happening today.
If stories were fundamental to the schema of Sapiens, here it’s all about information networks, which Harari views as the basic structures undergirding our societies. “Power always stems from cooperation between large numbers of humans,” he writes, and the “glue” that holds these networks of cooperation together is information, which “many philosophers and biologists” see as “the most basic building block of reality”.
But information doesn’t reliably tell the truth about the world. More often, Harari emphasises, it gives rise to fictions, fantasies and mass delusions, which lead to such catastrophic developments as nazism and Stalinism. Why is Homo sapiens, for all its evolutionary successes, so perennially self-destructive? “The fault,” according to Harari, “isn’t with our nature but with our information networks.”
