Nexus

Title: Nexus – A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
Author: Yuval Noah Harari
Publisher: Fern Press, 2024 (First)
ISBN: 9781911717096
Pages: 492

‘Sapiens’ was a best seller by Yuval Noah Harari that showcased some very pertinent ideas on the evolution of human societies from an anthropological perspective. The take-home message from the book was that the immense success of human societies was not caused by the exceptional intelligence of individuals, but due to the cooperative effort by a multitude of individuals. For a group of people to cooperate as part of an organisation, some methods are essential to bring them together and that title examined them in good detail. This book is an extension of the idea which evaluates the information networks which bind humans together. Mankind gains enormous power by building large networks of cooperation, but the way these networks are built predisposes us to use that power unwisely. Our problem then is a network problem. Humanity possesses many powers which they can’t effectively control. The tendency to create powerful things with unintended consequences started not with the invention of machines or AI, but with the invention of religion. Prophets and theologians have summoned powerful spirits that ended up with flooding the world with blood instead of love and joy. With this stark reminder delivered beforehand, the book inspects information networks from the stone age to artificial intelligence (AI). The goal of the book is to provide a more accurate historical perspective on the AI revolution, because AI is the first ever technology that is capable of making decisions and generating ideas by itself. My earlier reviews of Sapiens and Homo Deus (also by Harari) can be accessed by clicking on the book titles.

Harari delves deep into the definition of information to get the discussion going. The naïve view among people is that information is an attempt to create reality. He argues that reality may not be the basis of people associating together. There’s something called inter-subjective reality which is true only for the people believing in the same story or myth. In this light, information actually creates realities by tying together disparate things, like people or empires, into a network or nexus. In short, the role of information is to connect people together to create order in a network rather than representing truth or reality. As we look at the history of information over the ages, we see a constant rise in connectivity without a concomitant rise in truthfulness or wisdom. To reinforce the point, Harari presents an example on the nature of reality taken from an episode in the creation of Israel which runs counter to the truth perceived by a Palestinian. Considering his Jewish background and Palestinian backers usually having a short fuse, this attempt is rather bold.

The author focusses his attention to provide an interesting and informative view of the information technologies that made human societies stick together. The ‘story’ is the first information technology mankind developed to connect people. It was assumed wrongly that people connect to the person (hero or heroine) of the story, but in fact they connect to the story told about that person. For uniting people, fiction offered many advantages over truth because it could be made really simple and understood by everybody while the latter was often complicated. Plato, in his Republic, imagined that the constitution of his utopian state would be based on ‘noble lie’. While stories circulated in societies, it was realized that poems and myths could be easily remembered by people but other factors were also needed to run a society such as tax records or payable amounts that required a unique non-organic information technology to function. This led to the origin of the written document. Retrieval of the document at the right time was a problem that was solved by the creation of bureaucracy. This led to the development of more powerful information networks. The written book became part of the network in first millennium BCE. After eons in which gods spoke to men via shamans, priests, prophets, oracles and other human messengers, god began to speak through the information technology of the infallible book. Inevitably, the holy book spawned numerous interpretations which eventually turned out to be far more consequential than the book itself. Problems of interpretation tilted the balance of power between the holy book and the institution called church in favour of the latter. Here, the term church is used in a universal sense and not restricted to the Christian variety. The power to interpret the sacred teachings made these institutions omnipotent. The Catholic church interpreted Jesus’ gentle words in a way that allowed it to become the richest landowner in Europe, to launch violent crusades and to establish murderous inquisitions (p.89).

When we come to the modern age, we see mass communication technologies that helped democracy become technically feasible. Newspapers and printing caused consolidation of public opinion that is a precondition of democracy. Hence the new information technology of the late modern era gave rise to both large scale democracy and large scale totalitarianism. We generally tend to be unaware of the potency of the latter. Stalinism (which is the author’s euphemism for communism; for some unknown reason he does not want to call a spade a spade) came close to world domination after World War II and it would be naïve to think that its disregard for truth doomed it to failure or that its ultimate collapse guarantees that such a system can never again rise. The advent of the computer age was again a game changer. The main split in twenty-first century politics might not be between democracies and totalitarian regimes; instead the participants might be human beings and non-human agents such as AI. For thousands of years, prophets, poets and politicians used language to manipulate and reshape society. Now computers are learning how to do it. As computers amass power, new information networks will emerge, but for at least some time, most of the old information chains will remain. Harari suggests ‘alien intelligence’ as the expansion of AI. The book looks at the ways in which an authoritarian system can bend the social media to serve its need of subservience of the people to it such as China’s social credit system. Apart from money, there was traditionally a non-monetary system that was variously known as honour, reputation or status. The new social credit system ascribes to award precise values even for social gestures such as smiles or visiting parents! For example, you might get ten points for picking up litter from the street or lose fifteen points for disturbing neighbours with loud music. This may wipe off privacy and turn life into a ‘never-ending job interview’. This will also pave the way for a totalitarian control system.

The latter half of the narrative is a laboriously long and uninspiring sermon on the likely pitfalls of AI technology when it spreads to the entire world and begins to handle all aspects of human life. The possibility of such systems taking over the world and turning humanity into its slaves is not seriously considered. Instead, the very real chance of AI acquiring the prejudices of human societies such as racism or misogyny is dissected threadbare. In view of this threat, the author recommends to build human institutions that will be able to check not just familiar human weaknesses but also radically alien errors. The scope of AI systems is also evaluated in the book. Some of mankind’s intellectual tasks can easily be automated such as playing chess or providing medical diagnosis, but manual tasks such as dishwashing or nursing are not so easily amenable to AI. People who want a job in 2050 should perhaps invest in their motor and social skills, as much as in their intellect. Data colonialism is a threat Harari flags prominently. American AI systems engage in mass surveillance of Pakistan’s mobile phone network and then uses a machine-learned algorithm to identify suspected terrorists (p.236). This would lead to the pioneer nations or corporations in AI to the ability to control data using their advantages to achieve domination over other nations or corporates. Mastery of AI and data give these empires the power to control people’s lives beyond their national borders. Raw data will be harvested throughout the world and will flow to the imperial hub. There the cutting edge technology will be developed, producing unbeatable algorithms. These will then be exported back to data colonies but neither the profits nor the power is distributed back. Overall coverage of the topic leads readers to the impression that the author is unduly pessimistic.

As noted above, the long lecture on democracy and dictatorship is rudimentary and plain to the point of being redundant. Democratic societies need not be lectured to on the requirement of democracy while totalitarian societies will not be allowed to listen to the author’s tiresome tongue-lashing. The author appreciates the present Indian government under Narendra Modi for its clean up mission. He casts his glance on the Clean India Mission (Swachh Bharat) and the $10 billion spent to build 100 million latrines and remarks that ‘sewage isn’t the stuff of epic poems, but it’s a test of a well-functioning state’ (p.56). The book exhibits scathing and sometimes out-of-place criticism of Vladimir Putin with comments such as ‘Anticipating present-day strongmen like Putin, Augustus [Caesar] didn’t crown himself king, and pretended that Rome was still a republic’ (p.140). While loquacious on Russia, Harari is uncannily tight-lipped on China or its pathetic credentials on democracy and human rights, seeming reluctant to utter anything that would antagonize the Chinese Communist party. Left liberalism seeps through every page, paragraph and word in the book that makes it so drab, unlike Harari’s earlier works. He laments about government censors cutting out free speech, but wants social media platforms to employ more censors – human or AI-based – to block out rightist speech which he conveniently classifies as hate speech. It’s a peculiarity of this genre of scholars to demand total freedom to say anything for themselves while wishing to drown out any opinion dissenting with them. It’s a liberal principle that gender preferences be left to the individual to handle. There is no need for homosexuals to shout their sexual preferences from the rooftops. Being a gay himself, the author has no right to force the readers to irrelevantly go through the problems they face in modern societies and to ‘wonder’ at how he met ‘his husband’ in an LGBTQ social media platform in 2002. Being non-compliant to society’s norms don’t make you entitled to utter something which is best left unsaid. The latter half of the book on AI is mere gaslighting of the readers under the guise of examining potential problems of the new technology.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 2 Star