Yuval Noah Harari Exposes Power and AI Nexus

Yuval Noah Harari is not your usual run-of-the-mill writer. After his runaway success of the Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, he has become one of the best-known public intellectuals. Critics dismiss him as a peddler of snake oil, packaging it in attractive and digestible ideas. His followers hail him as an iconoclastic thinker who sees through the smokescreen and ferrets out the grand theories that make sense of history and by virtue of its lessons, clarify the goings on in the present. As much as you cannot judge a book by its cover, Yuval Noah Harari cannot be defined by just one book and what it propagates. What distinguishes the author from other intellectuals is how he gathers so many facts from disparate sources, cutting across disciplines, time and place, categorising them and distilling them into one unified thinking framework. His ideas, for the most part, are nothing revolutionary. Still, he somehow interspersed them with rare insights into the evolution of human society and notions of reality by weaving entertaining stories designed to converge at a grand finale that reveals the underlying workings of the world. Whatever that overarching conclusion he makes, whether you hate or love him, his books are eminently readable, unlike those cobbled together by decorated Nobel prize winners, most of whom write in a dry, inscrutable style replete with jargon. Accessibility and engaging writing is Yuval’s power.

His new book Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI is anything but brief. The book is all about AI and how it will change society, politics, relationships, intimacy and the eternal mind-body duality in the future. If you don't want to read further, here’s the crux: technologies change how information networks form, who controls and harnesses them to acquire power and establish order in the service of democracy or totalitarian regimes. AI turns the hitherto understood information networks upside down through its unique ability to generate ideas and make decisions on its own, a feat which earlier mass communication technologies could not achieve. Elaborating on this concern, Yuval writes, “knives and bombs do not themselves decide whom to kill. They are dumb tools, lacking the intelligence necessary to process information and make independent decisions. AI isn’t a tool—it’s an agent.” The author’s call to action is to reign in incalcitrant AI, which might end up manipulating mankind by our unquestioning reliance on AI. The ultimate danger is that AI may coax you incrementally until we don’t even realise that it controls us, with our full cooperation.  

The book itself is a bulky one with 492 pages between its covers. The first half is a rehash of his earlier books–Sapiens, Homo Deus & 21 Lessons for the 21st Century– and sets the tone for the 2nd half, in which he unveils his thoughts on AI. The author takes us on his dizzying journey, speeding through different eras in history, places, anecdotes, people and the evolution of mass communication technologies. 

The first of the information replication technology is the printing press. Printing made possible the dissemination of both valuable knowledge and false propaganda. Thanks to printing, religious treatises like the Bible found their place in the homes of ordinary people who were hitherto not permitted to see them except in ecclesiastical institutions mediated by a theological authority. Books empowered the masses, and God’s words ceased to become the privileged information of the few men in robes. However, printing also became an accomplice in spreading disinformation. The bestseller in the 15th century was not a Copernican but a book called Malleus Maleficarum that kindled a worldwide Satanic conspiracy supposedly hatched by the witches. The work of fiction led to the infamous witch-hunting craze in all of the Western world. Many innocents were tortured, and in fact, strong-willed women of the times were branded as witches and burned at the stakes for personal enmity and to achieve fatten official records. This period of witch-hunting was one of the most misogynistic periods in history. And printing made that possible through a toxic book which peddled numerous lies and concoctions.  

The next generation of mass media, like TV and radio, only worsened this trend of disinformation and misinformation. Hitler executed the Holocaust through his demagogic speeches relayed via radio and TV broadcasts. The good side of mass media is the availability of literature and scientific studies, which are the fruits of human collaboration and sharing. Mass media, in short, is a double-edged sword. 

It all boils down to the fact that the availability of information matters less than what gets attention, mass appeal and how it is interpreted. This goes against the common belief that more information leads to discovering the truth. 

Yuval's startling contention is that we instinctively hold the NAIVE view of information which assumes that more information leads to truth. “Information has no essential link to truth, and its role in history isn’t to represent a preexisting reality. Rather, what information does is to create new realities by tying together disparate things—whether couples or empires. Its defining feature is connection rather than representation, and information is whatever connects different points into a network,” writes Yuval. Often, information is chiselled into attractive objects for worship at the marketplace of ideas. Because truth is rather inconvenient for maintaining peace and order in society, it has to be hidden. The divine origin of the power of the kings, for example, was deeply entrenched, the subjects brainwashed by the pomp and rituals of the royalty aided by the clergy within a loop of “fictions, fantasies, propaganda, and—occasionally—downright lies.”

Yet another example is religious adherents who believe in the existence of omnipotent godheads, and visiting holy places like Mecca is considered a duty of faithful Muslims. Without the lens of the supernatural, all religious texts are just works of scribes who perceived the pulse of the society in which they were recorded, laden with human biases. But order, more than truth, was the more important objective. So, the fiction wins. 

The fiction that we share and the order it maintains is now under threat from the AI-enabled chatbots and algorithms humming in our computers and smartphones. When a Russian Tsar in the Middle Ages wanted to monitor the activities of his potential enemies, he deployed a spy for each dissident. In hindsight, the idea of one-on-one human surveillance was highly inefficient and not free from human tedium and biological limitations. Smartphones are much better spies as they can listen to our conversations in the bedroom and record our every intimate moment. They do not get tired, nor get distracted or respond to nature’s calls.

Nexus paints an alarming future in which AI is snooping on us everywhere. With more intimate knowledge of our lives, AI will be able to analyse our weaknesses, likes, and dislikes to feed calibrated information that suits our tastes and makes decisions for us, most of which we will approve of. Slowly but ultimately, we will begin to rely blindly on AI to steer our lives without a war fought, bloodshed, or arguments made. It might be a hypnotic and horrific scenario. 

AI’s influence will extend to our personal finance, marriage, healthcare, education, entertainment, politics and consumption choices. There will be no escaping it.

AI’s first line of attack will be the online medium, which is our predominant means of communication, work and fun. When we want to learn about an exciting or important topic, we turn to Google or Chatbots like ChatGPT and its myriad avatars. More than a human mentor, we consult AI products. 

Since the time of cuneiform tablets, human bureaucrats have been the custodians, purveyors, and creators of documents that inform our reality. However, the role of bureaucracy is slowly slipping away in importance. Why ask an arrogant clerk about a tax filing detail when we can just command the chatbot to pull up the works, fill out a form, and make it picture-perfect for printing and filing away? 

Most of these mind control tricks by AI have already hurt society. When social media algorithms prioritise user engagement over the importance of the message, the results are horrific, even ending in the loss of human lives. Yuval mentions specifically the insidious roles of Facebook in amplifying and inundating the Facebook feeds that incited hatred and dehumanisation of Myanmar’s Rohingya community, making them victims of genocides. Facebook algorithms, designed by the engineers to maximise engagement and reach, went overdrive in spreading the videos to demonise the Rohingya ethnic members fueling a real pogrom in Myanmar. It was not the fault of the engineers who wrote instructions to play up the emotive content but they couldn't anticipate the aftermath.    

Yuval claims that future wars will be fought by the AI on behalf of the human political leaders who will depend on the AI for even critical issues like trade and commerce, policy on the use of mass destruction weapons, climate change, geopolitics etc. As countries like China, Europe, the USA, and probably India develop their own AI’s walled gardens, they will no longer be able to talk to each other and lose the semblance of shared concerns. Yuval calls this digital divide the ‘Silicon Curtain’ that will segregate one nation from another, and this breakdown of communication will herald a world war in which AI will call the shots at its will. We will hardly understand the AI’s actions except for placing our complete faith in it to command our sensitive resources supposedly on our interests.  

The only way we can avert these doomsday scenarios is by establishing self-correcting institutions at various levels like courts, parliaments, and civil societies, or in other words, by strengthening the current model of democracy by flesh-and-blood people. When too much truth is sacrificed for fiction or when the myth supersedes the objective reality, cross-checking institutions and mechanisms should restore the two in the right proportion.

Democracy thrives on transparency and the dissemination of information to citizens, while totalitarian regimes maintain their grip by centralising information and keeping the people in the dark. Dictators control the population by releasing self-serving tidbits of information to lionise themselves. But in the future, when AI infiltrates everything and everyone, the de facto dictator will be the AI. Humans will live in a fantasy of control.  

The AI evolution is progressing so fast and in unpredictable ways. Yuval cites the test done by scientists on ChatGPT to crack the CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Technology to tell apart Humans from AI) challenges. ChatGPT cracked it by contacting a cybersecurity firm with the pretext of someone seeking help due to visual impairment. Such is the ingenuity of the AI that really frightens the wits out of humans.   

The only way to prevent an AI takeover of the world is by instituting a universal AI safety protocol for identifying AI and humans in all mediums of information with the seriousness world leaders give to climate change, the nuclear arms race, space missions and human rights. 

Most of the tech leaders like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and Elon Musk have pledged to make AI safe and restrain themselves from competing mindlessly which may cause an existential threat to human civilisation. The irony is that Elon Musk stepped up the AI competition by launching his own AI app and integrating it into X, few months after the pledge. Did AI advise him? My opinion is that it is too dangerous to leave AI into the hands of private tech tycoons and Governments must regulate the sector, as done with pharmaceuticals, at the earliest. It’s not for nothing that Yuval relabel the AI as ‘Alien Intelligence’. Perhaps AI is a perfect vehicle for aliens to penetrate and control this planet.

In a telling reminder that AI is set to cannibalise our top men and women’s minds, this year’s Nobel Prize goes to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, for their groundbreaking work on Machine Learning. May we say, Ayes CAPTCHA!