Yuval Noah Harari’s latest book constructs entire dystopian futures

Yuval Noah Harari has sold more than forty-five million books in sixty-five languages. He is a professor with a PhD from the University of Oxford, has spoken at TED and the World Economic Forum in Davos, and his latest book, Nexus, is considered “erudite, provocative and entertaining” by Rory Stewart and “thought-provoking and so very well reasoned” by Stephen Fry.

This is the story the book’s cover tells us about its contents, and Nexus itself argues that it is stories which are fundamental to shaping the world. It posits that the strength of humanity comes from building large networks in which we work together co-operatively, but that our weakness is that once we have amassed power this way, we use it unwisely. Information lets us pull together these powerful networks; but information is not based on sharing facts or things that are true so much as on building a shared story.

Now is, conveniently, the most exciting point in 70,000 years of human history

Gradually new communications technologies increased the group that could share the narrative: print allowed a story to spread, largely unchanged, through books. Radio and TV accelerated the process; but computers, says Harari, have changed its character, since humans are no longer essential at every step in the story chain. Computers can tell their own stories; and so AI might come to dominate humanity either by accident or design, simply by telling its own story better than we tell ours.

This is a sweeping narrative, taking in philosophy, history, economics, computer science and physics to place information and narrative in its “proper” place in history. Such a feat is now par for the course for an author whose first popular book, Sapiens, encompassed all human history, and whose second, Homo Deus, its future. After two such volumes there can be no room for small ideas in this one — and indeed we learn that it is our “intersubjective realities” that shape the world.

Harari argues that information technologies made both democracy and totalitarianism feasible, and they are characterized by the different ways information flows in each. Since today’s computers can process information beyond human capabilities, we are on a precipice never faced before. Now is, conveniently, the most exciting point in 70,000 years of human history. These are big ideas, backed by hundreds of references, that can sweep you along. Except the problem with stories is that you can always tell them in more ways than one. One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist. Whether a battle was a disaster or a triumph depends on what you highlight.

The alternative stories about Nexus start to form when you resist the sweep of the narrative current. That could be early on, when a chapter that actually asks “What is information?” first posits that “biologists” and “some physicists” think information might be a more fundamental building block of the universe than energy, before rejecting any existing definitions of the term. Information is not necessarily connected to truth, or even to an attempt to represent reality. “Any object can be information,” Harari argues, before saying that most information “does not attempt to represent anything.” Instead, it “always connects.”

This is the kind of profundity typically experienced by teenage weed-smokers the first time they wonder aloud whether the “red” they see is the same as the “red” you do. If I tie two pieces of glassware together, that string is apparently now “information,” according to Harari — though who knows what that means beyond a bigger mess if I throw one on the floor.

Once you snag on the narrative, it is hard to be captivated any more. Information defined the Cold War, we are told, before being given a very conventional account of the era that suggests many more factors were actually at play. The massacres of Rohingya Muslim minority communities in Myanmar, because they involved misinformation spread on Facebook (though experts generally think to a lesser extent than Harari suggests), are a sign of the involvement of non-human intelligence in mass slaughter, and so a pivotal moment in history. But Facebook’s unwillingness to change its recommendation engine or to hire enough moderators in regions such as Mynamar are human decisions.

From AI’s apparent role in the Myanmar massacres, ever more is built: computers might be able to amass all the information in society, giving them power beyond anything we imagined in the previous century, an era in which the world came within minutes of nuclear annihilation on more than one occasion. From the flimsiest of foundations, Harari constructs entire dystopian futures.

Publishing history suggests which narrative will win: readers who have previously enjoyed Harari’s storytelling are likely to do so again. But the expected success of this book perhaps itself serves to reassure against the dangers of AI. One major fear experts share for the future of information is the rise of “slop” — automatically produced online content that engrosses us and occupies our attention, satisfying our desire for culture or for information while having no deeper meaning or sustaining value. If nothing else, Nexus shows us that AI has some way to go before it can match human ingenuity on that particular front.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.