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A review by kathywadolowski
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
This was a kind of intense and apocalyptic read, so be prepared before you pick this one up to dive into some dark themes.
It does take a while to get to Harari's examination of how AI might change the world as we know it—and how it differs from any other communication/information dissemination tool that preceded it—but I appreciated how deeply he explores the history of information and how it's been shared over the course of human history. And I was especially interested in the more political chapters, in which he discusses how different systems of government use (and hide) information according to their goals. Ultimately, information on its own is kind of meaningless; we think "more" information is always a societal good, but in reality the way it's framed, shared, and interpreted has everything to do with what it actually means. And traditionally, those manipulations have always been done by humans, and for better or worse we could come to understand (even if we don't agree with) the thought behind them.
This is why AI—"alien" rather than "artificial" intelligence, in Harari's lexicon—is so potentially transformative; because it is the first tool that actually has the capacity to make decisions about how to share information without the impetus of a human. It might even generate information on its own! The printing press can't print newspapers by itself, and so relies on human inputs to generate any impact. But how can we really know what AI will be capable of in the next 5 years even? Social media algorithms are a great illustration of this danger: given a goal of driving more engagement, these AIs push radical and often hateful content because it captures more attention and thus spurs more hate. It's toxic for our society, and it's scary to think of even just that technology continuing to spiral beyond human control. And that's not even accounting for what's coming.
Sorry for the doom and gloominess, but this one really freaked me out. Hopefully the powers that be are asking the right questions and setting up the right guardrails, but I'm not feeling too confident in this moment...
It does take a while to get to Harari's examination of how AI might change the world as we know it—and how it differs from any other communication/information dissemination tool that preceded it—but I appreciated how deeply he explores the history of information and how it's been shared over the course of human history. And I was especially interested in the more political chapters, in which he discusses how different systems of government use (and hide) information according to their goals. Ultimately, information on its own is kind of meaningless; we think "more" information is always a societal good, but in reality the way it's framed, shared, and interpreted has everything to do with what it actually means. And traditionally, those manipulations have always been done by humans, and for better or worse we could come to understand (even if we don't agree with) the thought behind them.
This is why AI—"alien" rather than "artificial" intelligence, in Harari's lexicon—is so potentially transformative; because it is the first tool that actually has the capacity to make decisions about how to share information without the impetus of a human. It might even generate information on its own! The printing press can't print newspapers by itself, and so relies on human inputs to generate any impact. But how can we really know what AI will be capable of in the next 5 years even? Social media algorithms are a great illustration of this danger: given a goal of driving more engagement, these AIs push radical and often hateful content because it captures more attention and thus spurs more hate. It's toxic for our society, and it's scary to think of even just that technology continuing to spiral beyond human control. And that's not even accounting for what's coming.
Sorry for the doom and gloominess, but this one really freaked me out. Hopefully the powers that be are asking the right questions and setting up the right guardrails, but I'm not feeling too confident in this moment...