Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

As with every Harari book I've read, this is excellent. He is easy to read and lays his arguments out in a way that one doesn't have to do mental gymnastics to get it. We live in an age of massive amounts of information: good, bad, true, partly true, or patently false. How many of us vet their sources and check the truth of info? Sadly not enough. Democracies depend on the choices "the people" make. When enough of those choices are based on false or incomplete information democracy is in trouble.

Harari is an extremely lucid author who excels at distilling the complex into the simple. As in all his books, he seamlessly takes the reader from the distant past to the present to the future. In this case his subject is information and the networks we use to manage and disseminate it. As such it is, but isn’t, a book about AI. “My goal with this book is to provide a more accurate historical perspective on the AI revolution.”In many ways, it is a book about politics, although the author never names names or talks in terms of blue and red. And his canvas is global and spans history. He does, however, talk about democracy, populism, totalitarianism, and such, terms that are being bandied about a lot in the US this election year. And that, I suspect, is why the reviews of the book vary so widely. We are a polarized nation and want to inject politics into just about everything.Harari, however, is not a politician or political commentator. He is an historian who, of course, has not defined that history. His job is to spot the patterns. And in this case the pattern has a political implication. “Democracy and dictatorship are typically discussed as contrasting political and ethical systems. This chapter seeks to shift the terms of the discussion, by surveying the history of democracy and dictatorship as contrasting types of information networks.”Which ultimately, of course, brings us to AI. The author correctly notes that AI is different from all prior information networks (e.g., printing, the telegraph, the Internet, the pre-modern church, etc.) in that it is the first network capable of acting independently of humans. And, as a result, it deserves special consideration, both for its opportunity and its menace.Adding a bit of gravity and urgency to the matter, Harari notes: “The main argument of this book is that humankind 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, therefore, is a network problem.”Harari, among many other prominent voices, as a result, argues that we must manage the future application of AI. I agree. Our tech leaders, unfortunately, have shown themselves to be as independent of oversight as AI itself. And given the enormous amounts of capital that AI will undoubtedly unleash, my personal fear is that Silicon Valley, at Wall Street’s urging, will unleash AI before there is any public consensus on its application. After all, that is what they have done at every step of the digital revolution. They routinely release powerful new products that must almost immediately be updated to fix flaws and security oversights in their design. The earliest pioneers of the internet, as but one example, now readily admit that they did not foresee the degree to which it could be abused by malevolent actors. With AI, however, we may not get the chance to address the problems in retrospect.As part of its mission, the book also offers a plethora of insights into several important underlying currents of thought and conviction important to current culture. Some of my favorite quotes:“But power isn’t wisdom…”“The naïve view [of information] thinks that disagreements about values turn out on closer inspection to be the fault of either the lack of information or deliberate disinformation.”“History isn’t the study of the past; it is the study of change.”“However, democracy doesn’t mean majority rule; rather, it means freedom and equality for all.”“It is particularly crucial to remember that elections are not a method for discovering truth. Rather, they are a method for maintaining order by adjudicating between people’s conflicting desires.”“…information isn’t truth.”In the end, I believe it is an author’s job, with few exceptions, not to tell us what to believe, but to make us think. And with this book, in addition to his many others, this author has done just that. I do believe, therefore, that this book is worth every reader’s time. You won’t agree with everything he says. I didn’t, either. And it is true that the higher you take the camera the simpler the landscape looks, to the point of causing you to make erroneous conclusions about what you see. Not all patterns have meaning. Sometimes they are just patterns.

Nexus is the latest book by Yuval Noah Harari in which he explores some of the existential questions that concern technology and humanity and their interaction. Starting from a perspective of information and its role in increasing participation or strengthening control the work weaves together a lot of topics to try to give a perspective on how technology is impacting society in some positive but many detrimental ways. He then pursues the topic of AI which he alters the acronym to Alien intelligence to highlight the intrinsic difference in computational schemes that goes into machine technologies and highlights a multitude of scenarios that seem plausible but highly concerning about the embedding of more technology into our social structure. It is a thought provoking book that highlights rational concerns on our future in a technology fueled world but it offers no real policy vision on what to do about it. It does serve as a strong reminder that there are severe consequences to some of our technology roadmaps and they are already impacting us but again what to do about it is the real question not what are imaginable scenarios.The book is split into three parts starting with human networks. The author in his usual style implicitly pokes fun at humanity's social structure and history of gravitating to mythology and shows how much of history has been about using information and story to create order. Human stories create networks of common purpose far beyond the family unit and thus has been the basis of creating networks that allow for coordination on a scale that no other species can replicate. This is a powerful concept introduced and is also then discussed in the context of democracy and autocracy. The author highlights that the information structure of a democracy is that of greater participation in the information network and in autocracy it is a centralized one. These different style focus on truth and order with different priorities. The author brings up how in autocratic, mimicking religious frameworks the systems are built on the timelessness of the regime for providing solutions and thus infallibility is a pillar of the governance structures. Democracy being an evolving system by construction is more fluid with the potential to get carried in different directions at different times. The author makes it a strong point to highlight that democracy is not majoritarianism but is about the rights of citizens for themselves not the rights of citizens over others.The author moves onto computers and their influence. He highlights the distributed nature of them as well as their permanence in the infrastructure we depend on. The author starts to highlight how the control of this network has changed interaction structures as well as changed the likelihood of survival of autocratic regimes relative to the past. In particular the information gathering networks of today can be processed in real time unlike in the past when piles of papers would be the product of surveillance that the state didn't have the capacity to process. The author also highlights that networks can perpetuate bias and be error prone.From here the author moves on to the influence of technology on politics and its clear deterioration in recent times. He gives a multitude of scenarios in which platforms with no editorial review that promote user engagement are mere platforms to perpetuate hate and sensationalism. These examples all highlight how the "objective function" that many algorithms are trained to maximize have a negative relationship with human welfare. There is also little consequence of this given the weak regulatory oversight. Despite this problem the author is able to highlight that oversight itself solves little because we don't know the consequences of changing goals given the complexity of mapping the dynamics of the underlying ecosystem to their conclusions. The author uses some examples where AI evades boundaries to achieve goals highlighting the increasing difficulty in constraining AI in practice. Overall the book highlights the concerns many people have about the direction of technology and the speed at which technology has been disruptive. Unfortunately despite such concerns resonating they do not offer sufficient concern to stop progress nor a blueprint for a dependable oversight structure, which is probably impossible to achieve anyway. This leaves us unfortunately unsettled and without clear solutions.Nexus was a stronger work than Homo Deus and up there with Sapiens. As usual he will likely have an audience which dislikes his style and willingness to poke fun at some of humanities mythologies but the content is deep and the argument construction is well thought out. I definitely think this is a worthwhile read but be prepared to come out of it with no further wisdom on what to do about it.