Nexus, What Connects Us: Book Review

 

Book title: Nexus

Book author: Yuval Noah Harari

In Nexus, Harari explains how human information networks worked throughout history. How you and I came to cooperate or waged a war. And now, what role AI might play in this human network.

Human brain has evolved to remember stories heard years ago, compared to a few digits just memorized minutes ago. Stories can be complex for AI to parse, but not for humans. On the other hand, plain information never suited human brains compared to AI who grabs numbers and stats. Our memories are designed to perform efficient reading and writing of information in the form of stories.

So Harari tells us stories — how the nexus among humankind formed. Stories, religious texts, printing press, steam engines and now AI — are the networking tools for us. How did the previous tools perform, how AI can inherit the biases and myths of the old tools.

Harari laments how sci-fi still focuses on biological drama rather than the complex bureaucratic drama happening in this global era. And it seemed to me that Harari took it upon himself to write the probable sci-fi or science non-fiction. In this book, he delivers us a story — so that our organic brain can process it, but the story is not concentrated on the biological drama of a few players, rather it includes everyone as we all are connected by international policies, resource sharing rules, tech giants and think of it—we all live in one home, the planet earth.

While I was reading, in my head I was hearing the words falling from Harari’s mouth, the way he speaks on podcasts, his accents… I highlighted the book very much, probably similar to how I did my textbooks. And nodded along his words. It’s a big feast for a hungry soul, who can know networking histories, some of the biggest networks — totalitarianism, democracy. Without knowing how it was before, we cannot uncover the mysteries of AI.

I will be leaving the quotes from Nexus where I nodded along. These give a glimpse of what the book talks about.

Why are we so good at accumulating more information and power, but far less successful at acquiring wisdom?

When his troublesome son Vasily exploited his famous name to frighten and awe people, Stalin berated him. ‘But I’m a Stalin too,’ protested Vasily. ‘No, you’re not,’ replied Stalin. ‘You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, no — not even me!’

A brand is a specific type of story…

Coca-Cola has invested billions of dollars in advertisements, making us often think Coca-Cola is a fun drink, associated with youth and happiness, opposed to tooth decay, obesity and plastic waste.

Telling the truth about the universe is hardly the most efficient way to produce order among large number of humans. Knowing that E = mc² doesn’t resolve political disagreements or inspire people to make sacrifices for a common cause. Instead, what holds human networks together tends to be fictional stories, especially stories about intersubjective things like gods, money and nations.

There is a reason why institutions like the Catholic Church and the Soviet Communist Party eschewed strong self-correcting mechanisms. While such mechanisms are vital for the pursuit of truth, they are costly in terms of maintaining order. Strong self-correcting mechanisms tend to create doubts, disagreements, conflicts and rifts and to undermine the myths that hold the social order together.

Democracy doesn’t mean majority rule; rather, it means freedom and equality for all. Democracy is a system that guarantees everyone certain liberties, which even the majority cannot take away.

The one option that should not be on offer in elections is hiding or distorting the truth. If the majority prefers to consume whatever amount of fossil fuels it wishes with no regard to future generations or other environmental considerations, it is entitled to vote for that. But the majority should not be entitled to pass a law stating that climate change is a hoax and that all professors who believe in climate change must be fired from their academic posts. We can choose what we want, but we shouldn’t deny the true meaning of our choice.

Harari suggests we can choose to accept fiction but we should be conscious about reality.

Just as the printing press didn’t cause the witch hunts or the scientific revolution, so radio didn’t cause either Stalinist totalitarianism or American democracy. Technology only created new opportunities; it is up to us to decide which ones to pursue.

When we write computer code, we aren’t just designing a product. We are redesigning politics, society and culture, and so we had better have a good grasp of politics, society and culture. We also need to take responsibility for what we are doing.

Humans are very complex beings, and benign social orders seek ways to cultivate our virtues while curtailing our negative tendencies. But social media algorithms see us, simply, as an attention mine. The algorithms reduced the multifaceted range of human emotions — hate, love, outrage, joy, confusion — into a single catch-all category: engagement.

Facebook and other social media platforms didn’t consciously set out to flood the world with fake news and outrage. But by telling their algorithms to maximise user engagement, this is exactly what they perpetrated.

Yet even so the message to the twenty-first century is bleak. If it took humanity so many terrible lessons to learn how to manage steam power and telegraphs, what would it cost to learn to manage bioengineering and AI? Do we need to go through another cycle of global empires, totalitarian regimes and world wars in order to figure out how to use them benevolently?

It is highly unlikely that by 2050 all human jobs will disappear. Rather, the real problem is the turmoil of adapting to the new jobs and conditions.

In traditional Jewish or Christian weddings, the tasks of the rabbi or priest can be easily automated. The only thing the robot needs to do is repeat a predetermined and unchanging set of texts and gestures, print out a certificate and update some central database. Technically, it is far easier for a robot to conduct a wedding ceremony than to drive a car.

Novels, movies and TV series about twenty-first-century politics tend to focus on the feuds and love affairs of a few powerful families, as if present-day states were governed in the same way as ancient tribes and kingdoms. This artistic fixation with the biological dramas of dynasties obscures the very real changes that have taken place over the centuries in the dynamics of power.

Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine, recounted how in 2002 he attended a small party at Google and stuck up a conversation with Larry Page. ‘Larry, I still don’t get it. There are so many search companies. Web search, for free? Where does that get you?’ Page explained that Google wasn’t focused on search at all. ‘We’re really making an AI,’ he said.

All those cat images that tech giants had been harvesting across the world, without paying a penny to either users or tax collectors, turned out to be incredibly valuable. The AI race was on, and the competitors were running on cat images. The technology developed by recognizing cute kittens was later deployed for more predatory purposes. For example, Israel relied on it to create the Red Wolf, Blue Wolf and Wolf Pack apps used by Israeli soldiers for facial recognition of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. The ability to recognize cat images also led to the algorithms Iran uses to automatically recognize unveiled women and enforce its hijab laws.

In the nineteenth century, China was late to appreciate the potential of the Industrial Revolution and was slow to adopt inventions like railways and steamships. After having been the world’s greatest superpower for centuries, failing to adopt modern industrial technology brought China to its knees. It was repeatedly defeated in wars, partially conquered by foreigners and thoroughly exploited by the powers that did understand railways and steamships. The Chinese vowed never again to miss the train.

After a few pages, Harari expressed the possibility of the Chinese taking over AI. God, he predicted so well!

In 2022, the Biden administration placed strict limits on trade in high-performance computing chips necessary for the development of AI. While in the short term, this hampers China in the AI race, in the long term it will push China to develop a completely separate digital sphere…

In the nineteenth century, to control the textile industry meant to control sprawling cotton fields and huge mechanical production lines. In the twenty-first century, the most important asset of the textile industry is information rather than cotton or machinery. To beat the competitors, a garment producer needs information about the likes and dislikes of customers and the ability to predict or manufacture the next fashions.

This grim view of international relations is akin to the populist and Marxist views of human relations, in that they all see humans as interested in power. It argues that at heart humans are Stone Age hunters who cannot but see the world as a jungle where the strong prey upon the weak and where might makes right.

Real jungles — unlike our imagination — are full of cooperation, symbiosis and altruism displayed by countless animals, plants, fungi and even bacteria. If organisms in the rain forests of Amazonia, Africa and India abandones cooperation in favor of an all out competition for hegemony, the rain forests and all their inhabitants would quickly die. That’s the law of the jungle.

In the epilogue, Harari himself summarized the gist of the book, sparing me to summarize, he he.

This book has juxtaposed the discussion of AI with the discussion of sacred canons like the Bible, because we are now at the critical moment of AI canonisation. When church fathers like Bishop Athanius decided to include 1 Timothy in the biblical dataset while excluding the Acts of Paul and Thecla, they shaped the world for millennia. Billions of Christians down to the twenty-first century have formed their views of the world based on the misogynist ideas of 1 Timothy rather than on the more tolerant attitude of Thecla. Even today it is difficult to reverse course, because the church fathers chose not to include any self-correcting mechanisms in the Bible. The present day equivalents of Bishop Athanasius are the engineers who write the initial code for AI, and who choose the dataset on which the baby AI is trained. As AI grows in power and authority, and perhaps becomes a self-interpreting holy book, so the decisions made by present-day engineers could reverberate down the ages.

Information isn’t truth. Its main task is to connect rather than represent.

Due to privileging of order over truth, human information networks have often produced a lot of power but little wisdom.

To create wiser networks, we must abandon both the naive and the populist views of information, put aside our fantasies of infallibility and commit ourselves to the hard and rather mundane work of building institutions with strong self-correcting mechanisms. That is perhaps the most important takeaway this book has to offer.