Nexus

April 1, 2024

Best-selling historian Harari (Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem; Sapiens) considers how information has shaped the world. He considers witch hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and populism as he looks at how the powerful have wielded information to get what they want. But he also offers hope for better uses of data. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from August 15, 2024
The author ofHomo Deus considers the future of information networks. His international bestseller laying out ideas on human destiny is a hard act to follow, but Harari manages. The first part examines past information networks, leading with the intriguing declaration that "most information isnot an attempt to represent reality....What information does is to create new realities by tying together disparate things." What that means is that "errors, lies, fantasies, and fictions are information, too." Information is often wrong, and more information does not necessarily improve matters, so it's essential that institutions contain self-correcting mechanisms. Our Constitution receives high marks for allowing amendments; holy books considered infallible, like the Bible and Quran, create problems and "hold important lessons for the attempt to create infallible AIs." The second part deals with governments whose information networks maintain a balance between truth and order, arguing that just as sacrificing truth for the sake of order comes with a cost, so does sacrificing order for truth. Modern technology enabled large-scale democracy as well as large-scale authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Harari deplores the conception that democracies operate through majority rule. In fact, he argues, democracies guarantee everyone liberties that even the majority cannot take away. This is a sophisticated concept that current events suggest is not universally accepted, and recent advances in artificial intelligence may be an additional destabilizing force. Harari warns that modern societies controlled by carbon-based life forms (us) must deal with inorganic, silicon-based networks (AI) that, unlike the printing press, the radio, and other inventions, can make decisions and create ideas by themselves. AI's ability to gather massive amounts of information and engage in total surveillance "will not necessarily be either bad or good. All we know for sure is that it will be alien and it will be fallible." Confronting the avalanche of books on the prospects of AI, readers would do well to begin with this one.

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Starred review from August 1, 2024
Harari's monumental blockbuster, Sapiens (2015), demonstrated his considerable talent for working on a grand scale, presenting copious information and distilling it down to its essential concepts. That ability to discern relevant details, identify connections, and present arguments in a lively, often personal manner makes Harari the ideal candidate to tackle the history of information itself. He elegantly guides readers through the earliest examples of written records on stone tablets all the way through the advent of social media and the increasing concerns over AI. In between, we learn a wealth of fascinating facts about the role information played in early city states, the origin of bureaucracy, the printing press, witch hunts, ethnic cleansing, algorithms, and artificial intelligence. Harari details the origins of various religious texts as examples of how information is malleable, open to interpretation, vulnerable to bias, fallible, and, ultimately, susceptible to the machinations of human agents. Harari draws on history, philosophy, science, psychology, and political theory to present a plethora of examples of information as the current running beneath all human endeavor. Indeed, it is Harari's genius to untangle complex patterns to reveal complicated structures while illuminating the connections to our everyday lives. An important and timely must-read as our survival is at the mercy of information.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Burgeoning concerns over AI and Harari's stellar reputation will have readers reaching for this promising title.

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August 12, 2024
Bestseller Harari (Homo Deus) offers an ambitious but muddled meditation on the past and future of information technology. Positing all human history as a history of information—and defining information as “something that creates new realities”—Harari ends up telling a cautionary tale about the power of stories. He argues that prehistoric humans’ harnessing of information technologies led to the emergence of a new “ of reality”—the realm of shared belief—and that manipulations of this realm via new information technologies account for both advancements in human civilization and sweeping social ills (for example, the ancient invention of the written document led to bureaucracy, while the 20th century’s overabundance of the written document enabled totalitarianism). Harari sees the rise of artificial intelligence as an inflection point, one that leads either to unprecedented opportunity or to humanity’s obsolescence. Harari’s historical arguments are vague and prone to circular logic, and though his discussion of AI is more focused, he confusingly levels sharp critiques of tech gurus’ utopian claims (raising salient points about the dangerous role algorithms have already begun playing in policing, for example) while still taking their dystopian ones at face value (prognosticating on a rise-of-the-machines scenario in which “AI will just grab power to itself”). Readers who enjoy Harari as a kind of freewheeling conversation partner will find food for thought here. But take this with a heaping dose of salt.