Thoughts On Yuval Harari's Nexus

posted 2024-12-01

Sapiens by Yuval Harari is probably the last non-fiction book I read that had a big effect on how I view the world. After years of buying into the new atheism and the skeptics movement, the book really helped me soften to religious and spiritual people again and that there is value in believing things that aren't true actually can have value. So when I saw Nexus had been written and focused on Information Networks and how AI might effect society moving forward I was pretty excited as AI has always been a big interest of mine and has already been making big changes in my corner of the world. Although it wasn't as earth shattering to my worldview, it did change my perspective on some things.

One, was explaining the difference between autocracy and totalitarianism. Autocracy refers to societies with a single powerful leader with no checks on their power. However, an autocratic leader, historically would be limited by the scope of their view. Sure, a Roman Emperor could monitor and exact revenge on those he didn't like close to home, but managing every aspect of people's lives in a city thousands of miles away was impossible. In the 20th century, with technology like the telegraph, totalitarianism came about. Stalin, for instance, could plant spies and get reports from across the entirety of the U.S.S.R and control things at a greater distance with greater ease. In fact, getting too much information was often a more difficult problem than not having enough. One of the things Harari argues is that AI technology will make it easy for totalitarians to micromanage across vast areas even more effectively because it can collect and filter through large sets of data about people to identify potential bad actors. China's social reputation scoring system might be an example of this that already exists.

But, he brings up the point that AI, on the other hand, could be used to fight against such total control. If dissidents against a totalitarian power can make bots that share anti government ideas online without being traceable back to the original author, perhaps AI can help those fighting gain their own reach.

Beyond giving me some ideas on how to think about how AI might affect the world, the book really drove home for me that History can be an interesting lens to look at current and future events through. I haven't generally read a lot of history, but maybe that should change.