In his newest book, author Yuval Noah Harari, pictured here in Tel Aviv in 2023, tackles how information shapes our reality.Oded Balilty/The Associated Press
Yuval Noah Harari’s books have sold 45 million copies worldwide in more than 40 languages. In his new book, Nexus, A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, Harari focuses on one of the most critical conversations of our time: artificial intelligence and how we humans will deal with it.
I met him at his hotel the morning after his onstage interview at the Toronto International Festival of Authors.
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He is a slim, small, balding man with a narrow face, soft voice, and an easy smile, polite, welcoming, formal. I am thinking about how often he will have to do this as he travels around the world, talking about this extraordinary 500-page book that he believes is, or should be, urgent, essential reading for everyone concerned about the future of Humankind.
Nexus, A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AISupplied
One of the unusual aspects of Harari’s books is his ability to relate the grand sweep of history, yet take deep dives into individual stories, each of which is memorable in its own right.
“On the one hand, I have a very broad perspective; I try to understand the evolution by looking at thousands of years of information networks, not just the last few years. But when you want to communicate with the public, it is important to go deep. I chose a few examples, such as the canonization of the Bible, the witch hunts, the story in Myanmar with the Facebook algorithm. Humans think in stories, not in statistics or equations or graphs. It is the stories that stick in the mind.”
Although the book explores the very current issue of artificial intelligence, its topic is information networks more broadly. He illuminates the means, throughout history, that humankind has used to transfer ideas. One of the most easily relatable examples is the Bible. Rather than arriving wholesale as a definitive text, the Bible was pieced together over a long period of time that ended with the emergence of a canonical work.
“There is a chapter in the book about the process of the canonization of the Bible … We have texts from the second and third and fourth centuries C.E.”
There is evidence that the Councils of Hippo and Carthage (393 and 397) determined which stories to include in the official Bible. For example, the Acts of Paul and Thecla were rejected, while 1 Timothy was included, despite Thecla’s popularity with early Christians. That, as Harari wrote in Nexus, “shaped Christian attitudes to women down to the present day.” This particular 2,000-year-old information network is still influential now.
Humans, his point is, communicate by story.
The story that caused the extreme violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar was invented by Buddhist extremists, but it was fomented by Facebook’s news platform. Facebook had not created the story. Its algorithm spread it to gain more viewers, a business decision with devastating consequences.
Both nationalism and religion evoke great passions in humans. They are also great network creators. In his books, he has written about both.
“We are a social species,” Harari says. “Our success comes from our ability to connect thousands, millions of people into social networks.” Take the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “Russian propaganda which, unfortunately, has traction in the West, tells you that [the invasion] is about Russia being threatened by NATO. Yet there was no evidence of a threat. No massing military troops threatening Russia. It’s a fictional threat. To see its source, you need to read Putin’s own essays. He has a fantasy that Ukraine doesn’t exist as a nation, that Ukrainians are actually Russians, that their territory actually belongs to Russia. As do the Baltic nations. And any territory conquered by the Russian army is annexed by the Russian state. It is old style imperialism driven by a fantasy in Putin’s mind.”
Does he view himself essentially as a scientist or as a historian?
“I think history is a science. It’s a soft science, but it is science. There are two things that mark something as science. First, the reliance on evidence. If you write the history of the world from your own imagination, it is not history. It is literature. When I write about Neanderthals or about the Bible, I have evidence. A 40,000 year-old bone in Spain. A record of the synod meetings. The other mark of science is the willingness to admit mistakes. Religions don’t do that. Once the Bible is canonized, it is deemed to be perfect. And I am not only talking about factual mistakes, but also about moral mistakes. For example, the tenth Commandment says that you should not covet someone else’s slaves, which implies that God had no problem with slavery, only with coveting someone else’s slaves. The Bible needs a rewrite.”
Humans are still struggling with the old ideas of religion and nationalism, of democracy and free will even as we are encountering Artificial Intelligence.
Sapiens, his monumental first bestseller, was endorsed by Jeff Bezos. Mark Zuckerberg promoted it. In fact, when interviewed, the only books on his shelf were Harari’s. What would Harari say to them and to Elon Musk, or to anyone else involved in the development of AI, now, were they to ask his opinion on the way forward?
“I would start with a question: How is it that we have the most sophisticated information technology in history and we are losing the ability to talk with one another? You are heading the most powerful media companies in the world, Facebook, X, Google. You are experts on information technology. Explain to me why conversation all over the world is breaking down. People can’t agree on the most basic facts. People can’t listen to each other. We are overrun by hatred and anger.”
“Even in a place like Canada: if you think about the whole of human history, you can’t find a place where people have better lives than here in the 21st century. Of course, there are problems, but what other time or place in history was better? Yet here, too, people are so angry. Why? That’s the first question I would ask them. Because my suspicion is that to a large extent [social media companies] are responsible for the breakdown of conversation.”
Are they pushing the wrong buttons, inadvertently? Is the algorithm doing that, as it did in Myanmar?
“I don’t think that, as individuals, they have bad intentions. But they have a different goal: more user engagement. They want more people to spend more time on their platforms and unfortunately, the algorithms of these platforms discover by experimenting on millions of human guinea pigs that the easiest way to increase user engagement is by spreading hate and anger and greed.”
What advice would you give people who are developing AI, I asked.
“I would want them to invest more in safety, to slow down the development of AI. Humans are extremely adaptable, creative beings. But we are organic beings, we need time to rest. Inorganic beings like computers and algorithms don’t need time to rest. The pace of life keeps accelerating because there are non-organic algorithms in control. We need to push back, take time to adapt. Artificial intelligence is potentially far more powerful than any atom bomb in the sense that it’s the first technology in history that can make decisions by itself and create new ideas by itself. A.I. is a kind of alien immigrant that will take control of your life. In five years you have these millions and millions of A.I. bureaucrats and A.I. soldiers. They will decide whether you get a loan in the bank. They will make crucial economic and political decisions. That’s what we should be worried about.”
Yes, he would tell AI developers to slow down and let humans catch up.
“But I’m not sure they would listen to me,” he says with a smile, “especially after this book.”