'Nexus' Review: Prognosis Apocalyptic - WSJ - 0 views
www.wsj.com/...prognosis-apocalyptic-b888e741
AI book review democracy networks free speech apocalypse WSJ history culture crisis
shared by Javier E on 15 Sep 24
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the Israeli historian-philosopher Yuval Noah Harari divides us into a naive and populist type and another type that he prefers but does not name. This omission is not surprising. The opposite of naive and populist might be wise and pluralist, but it might also be cynical and elitist
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A dollop of historical anecdote is seasoned with a pinch of social science and a spoonful of speculation, topped with a soggy crust of prescription, and lightly dusted with premonitions of the apocalypse that will overcome us if we refuse a second serving
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“Nexus” divides into three parts. The first part describes the development of complex societies through the creation and control of information networks.
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The second argues that the digital network is both quantitatively and qualitatively different from the print network that created modern democratic societies
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All “true believers” are delusional. Anyone who calls a religion “a true representation of reality” is “lying.”
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Information, Mr. Harari writes, creates a “social nexus” among its users. The “twin pillars” of society are bureaucracy, which creates power by centralizing information, and mythology, which creates power by controlling the dispersal of “stories” and “brands.”
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Societies cohere around stories such as the Bible and communism and “personality cults” and brands such as Jesus and Stalin.
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The third presents the AI apocalypse. An “alien” information network gone rogue, Mr. Harari warns, could “supercharge existing human conflicts,” leading to an “AI arms race” and a digital Cold War, with rival powers divided by a Silicon Curtain of chips and code.
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“Subjective facts” based on “beliefs and feelings” cannot be true. The collaborative cacophony of “intersubjective reality,” the darkling plain of social and political contention where all our minds meet, also cannot be fully true.
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Mr. Harari agrees that “truth is an accurate representation of reality” but argues that only “objective facts” such as scientific data are true
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He consistently confuses democracy (a method of gauging opinion with a long history) with liberalism (a mostly Anglo-American legal philosophy with a short history).
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Digital networks overwhelm us with information, but computers can only create “order,” not “truth” or “wisdom.”
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The nexus of machine-learning, algorithmic “user engagement” and human nature could mean that “large-scale democracies may not survive the rise of computer technology.”
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The “main split” in 20th-century information was between closed, pseudo-infallible “totalitarian” systems and open, self-correcting “democratic” systems.
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Mr. Harari nevertheless argues that “social media algorithms” play such a “divisive” role that free speech has become a naive luxury, unaffordable in the age of AI. He “strongly disagrees” with Louis Brandeis’s opinion in Whitney v. California (1927) that the best way to combat false speech is with more speech.
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The survival of democracy requires “regulatory institutions” that will “vet algorithms,” counter “conspiracy theories” and prevent the rise of “charismatic leaders.”
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Unfortunately, his grasp of politics is tenuous and hyperbolic. He seems to believe that populism was invented with the iPhone rather than being a recurring bug that appears when democratic operating systems become corrupted or fail to update their software
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Mythologies of religion, history and ideology, Mr. Harari believes, exploit our naive tendency to mistake all information as “an attempt to represent reality.
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but the openness of the conversation and the independence of its nodes derive from liberalism’s rights of individual privacy and speech. Yet “liberalism” appears nowhere in “Nexus.
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Nexus” is a mirror to the unease of our experts and elites. It divides people into the cognitively unfit and the informationally pure and proposes we divide power over speech accordingly
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Call me naive, but Mr. Harari’s technocratic TED-talking is not the way to save democracy. It is the royal road to tyranny.