The Fantastical Scenarios of Yuval Noah Harari: From the Roman Past to the AI Future
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, by Yuval Noah Harari, Random House, 528 pages, $35
Early in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, the book that made him a globally renowned intellectual, the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari stresses that human beings are storytellers. We use fictions—religions, nations, laws, currencies—to bind ourselves together and cooperate. The stories are largely made up, but they grip our minds. Often they help us; sometimes they lead us astray.
That’s the spirit in which to receive Harari’s latest volume, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. Harari tells an entertaining and at times illuminating story. But the story doesn’t withstand much scrutiny.
Nexus is about how information technologies shape societies. Because they communicated by speaking face-to-face, Harari tells us, hunter-gatherers had to live in small, flat bands. The advent of documents—tablets for tallying grain harvests and such—fueled the rise of centralized governments. The printing press and the radio were necessary for both large democracies and totalitarian regimes. Soon artificial intelligence could badly disrupt current political structures. Harari hangs a lot of bunting on this stuff, but you’ve basically just speed-read the book.
Harari does have a knack for viewing things from interesting angles. A modern society is held together, he proposes, by a combination of myth and bureaucracy. These forces must supply a functioning balance of truth and order. That balance is set according to how the society collects, organizes, distributes, and processes information. Democracies let information flow freely, an approach that’s good for truth but dicey for order. Dictatorships constrain information, which tends to create order but ultimately crushes truth.
This narrative has its moments. But in his pursuit of a charming tale, Harari becomes an unreliable narrator. Take his portrait of the Scientific Revolution. Science relies on open inquiry, intense debate, and an insistence on settling disputes with empirical evidence. Harari wants to downplay the value of free speech, underline the need for certain expert bodies, and borrow the prestige of science for a wider swath of authority figures. For him, therefore, science’s defining feature is the presence of “curation institutions” that “reward skepticism and innovation rather than conformity.” This is misleading. A faculty of moral philosophers fits Harari’s criteria, but, unlike a biology department, they make no objective progress, achieve nothing concrete, and often simply evolve to keep pace with elite sensibilities.
Or consider how Harari contorts the fall of the Roman Republic: He is so focused on inadequate information networks that he fails to mention more conventional f
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