Is now the most exciting point in human history?

Yuval Noah Harari has sold more than 45 million books in 65 languages. He is a professor with a PhD at the University of Oxford, has spoken at TED and the World Economic Forum in Davos and his latest book, Nexusdescribed as “erudite, provocative and entertaining” by Rory Stewart and “thought-provoking and very well-reasoned” by Stephen Fry.

This is the story that the book's cover tells us about its contents Nexus itself argues that it is stories that are fundamental to shaping the world. Humanity's strength is believed to come from building large networks in which we work cooperatively. Our weakness, however, is that once we have accumulated power in this way, we use it unwisely. Using information, we can bring these powerful networks together. But information is based not so much on sharing facts or true things, but rather on building a shared story.

Gradually, new communication technologies expanded the group who could share the narrative: printing allowed a story to spread largely unchanged through books. Radio and television accelerated the process; But computers, says Harari, have changed their character as humans no longer play an essential role in every step of the chain of action. Computers can tell their own stories; and so AI could dominate humanity either by accident or by design, simply by telling its own story better than we tell ours.

This is a comprehensive narrative that incorporates philosophy, history, economics, computer science, and physics to place information and narratives in their “proper” place in history. Such an achievement is for an author whose first popular book Sapiensencompassed the entire history of humanity, and its second, Homo Deushis future. After two such volumes, there can be no room for small ideas in this one – and in fact we learn that it is our “intersubjective realities” that shape the world.

Harari argues that information technologies have enabled both democracy and totalitarianism and that each is characterized by different types of information flow. Because today's computers can process information beyond human capabilities, we are facing an unprecedented abyss. Now is conveniently the most exciting point in 70,000 years of human history. These are great ideas, backed by hundreds of references, ready to get you going. The problem with stories, however, is that they can always be told in more than one way. One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist. Whether a battle was a disaster or a triumph depends on what you highlight.

The alternative stories about Nexus begin to form when you buck the flow of the narrative current. That might be early on, when a chapter actually asks, “What is information?” first assumes that “biologists” and “some physicists” believe that information may be a more fundamental building block of the universe than energy, before going on to discuss all existing definitions rejects the term. Information is not necessarily connected to the truth or even an attempt to represent reality. “Any object can be information,” argues Harari, before saying that most information “does not try to represent anything.” Instead, it “always connects.”

This is the kind of profundity that teenage pot smokers typically feel when they wonder out loud for the first time whether the “red” they see is the same as the “red” you see. Apparently, according to Harari, if I tie two pieces of glass together, that string is now “information” – but who knows what that means, other than a bigger mess if I throw one on the floor.

Once you get caught up in the story, you can hardly be captivated anymore. We are told that information defined the Cold War, before being given a very conventional portrayal of the era, suggesting that many more factors were actually at play. The massacres of Rohingya Muslim minority communities in Myanmar are a sign of the involvement of non-human intelligence agencies in mass killings and are therefore crucial because they coincided with the spread of misinformation on Facebook (although experts generally think to a lesser extent than Harari suspects) . moment in history. But Facebook's unwillingness to change its recommendation engine or hire enough moderators in regions like Myanmar is a human decision.

What is becoming increasingly clear from AI's apparent role in the massacres in Myanmar is that computers could be able to collect all the information in society and give them power beyond anything we imagined in the last century. an era in which the world was minutes away from nuclear annihilation on more than one occasion. Harari constructs entire dystopian futures on the weakest foundations.

The publishing history suggests which narrative will win: readers who have enjoyed Harari's storytelling before are likely to do so again. But the expected success of this book may itself serve to provide reassurance about the dangers of AI. A major fear that experts share about the future of information is the rise of “slop” – automatically produced online content that captivates us and holds our attention, satisfying our desire for culture or information, without deeper meaning or lasting value to have. If nothing else, Nexus shows us that AI still has a long way to go before it can match human ingenuity in this particular area.