Where is AI Taking Us?

Mr Horvat reviews a surprising book. The author, Yuval Harari, is a well known futurist, endorsed by the Left, yet he opposes the idea of AI.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By John Horvat

Yuval Harari, in latest book, “Nexus,” believes that AI endangers the utopian dream of unbridled license that has long been the goal of countless revolutionaries on the left and libertarian anarchists on the right.

Modernity is replete with philosophers who interpret reality through prisms. By simplifying their perceptions, such figures seek to change history. Thus, Karl Marx saw everything through the prism of power and money. His class struggle is the battle between the haves and the have-nots. Freud saw things through the prism of sexuality. Everything can be explained as a struggle between those with complexes and those seeking the free exercise of passions. In both cases, history shifts leftward.

The Prism is Data Flow

In his latest book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, New York Times bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari finds his prism. He believes everything can be explained by who controls the flow of data. It is an extension of the Marxist dialectic since he merely makes data the source of all power.

Harari certainly has no problem with data flow. His heavy tomes enjoy the patronage of the liberal establishment. Celebrities like Bill Gates, Barack Obama were quick to endorse his previous books. Major publishers like Random House make sure his data (and royalties) flow abundantly.

Promoting his latest book makes good business sense since the author is known for always being on the cutting edge of all things liberal and futuristic. His new book about AI could not have come at a better time.

What makes Nexus so strange is that the author opposes AI. Indeed, he sees AI as a danger. It is as if some algorithm is scrambled here; he should be on the AI side.

Homo Deus Position

A pro-AI position for Harari would make sense in light of an earlier book, Homo Deus. His vision of man in it was so dark and fatalistic that AI would represent an improvement of the future. In Homo Deus, Harari claimed that man has no soul, free will, unity, real exercise of freedom, or eternal destiny.

For him, all life can be reduced to mere chemical reactions and algorithms. “Organisms are algorithms,” he writes in Homo Deus. “Every animal—including Homo sapiens—is an assemblage of organic algorithms shaped by natural selection over millions of years of evolution.”

Thus, if each person is only a collection of organic algorithms, it is hard to understand why the author is so concerned with AI algorithms. What difference can it make to him if some algorithms act upon others? It would all seem to be part of the same evolutionary game that he believes has been going on for millions of years.

All Data and Narratives Are Equal

However, the author opposes AI.

His opposition is based on the idea that all data flows are equal. He attaches no value to data. A mathematical equation or a sublime poem are all the same thing in his world. His problem is that AI upsets the data flow by operating outside the human loop and taking on frightening autonomous dimensions. An AI world would manipulate everything.

Harari also believes that narratives, myths, and stories hold data flows together so that people can explain reality. He says that humans maintain networks “by inventing fictions, fantasies and mass delusions—about gods, about enchanted broomsticks, about AI and a great many other things.”

These narratives and stories also have no value, no morality and no one True God. Harari traces these narratives (and gods) through history, showing how they first facilitate data flow and then eventually become barriers as they develop rules and restrictions for data’s further evolution. History is the evolving story of data flow and the efforts to stop it. AI could easily go rogue and impede true progress.

Will AI Deliver Tyranny?

By their overpowering capacity to process data, AI machines could become ever more controlling. The author believes that AI does not have the self-correcting mechanism found in simpler narratives. Thus, AI opens possibilities for tyranny on a much grander scale than anything in the past.

AI might well imprison data that yearns to be free. Thus, Harari sees any attempt to restrict data flow—by things like morality, religion, or rogue algorithms—as tyrannical. This opposition is likewise equal. He treats the Bolshevik Party, the Roman Empire, and the Catholic Church as equally guilty of this crime. His special loathing for the Catholic Church is especially obvious and offensive.

Indeed, without proper oversight (which he does not define), Harari believes AI could be an unprecedented manipulator of data flow, independent of any human control. In the hands of conservatives, he believes this could prove disastrous.

Data-Flow Class Struggle

Thus, the book is a tale of a data-flow class struggle with all the originality of a Chatbot AI. It has no special insights beyond this worn revolutionary liberal narrative adapted to today. Like his conception of humanity, it has no soul or aspirations to higher realities. Life is limited to the pleasures of the moment, which must be prolonged.

Such is the moral of Harari’s long story. AI endangers the utopian dream of unbridled license that has long been the goal of countless revolutionaries on the left and libertarian anarchists on the right. AI must be kept under liberal control, lest it take on the role of the oppressor (or help populist oppressors) that might suppress those who strive for this utopia.

Thus, the book disappoints since it presupposes a soulless humanity without meaning, purpose, and direction beyond self. For those with souls and free will, it leaves legitimate moral concerns about AI unanswered.

Alas, if only the book flowed as data is supposed to flow: unimpeded! The 492-page “brief history” drags the reader along, forcing the past through his distorted prism. It also forces the future into a dreary tomorrow without God, meaning, or purpose.

The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay.