Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari review – end of days?

The Sapiens author may be a superb narrative writer, but his apocalyptic pontificating about AI stretches credulity

As befits a writer whose breakout work, Sapiens, was a history ofthe entire human race, YuvalNoah Harari is a master of the sententious generalisation. Human life," he writes here, is a balancing act between endeavouring to improve ourselves and accepting who we were." Is it? Is that all it is? Elsewhere, one might be surprised to read: The ancient Romans had a clear understanding of what democracy means." No doubt the Romans would have been happy to hear that they would, 2,000 years in the future, be given a gold star for their comprehension of eternally stable political concepts by Yuval Noah Harari.

In his 2018 book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Harari wrote: Liberals don't understand how history deviated from its preordained course, and they lack an alternative prism through which to interpret reality. Disorientation causes them to think in apocalyptic terms." It seems that, in the intervening years, Harari has himself become a liberal, because this book is about the apocalyptic scenario of how the computer network" - everything from digital surveillance capitalism to social feed algorithms and AI - might destroy civilisation and usher in the end of human history". Take that, Fukuyama.

Like Malcolm Gladwell, Harari has a passionate need to be seen to overturn received wisdom. Many people think, for example, that the printing press made a crucial contribution to the emergence of modern science. Not so,insists Harari: after all, printing equally enabled the dissemination offake news, such as books about witches, and so Gutenberg is partly to blame for the gruesome torture and murder of those accused of witchcraft across Europe. Silly as that might sound, it also misses the fundamental point: because the scientific method is accretional, modern science could only come into being once the results of previous experimenters were widely available to those who followed them. Only via the ladder of print could early-modern scientists stand onthe shoulders of giants.

But perhaps I have fallen prey to what Harari dubs the naive view of information", which subtly changes throughout the book as rhetorical circumstances demand until it is something of a straw Frankenstein's monster. The naive view of information encompasses the idea that [it] is essentially a good thing, and the more we have of it, the better", which lots of people believe and is hard to argue with, but it also supposedly holds that sufficient information leads ineluctably to political wisdom and that the free flow of information inevitably leads to truth, propositions that almost no one believes. Knowing that e=mc2 usuallydoesn't resolve political disagreements," Harari says, to no one.