{"id":15851,"date":"2024-09-11T08:37:58","date_gmt":"2024-09-11T06:37:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/2024\/09\/11\/nexus-by-yuval-noah-harari-review-the-ai-apocalypse\/"},"modified":"2024-09-11T08:37:58","modified_gmt":"2024-09-11T06:37:58","slug":"nexus-by-yuval-noah-harari-review-the-ai-apocalypse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/2024\/09\/11\/nexus-by-yuval-noah-harari-review-the-ai-apocalypse\/","title":{"rendered":"Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari review \u2013 the AI apocalypse"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Sapiens author offers an oracular vision of the end of humanity <\/p>\n

As befits a writer whose breakout work, Sapiens<\/a>, was a history of\u00a0the entire human race, Yuval\u00a0Noah Harari is a master of the sententious generalisation. \u201cHuman life,\u201d he writes here, \u201cis a balancing act between endeavouring to improve ourselves and accepting who we were.\u201d Is it? Is that all it is? Elsewhere, one might be surprised to read: \u201cThe ancient Romans had a clear understanding of what democracy means.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

In his 2018 book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century<\/a>, Harari wrote: \u201cLiberals don\u2019t 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.\u201d It seems that, in the intervening years, Harari has himself become a liberal, because this book is about the apocalyptic scenario of how the \u201ccomputer network\u201d \u2013 everything from digital surveillance capitalism to social feed algorithms and AI \u2013 might destroy civilisation and usher in \u201cthe end of human history\u201d. Take that, Fukuyama.<\/p>\n

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,\u00a0insists Harari: after all, printing equally enabled the dissemination of\u00a0fake 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 on\u00a0the shoulders of giants.<\/p>\n

But perhaps I have fallen prey to what Harari dubs \u201cthe naive view of information\u201d, which subtly changes throughout the book as rhetorical circumstances demand until it is something of a straw Frankenstein\u2019s monster. The naive view of information encompasses the idea that \u201c[it] is essentially a good thing, and the more we have of it, the better\u201d, 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. \u201cKnowing that e=mc2 usually\u00a0doesn\u2019t resolve political disagreements,\u201d Harari says, to no one.<\/p>\n

Continue reading…<\/a>
\nThe Sapiens author offers an oracular vision of the end of humanity
\nAs befits a writer whose breakout work, Sapiens, was a history of\u00a0the entire human race, Yuval\u00a0Noah Harari is a master of the sententious generalisation. \u201cHuman life,\u201d he writes here, \u201cis a balancing act between endeavouring to improve ourselves and accepting who we were.\u201d Is it? Is that all it is? Elsewhere, one might be surprised to read: \u201cThe ancient Romans had a clear understanding of what democracy means.\u201d 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.
\n In his 2018 book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Harari wrote: \u201cLiberals don\u2019t 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.\u201d It seems that, in the intervening years, Harari has himself become a liberal, because this book is about the apocalyptic scenario of how the \u201ccomputer network\u201d \u2013 everything from digital surveillance capitalism to social feed algorithms and AI \u2013 might destroy civilisation and usher in \u201cthe end of human history\u201d. Take that, Fukuyama.
\n 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,\u00a0insists Harari: after all, printing equally enabled the dissemination of\u00a0fake 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 on\u00a0the shoulders of giants.
\nBut perhaps I have fallen prey to what Harari dubs \u201cthe naive view of information\u201d, which subtly changes throughout the book as rhetorical circumstances demand until it is something of a straw Frankenstein\u2019s monster. The naive view of information encompasses the idea that \u201c[it] is essentially a good thing, and the more we have of it, the better\u201d, 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. \u201cKnowing that e=mc2 usually\u00a0doesn\u2019t resolve political disagreements,\u201d Harari says, to no one. Continue reading…Technology | The Guardian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Sapiens author offers an oracular vision of the end of humanity As befits a writer whose breakout work, Sapiens, was a history of\u00a0the entire human race, Yuval\u00a0Noah Harari is a master of the sententious generalisation. \u201cHuman life,\u201d he writes here, \u201cis a balancing act between endeavouring to improve ourselves and accepting who we were.\u201d …<\/p>\n

Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari review \u2013 the AI apocalypse<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":15852,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15851"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15851"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15851\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}