Dennis Duncan, The New York Times; Pulling Back the Silicon Curtain:
Review of NEXUS: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI, by Yuval Noah Harari
"In a nutshell, Harari’s thesis is that the difference between democracies and dictatorships lies in how they handle information...
The meat of “Nexus” is essentially an extended policy brief on A.I.: What are its risks, and what can be done? (We don’t hear much about the potential benefits because, as Harari points out, “the entrepreneurs leading the A.I. revolution already bombard the public with enough rosy predictions about them.”) It has taken too long to get here, but once we arrive Harari offers a useful, well-informed primer.
The threats A.I. poses are not the ones that filmmakers visualize: Kubrick’s HAL trapping us in the airlock; a fascist RoboCop marching down the sidewalk. They are more insidious, harder to see coming, but potentially existential. They include the catastrophic polarizing of discourse when social media algorithms designed to monopolize our attention feed us extreme, hateful material. Or the outsourcing of human judgment — legal, financial or military decision-making — to an A.I. whose complexity becomes impenetrable to our own understanding.
Echoing Churchill, Harari warns of a “Silicon Curtain” descending between us and the algorithms we have created, shutting us out of our own conversations — how we want to act, or interact, or govern ourselves...
“When the tech giants set their hearts on designing better algorithms,” writes Harari, “they can usually do it.”...
Parts of “Nexus” are wise and bold. They remind us that democratic societies still have the facilities to prevent A.I.’s most dangerous excesses, and that it must not be left to tech companies and their billionaire owners to regulate themselves."
