Chaos: an AI-alarmist’s futuristic nightmare

PHILOSOPHER Jacques Barzun recounts in From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life how the printing revolution changed the development of Christian thought. Martin Luther's 95 statements, nailed to the church door in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517, were intended as a conversational document for the Catholic monks.

But Luther himself made and distributed handwritten copies, and one of his friends sent them to a buddy in southern Germany. Guttenberg's printing presses were in use in that region, so more suitable paper and ink were used during the printing. You had to burn the stuff or tear it up to destroy it. The friend had the doctrines set. A few thousand prints were made. One of them reached the reigning pope, who didn't think it was funny and immediately took action against Luther. Luther had no choice but to become the father of Protestantism.

In Yuval Noah Harari's Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, a brick of a book, he describes how every major development in knowledge formation, dissemination and application has affected humanity's ability to sustain itself. Through the ages, everything has been and is about networks of information. According to Harari, each information experiment had certain aspects in common with its predecessors. New information systems were created, but because homo sapiens ran them, each new epoch found that in the previous epoch “errors, lies, fantasies and fictions" were also part of the incorruptible “information".

Then, in the second half of the book, he finally sets his sights on artificial intelligence (AI). Harari is not someone who maintains a low profile in the media and on public stages, which may be why one gets the feeling that you have already heard his opinion on these things. He is the great AI alarmist of our time. His vision of the effects of AI on human behaviour patterns, politics, and political science is staggering. If he's got it right, we're on the threshold of the kind of future previously only visualised in Sylvester Stallone movies like Judge Dredd.

You have to read past this barrier to get the full impact of the futuristic nightmare he foresees. It has a certain inevitability. People over 50 years old will remember their experiences with the early internet, the cumbersome first Nokia mobile phones, CDs and CD-ROMs. What the first smartphones looked like. How desktop computers gave way to laptops and then tablets. Digitalisation has destroyed major sectors of the economy and entertainment industry.

Harari doesn't even dwell on all these waves of information enhancement, but one can probably sum it up with one observation: All that's left of the big market in cameras and film is an app on your smartphone that satisfies your point-and-push needs. And other apps let you do everything with the photos that were once handled by big industries. Names like Fuji, Kodachrome, Leica and Hasselblad are all but forgotten. There are entire economic sectors that have disappeared with them.

Progress necessarily destroys the old paradigm and all its tools – and its workhorses must seek new professions.

And now AI is coming along and threatening the vast majority of people who write computer programmes; AI has the ability to be creative, to create things without the help, intervention, or guidance of homo sapiens.

Harari's view is that AI will force governments to think differently about many things. Democracy, to name one. But he fails to draw the follow-through to the logical conclusion: Powers such as Russia and China have already advanced much further than the West in mobilising AI to take out opponents.

Nexus is a book that will affect every thinking person. Probably the one book you have to read this year. You don't come out of the reading process intact. It's hard work to read Nexus, sometimes because Harari's signature accessibility has suddenly become sticky toffee, other times because the implications are so terrifying. AI is going to become a part of our lives because the profits of great Silicon Valley giants are more important than humans' mental well-being.

And what about South Africa? you ask. There are other things in play here than those that alarm Harari. In any case, if Eskom collapses again, we will have to deal with AI that stutters, limps and is loadshedded into oblivion.

Even if Eskom were to outperform with power supply, there are parts of the information revolution that Harari does not take a close look at. These are the stepchildren of the digitisation revolution. There is a wealth of literature in smaller languages that were never digitised. Due to the poor maintenance of library services, some literatures and cultures will simply cease to exist because both homo sapiens and AI do not have access to them. Please try to get your hands on all the works of R.R.R. Dhlomo, Benedict Vilakazi and A.C. Jordan as e-books. Ditto the Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa and Sotho literature before the 1990s. AI doesn't know anything if homo sapiens hasn't had it digitised. AI will, thanks to historical reviews, be able to give you information about the titles, but not the creations themselves.

I suspect anyone reading this book will be able to think of things around their own field of interest that Harari could not have foreseen even in his wildest dreams. AI is going to cause big trouble and make it easier for us to know less about the smaller details. 

When the skies fall, we all wear blue beanies. In the penultimate chapter, “The Silicon Curtain: Global Empire or Global Split?", Harari dwells on the current international set-up, but his thinking is sloppy. Or maybe he's just woke or politically hypercorrect. The division is not between people who want to use the new technology for humanity's benefit and people who want to misuse it for humanity's benefit.

The real division is between people who connect to the technological networks and people who don't have access to them. Poverty, overpopulation, unemployment and religious blindness are probably the biggest bulwarks against AI for homo sapiens.

This is the most horrible truth, and Yuval Noah Harari does not utter it.

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari was published by Fern Press and costs R523 at Amazon SA.

♦ VWB ♦

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