Yuval Noah Harari: “If we lose trust in institutions, reality collapses”
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The renowned ‘Sapiens’ author and historian warns of the dangers of AI and hits out at big tech and the oversaturation of information on the internet.
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Read time: 4 minutes
In brief…
- Emily speaks to historian Yuval Noah Harari about his new book ‘Nexus’.
- It centres on the sea of information, or rather misinformation, that is spreading online and on social media.
- He calls on governments to hold big tech barons to account and argues we need trust in institutions.
Why is there so much misinformation?
The central premise of Yuval Noah Harari’s new book ‘Nexus’ is that we can collate and gather information, using AI for instance, without getting any wiser.
He tells Emily: “Information isn't truth, just gathering more and more information doesn't increase the amount of knowledge in the world. It doesn't make us wiser. And the same could also happen with AI.
“People think it will discover the truth about the world. More likely, it will just create a new and much more complicated world that we will know even less about. “
While it could offer access to more information quicker, Harari says that’s not necessarily a good thing.
“It’s like thinking that if you eat more food, you will be healthier.”
He adds: “Information is the food of the mind, and most information out there is junk information. The truth is a very small subset of all the information in the world.
“The truth, it's rare because it's costly. If you want to produce a truthful account of anything, you need to research and fact check and spend time and energy and money, whereas fiction and fantasy and lies are cheap.”
Emily points out that Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief political strategist, said he wanted to “flood the zone with shit”, referring to his intention to churn out misinformation to “take down the Biden regime.”
Harari notes: “For authoritarian figures, this is actually a good thing because democracy is built on trust, which requires truth, whereas dictatorship is built on terror, not on trust.”
Yuval Noah Harari: 'The truth is rare... Most information is junk'
What role does Big Tech and social media play?
Harari says big tech bosses, who have a crucial role to play in limiting the spread of misinformation, are not stepping up.
“They understand what is happening, and they should take a lot more responsibility… for what their own algorithms are promoting and recommending” he says.
But big platforms like Elon Musk’s X won’t just reign themselves in on their own accord.
“I tend to agree with Facebook, with Twitter, with these companies, that it is not their job to censor their human users.
“If somebody posts online a hate filled conspiracy theory, I would be very cautious, very worried about giving the companies the authority to censor it.”
Rather than the problem being the content produced by the users, he says the problem is with the “company's algorithms that choose which content to promote”.
To stop this, Harari says: “Governments should hold companies responsible and liable for the actions of their algorithms.
“They should be subject to the law of the country, just like everybody else, the companies, the people who manage them.”
Should we be worried about AI?
“It’s in a way, much, even much bigger than the atom bomb.
“This is the first technology in history which is not a tool, it's an agent… It can make decisions by itself. Autonomous weapon systems are deciding by themselves what to bomb. It can invent new things, new medicines, also new weapons, new strategies.”
Harari, an Israeli citizen, argues that AI is in part to blame for the extent of the “mess” we are witnessing in the Middle East right now.
“Warfare has been transformed over the last few years by AI. We see it in Gaza. We see it in Ukraine. The place where you see it most is not in who is doing the shooting, but in who is choosing the targets.”
Why AI is 'part of the mess' in the Middle East right now
People live in different realities, but how do we solve this?
The key, Harari says, is institutions.
Finding factually correct information often relies on professional institutions. Harari notes that as a historian, he himself must trust research done by those before him.
“I believe other historians and other academics, and that's the only way I can do it… So if we lose trust in institutions, that is when reality collapses.”
He argues that “science is a team sport”, so we should look to the past for inspiration.
“What really led to the scientific revolution was the establishment of scientific institutions, scientific associations and publishers who invested the necessary resources in sifting through the ocean of information to find the gems of facts and truth and science.”
Perhaps the same kind of approach needs to be taken with regard to tackling misinformation.
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