What a biography! The range of this great thinker extends from “Sapiens – a brief History of Mankind” to “Nexus – A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI”, which means that it embraces three centuries of European intellectual history. While “Sapiens”, the great early work, was still imbued with that euphoria of progress and science, or at least with that amazement at its demiurgic achievements that we already know from Francis Bacon in the early 17th century, “Nexus” surprises us with its radical skepticism.
However, I am not so convinced that this skepticism, no, this massive pessimism, should be the result of the misuse of artificial intelligence. In terms of its unpredictability and foreseeable apocalyptic consequences, I believe that the nuclear threat goes far beyond the danger that Harari ascribes to AI. According to the Israeli thinker, artificial intelligence will dig the grave of democracy. This may be perfectly true, but a nuclear first strike end the expected answer would not only end democracy, but most likely all life on our planet. The role AI meanwhile plays in the nuclear field as well, tends to be overlooked. Since warning times for a first strike are becoming increasingly shorter with ever faster supersonic ballistic missiles, governments lack the time to distinguish between false alarms and an actual attack. Today already, it is AI that evaluates the data from sensors distributed across the country and the satellite belt. Mankind’s very survival depends on its reliability.
In other words, the misuse through falsification and distortion of information, which according to Harari endangers democracy, is just one of the many dangerous consequences of AI. The world has, however, become accustomed to the nuclear threat and is studiously repressing it, while artificial intelligence is a fascinating novelty that captivates everyone and in addition brings substantial progress in areas such as medicine.
It seems fair to say that in his book “Sapiens”, Harari still made himself the mouthpiece of that modern-day substitute for religion that now goes by the name of “science”. Its most prominent representative is undoubtedly Elon Musk, whose euphoria is reminiscent of the behavior of a close relative of ours, namely the gorilla, who, in moments of great excitement, drums his chest with enthusiasm. Recently, we have seen the American imitate this ancestor by throwing both arms in the air in exuberant ecstasy uttering primeval sounds as a tribute to his success. Musk is the high priest of the new religion of science. However, unlike the representatives of past religious narratives, he promises us neither paradise here and now nor some garden Eden in the hereafter – in fact, he promises hell. Since, as he repeatedly emphasized, we may be facing physical extinction down here, he wants to catapult us to Mars. Nor does he seem to be troubled by the fact, familiar to every serious scientist, that we can neither breathe on this barren planet nor harvest anything to fill our stomachs. He doesn’t care that the temperature on Mars rarely reaches five degrees Celsius, but is usually around minus one hundred. In other words, the false scientific pope tells us the purest lies, against all better judgment – out of pure infatuation with his beloved and indeed surprising technical toys.
In Harari’s book “Nexus”, there is almost no trace left of any scientific euphoria – whether false or justified. Nevertheless, it is not Harari’s fear of an almost omnipotent artificial intelligence that ultimately makes man its slave and destroys democracy that makes his latest work a stroke of genius. With playful ease – never pedantic, never viscous, never trying to impress the reader with his own learning – the author manages to explain the most difficult concepts so effortlessly and in such simple and clear language, that we can only admire him for this seemingly effortless art, so rare especially in Germany. He summarizes our entire knowledge about nature and man in the overarching concept of “information” that he divides into the two halves of “order” and “truth”. Information qua truth comprises our objective knowledge of nature, which stems as little from human willfulness as nature itself. In contrast, order represents knowledge that has been created by man himself and is not found in outward nature. In Hararis own words: “The information humans exchange about intersubjective things doesn’t represent anything that had already existed prior to the exchange of information; rather, the exchange of information creates these things.”
Information qua order refers to all ideological, religious and other narratives that weld people into communities with a common world view. Others have spoken of “knowledge” instead of “information” and contrasted knowledge about nature with our knowledge of people and society. The contrast between the two forms of information or knowledge is that in each case we ask very different questions. The sciences of nature distinguish between true and untrue because our statements about nature are either true or false. Our knowledge of people and society stored in narratives has to do with moral or aesthetic values. It is about good versus evil or morally indifferent, or about beautiful versus ugly or aesthetically neutral.
As I said, this dichotomy is not Harari’s personal finding; we encounter it throughout the history of philosophy. To ensure order, Plato recommended a state-preserving lie in his Politeia, namely that the different classes were made of different metals depending on their rank, starting with gold for the highest of them. German intellectual history, up to Dilthey, emphasizes the contrast between the humanities and the natural sciences. But Harari manages to throw the entire historical burden overboard and start from scratch, so to speak, in a completely unbiased but clairvoyant way. He presents the opposition between “truth” and “order” as an ultimately unresolvable contradiction.
We all know that the narrative of order deliberately suppressed truth when the latter threatened to undermine it. The example of Galileo went down in history, but he is only one among the countless heretics whose true or sometimes merely supposed insights threatened to undermine an existing narrative and thus an existing order. The resulting divisions in the community were seen as much more dangerous than the potential gain of true knowledge (in the case of Galileo, only a handful of intellectual contemporaries were interested in his findings anyway). The same consideration underlies the resistance of the so-called creationists to the findings of Charles Darwin, though long considered irrefutable. In their eyes, the destruction of biblical authority and the community united by it cannot be offset by the small gain that arises from the realization that we share a common family tree with monkeys. The contemporary Putin regime selectively adheres to objective truth insofar as it serves the development of weapons with ever greater destructive power. But like the former Soviet Union it prohibits any scientific knowledge that stands in the way of its current narrative to be fully in the right when forcing its own supposedly far superior moral order on neighboring peoples, even in the most bloody way.
On the one hand, information qua order suppresses information qua truth when the latter threates to dissolve it. But the opposite also constitutes an evident historical reality. All over the world, religions and ideologies have had to give up one dogma after another under the onslaught of science (information qua truth). In the name of truth, Voltaire and the Enlightenment philosophers in his wake ridiculed religions. They and, to an even greater extent, the great apostles of progress in the nineteenth century – one thinks, for example, of Ludwig Büchner, the brother of the great Georg Büchner – resembled Elon Musk in their naive conviction that in the age of science, all questions would eventually be answered and all puzzles solved – answers and questions to which religions knew no answers or only false ones. Today, however, we know – and Harari is able to convince the reader of this basic fact, namely that this expectation is not only deceptive but simply false. Our values and the narratives with which we justify them cannot be derived from nature. They are not part of objective reality that exists outside of ourselves, but are produced by ourselves. Even if we could statistically prove that 90 percent of all people of our and previous generations prefer to live in peace with others rather than wage war or commit murder, there would still be 10 percent who see their own advantage in going against the majority and are willing to fight and kill to do so. In this way, Hitler and Putin forced the narrative of hatred and annihilation in the name of the supposedly good narrative they invented on Germans and Russians, respectively.
Narratives are the instruments of order. As human beings, we are free and therefore remain unpredictable for our fellow human beings as long as we are not connected by a common narrative, i.e. by a religion, an ideology or other spiritual-emotional content. We must believe in this order-giving content because it does not belong to the realm of scientifically verifiable truths. This means that nolens volens we will always remain the inventors of social narratives, because that is what binds humans together. In our time, these narratives are predominantly of a secular nature. They are concealed, for example, in the ethical principles of a constitution, but also in those of each individual business enterprise. To the people who live with them, such principles appear to be a rational necessity, e.g. to run a business successfully. But rationality itself is always in the service of ethical imperatives, which as such are rationally unjustifiable. Only because a modern company sees a desirable goal in ceaselessly producing and being competitive does the rationality demanded by it come into play. There have been societies in the past, and there will undoubtedly be new ones in the future, that pursue completely different goals and therefore realize them with a different rationality.
In my view, the extraordinary contribution of Nexus, the latest book by Juval Noah Harari, is based on this realization of an existential freedom that exists beyond all truth arising from the objective knowledge of nature. With an incredibly light touch and the mastery of a philosopher who, like a child, asks the really important questions for the first time, he deals a greater blow to today’s science religion than David Hume, Immanuel Kant or Karl Popper. However, unlike the global success “Sapiens”, “Nexus” demands more than just amazement from its readers, it demands active thinking, which – as the thesis of his book shows – is capable of shaking some of his certainties. Thinking being less popular than marveling, I would be surprised if Harari reaches as many readers with this philosophical masterpiece as he did with Sapiens, his winged gallop through world history.