I’d like to feel that every reader of this blog gets value for money, so today I’m going to give you a real bonus and hand back the fifteen or so hours it would take to read Nexus, the latest 500 page outpuring from Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens and the sort of person who can describe himself as ‘one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals today’ without blushing.
Nexus is advertised as ‘the story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world’ but (from the extract breathlessly promoted in the Guardian) is yet more rehashed anecdata linked together by barely-researched references to Phaethon crashing the sun god’s chariot and Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice, all based around massively optimistic projections of the capabilities of AI and an underlying belief that it is “an unprecedented threat to humanity because it is the first technology in history that can make decisions and create new ideas by itself”. It’s the sort of book that treats as credible the latest of scaremongering survey of AI researchers in which ‘more than a third gave at least a 10% chance of advanced AI leading to outcomes as bad as human extinction’ as if the assessment can have any useful relevance.
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