Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI, by Yuval Noah Harari

The Sapiens author looks into the past to warn about what our future might look like.

The publishing world is now releasing a steady flow of books about Artificial Intelligence (AI), some prognosticating doom, others predicting a supercharged future. Into this vexed subject  steps Yuval Noah Harari, mega successful historian and philosopher, who has sold some 45 million books. 

Harari has long had an interest in information technology, and how it interacts and shapes society. His 2016 followup to Sapiens, Homo Deus, mused on what technology might have in store for the human race, and how our outsized desires could be our downfall. That book had a bemused tone at the folly of humans. Nexus takes on a more alarmed tone. 

The main contention of the book, which many may find hard to accept, is that more information does not lead us to the truth. Harari writes that information more often than not is about maintaining order. An alarming example is Stalinist Russia. The Soviet state was able to amass enormous amounts of information about its citizens and thus keep them in line. Or there is the invention of the Gutenberg press, which democratised information and made possible the European witch hunts. In 1486 the German Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer published his bestseller The Hammer of Witches, which kicked off a bloodcurdling period in European history.

On a more positive note the Bible, Harari contends, was a genius piece of information technology, as it kept an agreed upon set of “facts” that could hold society together. If Biblical facts were contested over time, there was a self-correcting function, in that scholars and clerics could write new interpretations, publish them, and generate a new point of consensus.

The second part of the book, after the historical overview of information systems, concentrates on the future of artificial intelligence, its possible advantages and many dangers. In Australia, we have perhaps had a taste of the brutal effects of unregulated algorithms in the robodebt scandal, where many vulnerable people were sent incorrect computer generated tax bills. Harari argues that AI will become so complex, with its large-scale machine learning capabilities, that no human will be able to understand it. If society’s basic functions are run by incomprehensible AI, how will citizens have redress when things go wrong? In essence, Nexus argues for regulation and human intervention.

Yuval Noah Harari’s great skill is as a communicator of complex ideas, drawing together different strands of history and weaving them together into a compelling pattern. The first half of Nexus, which deals with the history of information, ideas, society and politics, is brilliant. The second half, while raising many interesting points that the reader may not have thought of, flags slightly. As Harari is writing about the present and possible future, it feels like we cannot see the forest for the trees, stuck as we are in the midst of so much technological progress. Harari makes predictions about the future, but it is impossible to know what will pan out. 

A brilliant book, also a highly enjoyable read and one that will open your mind to a new way of thinking about information, technology and society. 

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI, by Yuval Noah Harari. Published by Fern Press. $39.99

SEP 24

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World,

 

Naomi Klein explores how the internet has upended the way we think.

Canadian writer Naomi Klein has spent much of her career investigating capitalism and its effects on society and culture, with a focus on the inequities it creates. Klein felt her work was distinct; readers knew what she stood for. Imagine her surprise when she started noticing online that she was being mixed up with Naomi Wolf, a writer who shot to fame with her feminist treatise The Beauty Myth in 1990. Since then Wolf has had a stellar career, but in recent years has lurched to the far right as a conspiracy theorist.

Doppelganger is Naomi Klein's attempt to come to grips with this new age of online extremism. The book explores through literature, history and politics how individuals and even societies have a dark side, an almost evil twin. (Australia often gets a mention, the doctrine of terra nullius seen as a way of denying the existence of First Nations.) If we are honest, according to Klein, we are all vulnerable to this doubling and need only look in the mirror. Doppelganger starts from a flimsy premise, but spins into a fascinating and absorbing book, full of superb analysis and surprising paradoxes.

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, by Naomi Klein. Published by Allen Lane. $36.99

DEC23

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power, by Max Chafkin

 

The story of how one of Silicon Valley's dark princes made his billions and wields his influence.

Peter Thiel is not a name as well known as Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, yet he's had considerable influence in the tech world and has attempted to push his ideas into the sphere of politics.

Born in West Germany in 1967, his family moved to the United States the following year. A mathematics wiz and chess aficionado, he studied philosophy at Stanford University. His literary influences included Tolkein and Ayn Rand. He soon got involved in campus culture wars through the university's newspaper, The Stanford Review, which Thiel co-founded. The paper's bugbears were political correctness and identity politics, but some of the articles  pushed boundaries into racism, sexism and homophobia.

After Stanford, Thiel went into law, but soon got bored and dropped out of the corporate world. Instead he co-founded PayPal, the electronic payments system that revolutionised online shopping. Thiel was never really a technologist; investing was his true calling. His investments (including an early bet on Facebook, giving him a 10.2% stake in the company and a place on the board) made him a billionaire many times over.

So much wealth, one would think, would result in overwhelming joy, but Thiele remained restless and continued his Stanford University culture wars. When gossip blog Gawker outed Thiel as gay, he sought revenge by suing the media outlet through various proxies, keeping his involvement secret. He would eventually bankrupt Gawker. It was seen by some as deeply disturbing that a billionaire investor could shut down a media company, seemingly at whim.

Thiele's far right activities reached their peak when he met political strategist Steve Bannon and gained entry into Trump's circles. He would publicly endorse Trump at one of his rallies and donate one million dollars to his campaign.

Business journalist Max Chafkin has called his biography of Thiel The Contrarian. This is due to his subject's ability to hold various competing (or flat out contradictory) positions at the same time. As Chafkin writes:

“How exactly could a hedge fund guy who was effectively shorting the American economy also be a wide-eyed futurist? What kind of libertarian sold spy technology to the CIA? What kind of gonzo risk taker says no to an early investment in Tesla?”

The Contrarian reads as both a jaw-dropping biography of a cold nihilist and a well researched history of Silicon Valley, its personalities, energy and ethos. So many tech companies started out as sunny, optimistic, idealistic outfits, promoting themselves as striving to make the world a better place. But as they grew and became more powerful, businesses like Facebook and Google would start courting authoritarian regimes like China. (Mark Zuckerberg requested President Xi Jinping name his unborn child at a White House dinner.) 

A powerful book that raises a lot of questions about the power of technology and the lack of accountability surrounding it.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power, by Max Chafkin. Bloomsbury. $29.99

OCT 21

Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends, Digital Lovers and Algorithmic Matchmakers, by Rob Brooks

 

An evolutionary biologist looks at the future of sex. 

According to evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks, the future holds an abundance of artificial intimacy.  New sex technologies, from sex robots to virtual reality porn, will anticipate our every desire. So clever will the algorithms mining our personal data be that they will predict our every need. Dating apps will cut out the time wasted swiping and scrolling, express matching us with life partners we never knew we were meant for. Even further, machines could learn fantasies we never knew we had. 

If all this sounds daunting, Brooks does weigh the possible negatives. Too much time spent enjoying ArtInt (artificial intimacies) could take time away from real-life relationships. Behemoth tech companies knowing your most private desires wouldn’t be able to resist the financial opportunities. But on balance, Brooks believes, the good will outweigh the bad: the lonely and sex starved will get some relief, and society will benefit from a more contented population. 

From primatology to today’s incel culture of sexually frustrated young men, Artificial Intimacy takes an historical survey of human sexuality, employing the disciplines of economics, psychology and evolutionary science. Witty, accessible, always fascinating but surely contentious, this is popular science that will appeal to readers of Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens.

Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends, Digital Lovers and Algorithmic Matchmakers, by Rob Brooks. Published by New South. $32.99

Review by Chris Saliba. First published at Books + Publishing

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff

How the future was sold

Considered a landmark text on big tech and the internet in general, I've finally got around to reading it. No wonder it took me so long. On the upside, it's quite an extraordinary work, deeply moral, almost an activist's manual on how to combat the big tech companies. On the downside, it's a tough read. The prose is really dense and, to my mind at least, it's overwritten. Too many long words and torturous sentences. Which is a shame, because this book deserves to reach even more readers than it already does. 

Surveillance Capitalism argues many things, but if I could try to summarise, the main point is that all of our data (all those thousands of google searches, posts, messages, emails etc.) is being captured, amassed, analysed and packaged into "prediction products". Big tech now knows so much about us they can predict our behavior, even our future. In fact, they know more about us than we know about ourselves. This is all done by way of a one way mirror. We volunteer all our data, really thinking it's being done anonymously, but behind the veil complete profiles are being built. There's no transparency on what's being done with our data and government has completely failed to regulate. 

What Zuboff describes is a Faustian pact. We've sold our souls to the devil. The digital treats we get for free are so seductive it's lulled us into this terrible complacency. My personal analogy is from H.G. Wells The Time Machine. We are like the innocent Eloi, lacking in curiosity about how we get all these free treats, being fattened up by the Morlocks for slaughter.  

The book also takes a long, philosophical view of capitalism, demonstrating that "surveillance capitalism" (Zuhoff's coined the term in 2014) is something completely unprecedented. It's come out of  nowhere, which in part answers why governments have been slow to regulate it. Nevertheless, it's urgent that it is regulated, and well regulated. Its power is frightening. The capitalism of the last 150 years sowed the seeds for our current climate disaster. Surveillance capitalism now threatens to commercialise our very psyches. Will we lose our souls in the bargain?

After reading Surveillance Capitalism, living in ignorance is no longer possible.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, by Shoshana Zuboff. Published by Profile Books. 2019

The Most Dangerous Man in the World, by Andrew Fowler

Andrew Fowler has written a thoughtful and considered book that examines the personality of Julian Assange, the global significance of his creation Wikileaks, and the impacts that this freedom of information has had on institutions that thrive on secrecy. Ironically enough, Fowler finds that Assange’s work has more in common with old style journalism by exposing and keeping accountable powerful vested interests.

Like everything in the information age, Julian Assange’s rise to global notoriety has been lightning quick. His whistleblower website Wikileaks began merely as an inspired idea written on a piece of paper and placed in his Carlton bedroom. Early on Assange assumed that leaking government secrets would set the world on fire. This did not happen. The world, it appears, did not share Assange’s moral outrage. All of that would change when Wikileaks released a video in April 2010 the site labelled ‘Collateral Murder’, a classified US military video showing the killing of over a dozen people – including two Reuters news staff.

The theory behind Wikileaks is that complex and powerful bureaucracies rely on secrecy, and that once their ability to communicate in this clandestine manner is removed it makes it more difficult for them to exist. Therefore powerful institutions can be crippled by exposing (or rather leaking) their secrets. Basically taking away an organisation’s ability to harbour secrets is like taking away its oxygen, according to Assange’s political philosophy. It reduces the powerful organisation’s ability to communicate within itself; it makes it dysfunctional.

As Assange writes:

"The more secretive or unjust an organisation is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie.... Since unjust systems, by their nature, induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance."

Julian Assange, Electronic Media and the Threat to the Status Quo

The Most Dangerous Man in the World explores three main themes: the character of Assange; the old print and new electronic media; and how powerful political systems react to the threat of having their secrets exposed. Andrew Fowler, a journalist with the ABC, has written a well-considered and thoughtful book about the whole Wikileaks phenomenon, and the mercurial character of Julian Assange. Usually these types of books are quickly knocked up, and are little more than cut-and-paste jobs that lazily skim the surface. As a globetrotting journalist immersed in international politics and media, Fowler brings a refreshing range and subtlety of analysis to his subject. He has also interviewed Assange, for the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent program.

The question that most often comes to mind when assessing the cultural significance of Julian Assange is whether he is a freedom warrior, a scourge of despots the world over, or an over hyped computer nerd living in a world of instant media fame.

In Fowler’s portrait, Assange comes across as a bit of an international hobo, travelling the world and staying wherever friends will put him up, but with no fixed address of his own. His essential character is as hard to pin down as his fixed address. Obviously highly intelligent and also creative, he has jokingly described himself as a bit autistic. He also has a tendency to flip friendships into disgruntled enemies with alarming alacrity.

From all the information that Fowler puts forward on Assange, it’s hard to take him seriously as a Messiah of the Internet age. Information technology, with its inexorable march towards complete openness, always made Wikileaks seem like a child predestined to be born. An early supporter of Assange, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, has said he identifies more with Bradley Manning, the 22 year old soldier who leaked the mammoth cache of classified documents to Wikileaks, than with Assange himself. Assange, afterall, is publisher of leaked documents, not the actual leaker. Manning faces life in jail, whereas whether Assange will ever be given a prison sentence seems unlikely.

What The Most Dangerous Man in the World really highlights is the intersection between the work of journalism and the free-for-all world of Internet publishing, where there is no editor, only individuals self-publishing and Google’s mysterious algorithm, which ranks search engine queries as a sort of machine-editor. In the end it was Assange who approached various media outlets to seek advice on how to sort through the material from the leaked US cables. On his own, as a rogue publisher, he made serious editorial mistakes by not redacting names from the Afghanistan war logs, thereby potentially putting lives at risk. Maybe this is Fowler’s journalistic bias coming through in the text, but it seems that editors and journalists are still more important than the absolute freedom of information. Information still needs to be assessed and sorted; individuals need to have their privacy protected from leaks that may endanger their lives, careers or reputations.

Whether Assange’s reputation as a freedom fighter and enlightenment figure will grow with time, it is still too early to tell. Andrew Fowler’s biography of Julian Assange persuades that the Wikileaks founder is more of an old style journalist than anything else, making public what vested interests would like to keep secret.

The Most Dangerous Man in the World, by Andrew Fowler. Published by Melbourne University Press. ISBN: 978-0-522-85866-2

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr

In this well written and deeply thought out book, Nicholas Carr examines what the Internet is doing to the way we think, read and remember. While speed and accessibility has brought many benefits, there is a down side to the information revolution.

The question of whether new media technologies are mind numbing is an age old one, going back to classical antiquity. Nicholas Carr, in his new book The Shallows, a nuanced and considered study on the ill effects of too much Internet usage, uses the fascinating example of Plato and Socrates.

History of New Media Technologies

In Plato’s well-known dialogue Phaedrus, the philosopher has Socrates discussing the merits of writing with Phaedrus. Socrates relates a story about a meeting between the Egyptian god Theuth, who amongst other things invented the alphabet, and Thamus, a king of Egypt. The technologically savvy Theuth argues that writing will be a boon to society, allowing for the storage of information and hence providing ‘a recipe for memory and wisdom’. Thamus disagrees, and suggests that writing will have a deleterious effect on memory as people lazily rely on what is held in these early data banks. Thamus goes on to say that writing will not create true wisdom, as people will not cultivate their minds. It will rather create a kind of fake wisdom. The dialogue makes clear that Socrates agrees with Thamus.

Plato was not on Socrates’ side in this matter. In The Republic he argues against poetry, which in antiquity represented the oral tradition. Poetry was declaimed in public, rather than written down. Plato felt the advantages of writing superior to a purely oral culture. Writing would encourage the reader to be logical, self-reliant and rigorous.

Even back in fourth century BC Greece there was concern that the new technology of alphabet based writing had the power to change the way the mind worked. Many centuries later, modern machines would have a noticeable effect on thought and literature. In 1882 German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche found his eye sight failing and couldn’t concentrate when trying to write with pen and paper. To resolve this problem he ordered a Danish-made Malling-Hansen Writing Ball typewriter, which would allow him to close his eyes and tap away on the keys. The philosopher found that the forceful banging of the contraption during composition had a discernable effect on his writing, making his prose tighter and more telegraphic. He concluded that, ‘Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.’

The Shallows has an alarming subtitle: what the Internet is doing to our brains. It’s tempting to think from this eye-catching book blurb that Nicholas Carr is keen to scold Internet users and predict the decline and fall of Western civilisation. This is thankfully not the case, and The Shallows surprises with its long historical view and balanced analysis of how media affects the quality of our thinking and reading. For every advance in information technology, there has been a clamour of voices warning of its dangers. When the Gutenberg press revolutionised the accessibility of information, Robert Burton, author of An Anatomy of Melancholy (1628), bemoaned the plethora of books and the mental befuddlement they caused. “One of the great diseases of the age is the multitude of books that doth so overcharge the world that it is not able to digest the abundance of idle matter that is every day hatched and brought into the world”. Sound familiar?

How the Internet Affects the Way We Read and Think

The basic conclusion of The Shallows is that what a new technology gives with the one hand, it takes away with the other. The more ease and convenience the Internet places before us, the more it takes away from our ability to exercise our brains more rigorously. It promotes light, scattered reading. And for all the information we so hurriedly glean, much of it is quickly forgotten. If it is remembered, it’s so fractured that it can’t be integrated into an overriding schema or logic that benefits our understanding of the world, or ourselves.

The Shallows provides many examples of how cognition is diminished by the Internet’s powerful ability to store, collect and sort information for us. In one study, two separate groups of people were set an identical online task. One group used programs that provided helpful prompts, therefore making the task more ‘user friendly’. The second group were not given these same prompts, but had to figure out the task more for themselves. Eight months later the two groups were assembled again to do the same puzzle. Those who had done the more intellectually demanding program, were able to complete the task twice as quickly as the ‘user friendly’ program group. Dutch Researcher Christof van Nimwegen found that the group using the more difficult program were able to plan ahead and plot strategy, while the other group relied more on trial and error to get through their puzzle.

Another study mapped how much information is retained when reading text with hyperlinks. Hyperlinks have been hailed by many educationalists as a new path to improved learning. To test this theory, Canadian scholars gave seventy people an Elizabeth Bowen short story to read, ‘The Demon Lover’. One group read the story straight through, without links. The second group read the story studded with hyperlinks, as you’d find in any online article. The hypertext readers in subsequent interviews on what they had read reported they found the story confusing and ‘very jumpy’. The other group had no such difficulties.

To add further alarm to this mix, one researcher tracked the eye movements of Web users, by attaching a small camera that plotted eye movements as they read pages of text. The eye reads Web pages in the shape of an F. We merely read the first few lines of text, then the eye quickly plummets to the bottom of the page. (Disheartening news for those writing online articles!)

What are the lessons to be drawn from The Shallows? The Internet is surely an awesome and powerful tool that has enhanced our lives incredibly. Who wants to go back to standing in bank queues when all your banking can be done from the comfort of home? What writer or researcher would want to go back to haunting the stacks and dusty corridors of libraries, when so much more can be accessed with the click of a mouse?

An over reliance, or obsession, with the Internet as the be all and end all of wisdom, intelligence and information, however, is a mistake. Just as pre-literate societies produced great oral poetry, and could cultivate a deep intellectual and philosophical consciousness, so can we moderns also find other routes to intellectual stimulation. Reading books without the non-stop interruptions of the Internet is one way. Sitting in a silent natural setting, and ‘reading nature’, is another way (again, studies have found that we think much more clearly in these peaceful environments).

A reading culture that is now moving inexorably to the Internet from the printed page is a culture of ‘F’ shaped reading: superficial, fragmented, shallow and forgetful. What this means for our intellectual and cultural future is anyone’s guess.

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr. Published 2010 by W. W. Norton and Company. ISBN: 978-0-393-07222-8