🧙‍♀️ Harari is trying to create a myth

On Yuval Noah Harari's latest book, Nexus

I belong to those who were not so impressed by Sapiens. It was certainly well-written and truly entertaining, a pure pleasure to read and not without insights. Not least how good we are at creating myths through stories (a negative description of ideas), which have shaped the society and world we live in today.

But I had difficulty with Yuval Noah Harari's recurring disses of humanity, and claims that we lived our best lives as gatherers and hunters were purely foolish. Moreover, he spices it with a doomsday prophecy. At the end of Sapiens, he worries that with genetic programming we will try to create better versions of ourselves, which could just as easily become Frankenstein's monsters. Either way, they will replace "us" and he's afraid of that.

That fear remains in his latest book, Nexus. However, now it's not biology that's the danger, but artificial intelligence. Here I raise a red flag. When one doomsday can be exchanged for another, after the first doomsday didn't occur, neither the first nor the second danger was so well thought through. Especially if the argument is the same. Now AI will replace humans, by becoming its own being.

Blind to human development

Harari's success with Sapiens is his ability to tell our entire history with broad strokes, in an entertaining way. Despite this - and this fascinates me - he is blind to human development. Not that he doesn't see the technologies and ideas we've created and what we can do with them, but he believes that almost nothing has improved despite this.

He manages to squeeze out a single example. He describes the dramatic improvement that has occurred in child mortality. From half, or more, of all children dying before the age of five, it is now close to zero in many countries. In all countries, it has dropped dramatically. But he stops there. And says that science and the industrial revolution have also led to many bad things. That's true, of course, but so much more than "just" child mortality has improved. It is a result of broad improvements in society.

When we crowdfunded and gave Steven Pinker's book Enlightenment Now to a hundred members of parliament, we wrote in the accompanying letter:

"What constitutes progress is different for different people, but most would agree that life is better than death. Health is better than disease. Wealth is better than poverty. Peace is better than war. Safety is better than danger. Freedom is better than tyranny. Equal rights are better than discrimination. Knowledge is better than ignorance. Happiness is better than despair. The opportunity to socialize with family, friends and enjoy culture and nature is better than loneliness and boredom. Considering all these factors, the world has become much better."

Despite this, Harari claims that we don't know what we're striving for or what a good life is. But we certainly do know (even if the goal for humanity can become clearer.) It belongs to what he calls myths, which we have convinced ourselves of through stories. The core of the "myth" is human rights. That every human has intrinsic value and we have created nations whose main task is to protect these rights and make life better for ourselves. We know that far from all people live such lives, but the development decade by decade is moving in that direction. It's not straight, certainly not without setbacks, but step by step we're making the world better.

Information creates progress

What has created these advances? It's ideas and knowledge. Or "information," which is the theme of Nexus. We once started with a very first idea (maybe stone tools) and have built everything we have today on top of that. Information about these advances has been transferred between generations. When we have access to more information, development goes faster. Through the breakthrough of democracy and the right to think and express thoughts freely, we created the scientific revolution and the industrial revolution, which made possible what I just described.

Harari brushes this aside. He takes the example of the printing press. It contributed to a sharp increase in books and the spread of information. Yes, it gave us the scientific revolution, he says - but also witch hunts. Bizarre claims about why some women were witches spread with the help of books.

In this, Harari is of course right, but it doesn't hold up as a comparison. The witch trials were vicious, but the advances were so many more and greater. And what would the alternative have been? People at that time lived in brutal misery, where half of all children died and many other horrors befell us. Should we have slowed down the printing press and other technological developments that led to all advances, because they also contributed to creating problems? Problems that were very bad, but clearly less than the advances.

As David Deutsch points out, it's slow, or no, development that is dangerous:

"Every species whose members had the capacity for innovation, is now extinct, except ours, and genetic evidence shows that that was a close-run thing. All of them, and every past civilization that has fallen, could have been saved by faster innovation. In all of them, slow innovation caused unsolved problems to accumulate until, sooner or later, some novel threat from nature or other humans posed a problem that their civilization didn’t create the knowledge to solve before it collapsed."

Harmful myths hold us back

What has held back development is often harmful myths. Stories about angry gods who don't want change and who say we should listen to the established authorities (those who spread the myths.)

Instead of listening to women who gave herbs and plants to ease the pain of mothers during childbirth, we should listen to the priests. Those who told us that pain during birth was a sign that the woman was being cleansed of her sins. Those who claimed and did otherwise were witches.

The Enlightenment began to deal with these harmful myths. Many of them remain, but to a lesser extent, and through science we have organized a way of thinking critically.

Now Yuval Noah Harari wants to impress upon us another myth, with the same purpose. To hold us back. The new is dangerous. Ten years ago in Sapiens it was biology, genetics and Frankenstein's monsters. Now it's AI. Those who dabble in AI are summoning the demon that will exterminate us all, he believes.

That myth is not new, and like many old myths - not true.

Mathias Sundin
Angry Optimist