I read Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari on Feb 18th, 2025

The Artificial Intelligence, aka AI, has been regarded the most influential technology since the invention of steam engine. We expect the AI extends or surrogates our brains to liberate us out of the tedious endeavors, assists us to make better decisions. However, the author warned us that the AI may compromise the information network, — the foundation of human society, — and lead us to the abyss of dystopiathe public space was overwhelmed by the mis

Information network

What is information?

The information may represent the facts in the objective world, subjective emotion, and more importantly, widely-accepted narratives, aka intersubjective realities. Unlike misinformation, which arises from honest mistakes, or disinformation, which is the deliberate manipulation of truth, these narratives do not merely present reality; they connect people through shared beliefs and collective meaning.

This is a feature, not a bug. Humans are not driven solely by basic instincts but by the power of stories, ideologies, and imagined orders. The Arab Caliphates swept through the Middle East and North Africa like wild fire with the unifying vision of Islamic expansion. On a vastly smaller scale, the global astrology market was valued $12.8 billion as of 2021.

All the political systems are built upon the fictions, but their scalability has been constrained by the limits of communication. In ancient Greece, city states struggled to engage meaningful discourse beyond their city limits. The Roman empire ultimately collapsed under its own weight despite the military victories on the battlefield. The invention of printing press, telegraph, telephone, and Internet expanded the reach of information, thus making globalization not only possible but inevitable.

Artificial intelligence is capable to fabricate an intersubjective reality other than facilitating communications. For example, Facebook’s algorithm in Myanmar discovered that inflammatory posts stoking racial hatred drove higher user engagement, thus the optimization for engagement unintentionally promoted and amplified the extremists’ voices with devastating consequence, — the Amnesty International alleged that Facebook was accountable for the genocide against the Rohingya.

Common sense is NOT common

The above examples underscored a fundamental caveat of AI: its lack of common sense, when laser focusing on the specific objectives — as Paper clip maximizer fallacy described by Nick Bostrom. AI risks pursuing goals technically efficient yet profoundly misguided.

Moreover, AI lacks an inherent ethical framework, making it susceptible to reinforcing systemic biases rather than correcting them. Consider an AI-driven hiring system, t might detect that female candidates have historically been accepted at lower rates than their male counterparts. The AI could interpret this pattern as a signal and optimize for efficiency by rejecting all female applicants!

To make matters worse, we often struggle to explain the reasoning behind AI’s decision, especially with recent progress of the large language models(LLMs). The decisions are based on the intricate patterns, operated within complex, hyper-dimensional spaces that defy traditional interpretation.

Rise of the machines

AI has been integrated into our daily lives, assisting doctors in diagnosis, assessing risks for insurance premium, accepting or rejecting the school application, etc. They’re also used for surveillance to neutralize potential threats, and enforce censorship in cyberspace. It solved the logistical challenges for the authoritarian regimes to realize the omnipresent surveillance state foreseen in 1984.

Free speech is widely recognized as the cornerstone of the democracy. But what if the public discourse is flooded by the AI-driven propaganda? These bots are immuned to the counterspeech, and could gain our trust by engaing in personalized interaction to foster the intimacy.

While the rights of free speech ensures diverse voices are heard, meaningful debat is necessary to make progress by compromising. But what is the point to argue if the public discourse is overwhelmed by bots? Faced with stagnation, people may turn to the strongman to break the stallmate and disrupt the status quo. We have already seen the popularist politician rising to the power in the global scale.

Closing thought

It was very unlikely the mankind was massacred by droids or raised in the bottles, but AI woud accelerate the democratic backsliding by compromising the human information network.