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"For at least a few more years, we sapiens still have the power to shape our future."

— Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus

Book review: Yuval Noah Harari on alien intelligence and the end of human history 

In a recent post on X, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced the exciting news that crypto may have finally realized its killer use case: banking for robots.

"AI agents cannot get bank accounts," Armstrong explained, "but they can get crypto wallets."

The news he was excited to share is that AI agents "can now use USDC on Base to transact with humans, merchants or other AIs."

Safe to say, Yuval Noah Harari does not share his excitement. 

"We have now created a non-conscious but very powerful alien intelligence," he writes in his latest book, Nexus. 

"If we mishandle it, AI might extinguish not only the human dominion on Earth, but the light of consciousness itself, turning the universe into a realm of utter darkness."

If that sounds alarmist, it’s because Harari’s stated intention with Nexus is to sound the alarm.

Harari worries that all the excitement around eye-popping technical advances and booming stock prices has distracted us from the existential risks posed by AI: "What we are talking about is potentially the end of human history," he warns. 

"In the coming decades, we might find ourselves living inside the dreams of an alien intelligence."

Harari has been sounding this particular alarm since at least 2017 when the publication of Homo Deus established him as an expert on AI.

This is perhaps surprising, as his original area of expertise is medieval history.

But Harari has transcended his historian training to become a public philosopher in the throw-back mold of George Bernard Shaw and Jean-Paul Sartre — his ideas seep into the public discourse much more readily than you’d expect from anything put down in a book. 

In Sapiens it was the idea that everything other than physics is a myth, including money, religion, corporations, the New York Yankees, the United States and human rights. 

In Homo Deus (my well-worn copy of which is dog-eared seemingly every other page), Harari’s big-picture idea was that human nature will be transformed as intelligence becomes increasingly uncoupled from consciousness.

That’s now happening much as he predicted — and in Nexus, Harari introduces several new terms to help us understand the implications thereof, all of which could soon be seeping into public discourse: inter-computer subjectivity, data colonialism, the Silicon Curtain, information cocoons, and alien intelligence among others.

But Harari’s big-picture idea in Nexus is something of a reprise from Homo Deus: We humans, he warns, "are in danger of losing control of our future."

That is alarming, of course, but no longer surprising. It makes reading Nexus feel a little like rewatching The Sopranos — the ideas don’t feel quite as revelatory as they once did.

The Sopranos feels dated now because we’ve since watched so many TV shows adopting so many of the innovative ideas from David Chase’s story of North Jersey mobsters.

Similarly, Nexus feels less revelatory than Harari’s earlier books because the ideas from those books have been so broadly adopted.

This is a good thing — everyone thinking a little more like Harari means the existential risks he is again warning us about are a little less likely to be realized.

But it also means that ideas that would have previously seemed like book-worthy insights might now seem like material for more time-efficient blog posts instead (or newsletter comments, even). 

For example, when Harari spends a couple of paragraphs making the point that computers are better at chess than they are at washing dishes, it feels a little tired.

Similarly, the pages he dedicates to describing how YouTube and Facebook algorithms amplify conspiracy theories are still disturbing, but I'm not sure it will be news to any of his potential readers.

For me, Harari is at his best when illuminating his big-picture takes with examples from history, like the ancient Assyrian practice of voiding loan contracts by literally breaking the clay tablets they were drawn up on — if the tablet wasn’t physically broken upon repayment, the debt could be collected again.

(I'd love to know how many of these anecdotes he dug up with the help of AI.)

Another memorable example: Harari illuminates the benefits of bureaucracy with a historical anecdote (a government bureaucrat finding the single source of the black death in London) and then illuminates its dangers with a personal one (his grandfather escaping the Holocaust to Israel).

There are many more of these and they are all engaging, well-written and informative.

At book length, however, it can be a bit much.

Harari supports his warnings about AI in Part III of the book by referring back to the history lessons he offers in Parts I and II — on things like Europe’s witch hunts and Stalin's collectivization.

But those are familiar stories that I'm not sure needed retelling.

His own thinking can sound a bit familiar too: The first two parts of the three-part Nexus read like a Harari greatest hits album.

If you're as big a Harari fan as myself, you'll be happy to read it — but if you just want to hear his new material, feel free to skip ahead to Part III.

Part III is where he uses the sweep of history to explain why he’s so concerned about AI: "The invention of AI is potentially more momentous than the invention of the telegraph, the printing press or even writing, because AI is the first tool that is capable of making decisions and generating ideas by itself."

He worries, of course, that those decisions will not be made with the best interests of humans in mind. 

"By creating and imposing on us powerful inter-computer myths, the computer network could cause historical calamities that would dwarf the early modern European witch hunts or Stalin's collectivization."

But all is not lost!

"For at least a few more years," Harari writes, "we sapiens still have the power to shape our future."

Toward the end of Nexus, Harari offers some ideas on how we might do that — many of which involve crypto!

Coinbase may be accelerating AI agents' ability to coordinate with one another in a way that Harari would surely find worrying (one of his most plausible-sounding risks is that AIs will quickly make the financial system incomprehensible to humans).

But most of what Harari proposes to do about it has one underlying (and crypto-related) principle: keeping both information and decision-making decentralized.

Decentralization, he writes, would "protect democracy against the rise of totalitarian surveillance regimes."

He doesn’t necessarily have blockchains in mind, but I think he could be convinced that some adjustments there would surely help.

His defensive principle of "mutual surveillance" (to ensure government accountability) could be enabled by crypto; the risks of "data colonialism" could surely be offset by keeping data on blockchains; and blockchain tech, famously inefficient, might prove helpful simply by slowing things down: "for the survival of democracy, some inefficiency is a feature, not a bug."

These are only some of the things that we need to figure out, of course — and Harari believes we need to figure them out quickly.

"The decisions we all make in the coming years will determine whether summoning this alien intelligence proves to be a terminal error or the beginning of a hopeful new chapter in the evolution of life."

Even after reading (and enjoying) Nexus, so full of warnings to the contrary, I'm still betting that humanity’s next chapter will be a good one.

— Byron Gilliam

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