Science and technology have completely changed human thinking patterns, lifestyles, and interrelationships. Most of the changes have taken place in the last two hundred years but the changes in the last three decades have been mind-boggling. The writer has tried to explain the information, as it is a tool to discover the truth. Its main role is to represent the reality. Religious books like the Vedas, and Torah of Judaism have also been considered to be the representative of reality. There are two levels of reality. One is objective like stones, mountains etc. and the other level is subjective like pain, pleasure and love.
Harari is, without a doubt, a good storyteller who focuses on myths to drive his points home. He says that in Christianity and Islam, women have been considered intellectually and ethically inferior to men and suggested that women should be subjected to subordinate roles in society. Saint Paul is attributed to having said, ‘A woman should learn in quietness and full submission’. Thus, we find that Hindu scriptures and society, on the contrary, have accorded the highest respect to the women folk. However, aberrations crept into them also due more to slavery and oppression by the aliens, who became the rulers upon them. The Hindu scripture, it must be stated, never supported the principle of turning the other cheek for tyrants in the name of ‘absurdity’ that proclaims that the meek shall inherit the earth.
It is bizarre that in Christianity inquisitorial methods were adopted and even recommended in ‘The Hammer of the Witches’ to avenge personal slights or to gain personal or economic advantage. Novah Harari, therefore, is of the view that humanity will be able to explore the revolutionary implications of the rise of AI (Artificial Intelligence) after understanding the politics of information in historical systems.
While discussing the brief history of democracy and totalitarianism, the writer says that information networks are highly centralised, and the centre is considered to be infallible. A democracy, in contrast, is a distributed information network, possessing strong self-correcting mechanisms. Elections are a central part of the democratic tool kit, but they are not democracy. In every democracy, the limits of human civil rights are often discussed. However, allowing the governments to supervise the search for truth is like appointing the fox to guard the chicken coup. Democracy and dictatorship are not binary opposites but rather are on a continuum.
We have seen that the new information technology of the late modern era has given rise to both large-scale democracy and large-scale totalitarianism. However, there have been crucial differences in how the two systems use information technology. Technology only creates new opportunities; it is up to us to decide which ones to pursue. We are living amid an unprecedented information revolution. It is difficult to determine what is driving this revolution. Is it the internet? Smartphones? Social Media? Blockchains|? Algorithms? or AI? Computer-to-computer chains can now function without humans in a loop. For example, one computer might generate a fake news story and post it on a social media feed and the second computer might identify this as fake news and not just delete it but also warn other computers to block it. Within a few years, AI could eat the whole of the human culture and digest it. For thousands of years prophets, poets and politicians have used language to manipulate and reshape society but now computers are learning how to do it. In ancient India, Hindu and Buddhist sages argued that all humans lived trapped inside Maya- the world of illusion. The computer revolution is bringing us face-to-face with Maya or illusion. Tech giants like Facebook, Amazon, and Alibaba are not just obedient servants of customers’ whims and government regulations, they increasingly shape their whims and regulations. There is no doubt that AI is going to bring about unthinkable and unfathomable changes very shortly. The persuasiveness of the book ‘Nexus’ by Yuval Noah Harari is a laudable and mesmerising one that opens the eyes of readers.
