Viswanathan K's Thoughts

The alignment problem. A phrase Yuval Noah Harari uses in Nexus to describe the mismatch and thus the problems created by today’s information systems. The Internet started off by being free (content), but companies had to find a way to make money. They found ads. But that created a second-order consequence – it became necessary to show more ads, which meant it became key that users spent the maximum possible time online. User “engagement” has thus become the mantra of the Internet, quality (let alone truth) of content be damned. And outrage outsells tranquillity by a mile.   Clausewitz, a Prussian general, wrote a book called On War , in which he famously said that: “War is the continuation of policy by other means.” In his view, wars should not be based on emotions or egos or even righteousness. Rather, war should be used as a political tool and even then, only if it aligns with some overarching political goal. (Indira Gandhi in Bangladesh is pure Clausewitz; George W B...

Throughout history, propaganda and hate have existed. Is social media just a new vehicles for what’s always been there? Or is it different/worse, asks Yuval Noah Harari in Nexus .   Yes, he says, social media is different. Because what is seen/shown is determined by non-humans, i.e., algorithms. AI has only added fuel to that fire, but the problem was visible even before AI. Algorithms, for example, auto-play the next video in your feed. They decide what to show you based on what you’ve already liked and seen. They show more of content that provokes outrage and anger. Why? Not out of malice, but because they want to maximize the time you spend online (More time online = more ads = more money). “In a completely free information fight, truth tends to lose.” This is why Harari believes that more information doesn’t always lead to good outcomes. It was true up to a point – countries with free press were better than dictator-controlled news systems. But no more.   Over ...

In Nexus , Yuval Noah Harari goes deeper into information networks involving humans. Early religions had a problem – how did one know whether the narrator/priest was indeed conveying the original instructions? What if he was changing things, accidentally or deliberately?   The invention of the book offered a solution. “After tens of thousands of years in which gods spoke to humans via shamans, priests, prophets, oracles and other human messengers, religious movements… began arguing that the gods spoke through this novel technology of the book.” In theory at least, all copies of the book could be identical.   Religions of the book (Semitic ones) though then ran into a new problem. “Who decides what to include in the holy book?” After all, the first copy didn’t come from heaven. But the faithful decided that a “once-and-for-all supreme effort” with the wisest and most trustworthy men could stitch the first book together. (It still led to debates on who would for...

For humans to function as a group, records became critical, writes Yuval Noah Harari in Nexus . This makes sense – leaving things to memory led to disagreements. Over time though, the record didn’t just represent an aspect of reality (a loan, for example) – the record became the reality! “If somebody repaid the loan but failed to “kill the document”, the debt was still owed. Conversely, if someone didn’t repay the loan but the document “died” is some other way… the debt was no more.” This is exactly why during all revolutions, records are destroyed (That doesn’t work in a networked, digitized world though).   As societies advanced, the volume of records exploded. This created a new challenge: Retrieval. This need to organize information to make it easy to find led to the rise of the bureaucracy . “Bureaucracy too tends to sacrifice truth for order. By inventing a new order and imposing it on the world, bureaucracy distorted people’s understanding of the world in unique ...

The only time we had equality, writes Yuval Noah Harari in 21 Lessons for the 21 st Century , was when we were hunter-gatherers. Why? “Because they had very little property. Property is a pre-requisite for long-term inequality.” Agriculture was the beginning of inequality. Increased industrialization accelerated things. But then, ironically, industrialization also contributed to the reduction in inequality. Admittedly, in a roundabout and twisted way. First, as the number of workers grew, they could form groups and unions and make demands. Next, when employee skills and intelligence began to matter, they were paid better and treated better. And as the demand for workers increased further, it opened employment doors for all “races, classes and genders”, eventually even other countries via outsourcing. All of which helped reduce inequality globally. After the fall of communism, it looked like greater prosperity and thus reduced inequality was going to be the global norm. ...

Everyone complains that we live in a world of lies and fiction, where truth is hard to differentiate from everything else. There’s even a term for it: the “post-truth” age. But, asks Yuval Noah Harari in 21 Lessons for the 21 st Century : “If this is the age of post-truth, when, exactly, was the halcyon age of truth? In the 1980s? The 1950s? The 1930s?” Habits like denying the very existence of certain countries is an age-old tactic. In 1931, Japan created the fake country of Manchukuo to justify their conquest of China. China itself claims Tibet was never independent. And the British occupied Australia saying it was “nobody’s land”, thereby wiping out 50,000 years of Aboriginal history. All of which is why Harari says: “Humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions.” It’s been that way long before Facebook and WhatsApp, Trump and Putin: “For millennia, much of what pas...

In his blog on consumerism, Santosh Desai compared today’s scenario where: “The next big thing is awaited with anticipation, and gets absorbed into our lives virtually instantly, without creating a sense of satisfaction.” With the consumerism of our childhood, an era when: “Things lived twice over, once as yawning absences and then as presences that were made to linger, till every last drop of juice was extracted from it.” That sentiment isn’t all that uncommon. But what if consumerism is a good thing? A must have for the prosperity of all? Yuval Noah Harari’s awesome book Sapiens certainly seems to say so: Part 1: Origin of Capitalism : -          Long ago, money, that astounding thing that can “convert anything into almost anything else”, had a severe constraint: it could “convert only things that actually existed in the present”. -          And so “people agreed to represent imaginary ...