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- Oct 31, 2012
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The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari ❧ Current Affairs
<p>The best-selling author is a gifted storyteller and popular speaker. But he sacrifices science for sensationalism, and his work is riddled with errors.</p>
www.currentaffairs.org
Meet Noah Herrari. He is the new high priest of the global elitists.
And guess what, they don't believe in a God but are trying to create one, thus proving our need for one.
Harari’s motives remain mysterious; but his descriptions of biology (and predictions about the future) are guided by an ideology prevalent among Silicon Valley technologists like Larry Page, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and others. They may have differing opinions on whether the algorithms will save or destroy us. But they believe, all the same, in the transcendent power of digital computation. “We’re headed toward a situation where A.I. is vastly smarter than humans and I think that time frame is less than five years from now,” Musk said in a 2020 New York Times interview. Musk is wrong. The algorithms will not take all our jobs, or rule the world, or put an end to humanity anytime soon (if at all). As A.I. specialist François Chollet says about the possibility of algorithms attaining cognitive autonomy, “Today and for the foreseeable future, this is stuff of science fiction.” By echoing the narratives of Silicon Valley, science populist Harari is promoting—yet again—a false crisis. Worse, he is diverting our attention from the real harms of algorithms and the unchecked power of the tech industry.
In the last chapter of Homo Deus, Harari tells us of a new religion, “The Data Religion.” The practitioners of this religion—”Dataists,” he calls them—perceive the entire universe as flows of data. They see all organisms as biochemical data processors, and believe that humanity’s “cosmic vocation” is to create an all-knowing, all-powerful data processor that will understand us better than we can understand ourselves. The logical conclusion to this saga, Harari predicts, is that the algorithms will assume authority over all facets of our lives—they will decide who we marry, what careers we pursue, and how we will be governed. (Silicon Valley, as you can guess, is a hub of The Data Religion.)
“Homo sapiens is an obsolete algorithm,” Harari states, paraphrasing the Dataists.
But a human is not a spruced-up chicken, or even necessarily superior in all ways to a chicken. In fact, chickens can “absorb more data” than humans, and “process it better”—at least in the domain of vision. The human retina has photoreceptor cells sensitive to red, blue, and green wavelengths. Chicken retinas have these, plus cone cells for violet wavelengths (including some ultraviolet), plus specialized receptors that can help them track motion better. Their brains are equipped to process all this additional information. The chicken’s world is a technicolor extravaganza that we can’t even fathom. My point here is not that a chicken is better than a human—this is not a competition—but that chickens are uniquely “chicken” in the same way that we are uniquely “human.”
Neither chickens nor humans are mere algorithms. Our brains have a body, and that body is situated in a world. Our behaviors emerge because of our worldly and bodily activities. Living beings are not just absorbing and processing the data flows of our environment; we are continuously altering and creating our own—and each other’s—environments, a process called “niche construction” in evolutionary biology. When a beaver builds a dam over a stream, it creates a lake, and all the other organisms now have to live in a world with a lake in it. Beavers can create wetlands that persist for centuries, changing the selection pressures their descendants are exposed to, potentially causing a shift in the evolutionary process. Homo sapiens have unrivaled flexibility; we have extraordinary ability to adapt to our environments, and also modify them. Our acts of living don’t just differentiate us from algorithms; they make it near impossible for the algorithms to accurately predict our social behaviors, such as who we will love, how well we will do at future jobs,3 or whether we are likely to commit a crime.
