More information does not lead to more truth. It wasn’t true in the past, and it’s certainly not true now.
Guttenberg’s printing press contributed to the Scientific Revolution, yes, but also to the explosion of witch hunts. Copernicus’s “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres” (1543) sold far fewer copies than The Hammer of Witches (1486), an international bestseller. The Industrial Revolution led both to wealth-backed investments of research, and also imperialism and totalitarianism.
That’s a main argument of Nexus, the latest book from popular historian Yuval Noah Harari, which uses the long arc of history to explore the age of artificial intelligence.
“Information has no essential link to truth,” Harari wrote. “Its defining feature is connection rather than representation “
That connection is a balance between truth and order. Information was used from the repressive Qin empire and the increasingly totalitarian Stalinist Soviet Empire to relatively more tolerant reign of the highly-distributed Roman Empire and the United States. To get a (relatively!) more benign version, self-correcting systems are necessary. AI, though, could be used as new attempt at an infallible god, even as past epochs of human history have involved groups of people attempting to mediate between god.
Below my notes for future reference
Continue reading “Information has no essential link to truth”: Yuval Noah Harari in Nexus