Machine become monster?

In Nexus, author Yuval Noah Harari explores why we cannot expect to foresee or control the consequences of an AI-officiated future

- CP Surendran

In Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the opening scenes - The Dawn of Man - are about a group of apes in Africa who wake up to a mysterious, black monolith in their midst. It revolutionizes their cognitive powers, marking their ascent to Man.

The stone looks like a vertical black screen. The movie, based on short stories by Arthur C. Clarke, discovers two more such monoliths: one on the moon and the other on Jupiter. The last one turns out to be the doorway into a room where time has been rendered meaningless, from which a lone astronaut, Dave Bowman, steps out into the fluid psychedelic dimensions of universal consciousness, and is reborn as Star Child. During the space odyssey, one of the astronauts, HAL 9000, an AI program, rebels against its human companions and, finally, must be dismantled. A possible reason for this metallic murder is that HAL has been programmed to be responsible for the voyage's success, even at the expense of the lives on board. The machine becomes a monster because its need to achieve its objective overrides all other considerations. Like many successful people, HAL is a monomaniac.

Simply put, this situation troubles Yuval Noah Harari. In his latest book Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, he explains the nodes of the evolution of human society through networks of information from cuneiform clay tablets in Mesopotamia around 2500 BCE to the age of the computer network. The growth and change in the means of the distribution of the story is how humans move forward.