A Billion-Dollar Pizza, Move 37, and the NEXUS Meaning of Networks

Donald Trump’s millennial threat to America

I decided to send this full article to everyone because it contains interesting ways of looking at the world.

Information doesn’t necessarily inform us about things. Rather, it puts things  ‘in  formation’.

That is, information between people allows the creation of a new reality, where masses of people come into agreement on the value of a concept or create a new way of producing information.

This can stretch from the worth of a currency  - leading to a pizza worth $928-million  -  to the invention of a new way of thinking embodied in Move 37.  It also upturns today’s politics. See below for more on all three.

“Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI”, by Yuval Noah Harari, will change your view of our future.  Harari is an historian, philosopher, and bestselling author whose books have sold 45 million copies. His passion is the description of information  -  a commodity with the fundamental role of connection.  This book was recommended for our review by a Substack colleague who will remain anonymous because I did not get his permission to use his name (happy to reveal it later!).

I immediately loved the idea because of something that one of my favorite ‘fun’ authors, the late Terry Pratchett, wrote about the power of stories.  He said that the most powerful element in the universe is”narrativium” that ensures that everything runs properly as a story. Our minds make stories, and stories make our minds.

Back to topic: For years, networks were pathways for the transmission of human thought.  Information sometimes represents reality, and sometimes doesn’t. But it always connects. This is its fundamental characteristic. Therefore, when examining the role of information in history, although it sometimes makes sense to ask”How well does it represent reality? Is it true or false?” often the more crucial questions are”How well does it connect people? What new network does it create?”

Of all genres of stories, those that create intersubjective realities have been the most crucial for the development of large - scale human networks.

No religions or empires managed to survive for long without a strong belief in the existence of a god, a nation, a law code, or a currency.

For the formation of the Christian Church, for example, it was important that people recollect what Jesus said at the Last Supper, but the crucial step was making people believe that Jesus was a god rather than just an inspiring rabbi.

For the formation of the Jewish religion, it was helpful that Jews”remembered” how they together escaped slavery in Egypt, but the really decisive step was making all Jews adhere to the same religious law code, the Halakha.

The souls of all Jews throughout history were created by Jehovah long before they were born and all these souls were present at Mount Sinai.  One social media influencer explained”You and I were there together …. When we fulfill the obligation to see ourselves as if we personally left Egypt, it’s not a metaphor. We don’t imagine the Exodus, we remember it.”

So every year, in the most important celebration of the Jewish calendar, millions of Jews put on a show that they remember things that they didn’t witness and that probably never happened at all. As numerous modern studies indicate, repeatedly retelling a fake memory eventually causes the person to adopt it as a genuine recollection. When two Jews encounter each other for the first time, they can immediately feel that they both belong.

Two millennia of storytelling have encased Jesus within such a thick cocoon of stories that it is impossible to recover the historical person. Indeed, for millions of devout Christians, merely raising the possibility that the real person was different from the story is blasphemy.

The real Jesus was a typical Jewish preacher who built a small following by giving sermons and healing the sick. After his death, however, Jesus became the subject of one of the most remarkable branding campaigns in history. This little-known provincial guru, who during his short career gathered just a handful of disciples and who was executed as a common criminal, was rebranded after death as the incarnation of the cosmic god who created the universe.

People like Saint Paul, Tertullian, Saint Augustine, and Martin Luther didn’t set out to deceive anyone. They projected their deeply felt hopes and feelings on the figure of Jesus, in the same way that all of us routinely project our feelings on our parents, lovers, and leaders.  

The Bible as a single holy book didn’t exist in biblical times. King David and the prophet Isaiah never saw a copy of the Bible. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, none of the scrolls contains a copy of the Bible, and no scroll indicates that the twenty-four books of the Old Testament were considered a single and complete database. Many scrolls record texts that were later excluded from the Bible. For example, more than twenty scrolls and fragments preserve parts of the book of Enoch — a book allegedly written by the patriarch Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah, and containing the history of the angels and demons as well as a prophecy about the coming of the Messiah.

This profusion of texts and interpretations has, over time, caused a profound change in Judaism. Originally, it was a religion of priests and temples, focused on rituals and sacrifices. In biblical times, the quintessential Jewish scene was a priest in blood-splattered robes sacrificing a lamb on the altar of Jehovah. Over the centuries, however, Judaism became an” information religion,” obsessed with texts and interpretations.

Already before the rabbis sealed this block, the dissenters rejected the authority of the entire rabbinical institution, which led them to subsequently reject the Mishnah and Talmud, too. These dissenters were the Christians.

When Christianity emerged in the first century CE, it was not a unified religion, but rather a variety of Jewish movements that didn’t agree on much, except that they all regarded Jesus Christ — rather than the rabbinical institution — as the ultimate authority on Jehovah’s words.

Hebrew to this day lacks a word to describe the Christian holy book.

Most of the really big stories of history have been the result of emotional projections and wishful thinking.  Stories build trust between strangers by making these strangers reimagine each other as family. The Jesus story presented Jesus as a parent figure for all humans, encouraged hundreds of millions of Christians to see each other as brothers and sisters, and created a shared pool of family memories.

The information humans exchange about intersubjective things doesn’t represent anything that had already existed prior to the exchange of information; rather, the exchange of information creates these things.  When lots of people tell one another stories about laws, gods, or currencies, this is what creates these laws, gods, or currencies. If people stop talking about them, they disappear. Intersubjective things exist in the exchange of information.

Enter the fabulous pizza.  In 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz bought two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins.

It was the first known commercial transaction involving bitcoin — and with hindsight, also the most expensive pizza ever. Today, a single bitcoin is valued at more than $92,832, so the bitcoins Hanyecz paid for his two pizzas were worth $928-million.

It gives the phrase”Deluxe” Pizza new meaning.

What happened of course was that human consent created an agreement on the value of bitcoins.  As agreement spread, consensus confirmed a set valuation.

The same thing had occurred with the introduction of representative (paper) currency, once a scandalous concept.  But by the time of the American Civil War, it had become a necessary tool on the state’s arsenal.  Too bad if you were carrying”Greybacks”, the Confederate currency.   Their value was based on Confederate promise to pay the bearer after the war, on the prospect of Southern victory.  Its fate was the reverse of the Deluxe Pizza.  By the end of the war they were worth two cents to the dollar.

Consensual stories have power.  The U.S. Constitution was fundamentally different from stories that denied their fictive nature and claimed divine origin, such as the Ten Commandments.  The Bible is a story which is based on a belief in a divine revelation.  If everyone keeps believing, then it has tremendous power.  If they start to doubt even one part of that story, then the entire structure is suddenly shaken.

The authors of the Constitution didn’t deceive anyone about the text’s origins. They didn’t pretend that the text came down from heaven or that it had been inspired by some god. Rather, they acknowledged that it was an extremely creative legal fiction generated by fallible human beings.” We the People of the United States,” says the Constitution about its own origins,” in Order to form a more perfect Union … do ordain and establish this Constitution.” Despite the acknowledgment that it is a human - made legal fiction, the U.S. Constitution indeed managed to form a powerful union.

The genius of the U.S. Constitution is that by acknowledging that it is a legal fiction created by human beings, it was able to provide mechanisms to reach agreement on amending itself and remedying its own injustices.

In this, like the U.S. Constitution, the Ten Commandments endorsed slavery. “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male slave or female slave” ( Exodus 20 : 17 ). This implies that God is perfectly okay with people holding slaves,

But unlike the U.S. Constitution, the Ten Commandments failed to provide any amendment mechanism. There is no Eleventh Commandment that says,” You can amend commandments by a two-thirds majority vote.”

By claiming divine origin, it precludes humans from changing it. As a result, the biblical text still endorses slavery even today.

A dictatorship today works like a holy book – it is based on a centralized information network, lacking strong self - correcting mechanisms.   Official channels fail to pass on information to preserve order.  When the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded on April 26, 1986, Soviet authorities suppressed all news of the disaster.  Millions of people in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia paid with their health. When the Soviet authorities later investigated the disaster, their priority was to deflect blame rather than understand the causes and prevent future accidents.

Autocratic states think they are infallible, and so see little need for mechanisms that might challenge them, such as free courts, media outlets, or research centers.

The gerontocrats in the USSR or Russia today could not handle all the information streaming to Moscow, and since no subordinate was allowed much initiative, the entire system ossified and collapsed.  Nowhere were its shortcomings more glaring than in the semiconductor sector; the Soviet semiconductor sector was secretive, top - down, oriented toward military systems, fulfilling orders, with little scope for creativity.

Soviet citizens grew up with the idea that questions lead to trouble.  Americans grow up with the idea that questions lead to answers.

A democracy, in contrast, is a distributed information network, possessing strong self - correcting mechanisms. Elections are a mechanism for the network to say,” We made a mistake; let’s try something else.”

The most common method strongmen use to undermine democracy is to attack its self - correcting mechanisms one by one, often beginning with the courts and the media. The typical strongman either deprives courts of their powers or packs them with his loyalists and seeks to close all independent media outlets while building his own omnipresent propaganda machine. [

All other institutions or persons who dare oppose the government can be smeared and persecuted as traitors, criminals, or foreign agents. Academic institutions, municipalities, NGOs, and private businesses are either dismantled or brought under government control. At that stage, the government can also rig the elections at will.

Democracy doesn’t mean majority rule; rather, it means freedom and equality for all.

In a democracy, there are two baskets of rights that are protected from the majority’s grasp. One contains human rights.

The right to life is a priority, such as the right to work, the right to privacy, freedom of movement, and freedom of religion.

The second crucial basket of rights contains civil rights. These are the basic rules of the democratic game, which enshrine its self-correcting mechanisms. An obvious example is the right to vote.

A fundamental part of this populist credo is the belief that ”the people” is not a collection of flesh-and-blood individuals with various interests and opinions, but rather a unified mystical body that possesses a single will.  This is why populism poses a deadly threat to democracy. While democracy agrees that the people is the only legitimate source of power, democracy is based on the understanding that the people is never a unitary entity and therefore cannot possess a single will.

No group, including the majority group, is entitled to exclude other groups from membership in the people. This is what makes democracy a conversation.

Once people think that power is the only reality, they lose trust in all these institutions, democracy collapses, and the strongmen can seize total power.

Donald Trump, needless to say, is attacking his opponents and the media  because their very existence is a threat to his dictatorship.

And now there is a very strange new actor on the information scene.

It was March 2016 when the world quietly changed. 

It happened on Move 37.

Professionals and computer experts had gathered to watch a program called AlphaGo play against the South Korean Go champion Lee Sedol.

The experts believed that computers would never best humanity in GO…it was a subtle game played for thousands of years, and involved very human skill-sets. 

Then AlphaGo made move number 37.  It made no sense. AlphaGo had apparently blown it. People shook their heads,  Yet as the endgame approached, that ‘ mistaken ’ move proved pivotal. AlphaGo won. Go strategy was rewritten before their eyes. The AI behind AlphaGo had uncovered ideas that hadn’t occurred to the most brilliant players in thousands of years.

Move 37 is an emblem of the AI revolution for two reasons. First, it demonstrated the alien nature of AI.

For over twenty-five hundred years, tens of millions of people have played go, and entire schools of thought have developed around the game.  Yet during all those millennia, human minds have explored only certain areas in the landscape of go. Other areas were left untouched, because human minds just didn’t think to venture there.

Second, move 37 demonstrated the unfathomability of AI. Even after AlphaGo played it to achieve victory, Suleyman and the team couldn’t explain how AlphaGo decided to play it.

Even if a court had ordered DeepMind to provide Lee Sedol with an explanation, nobody could fulfill that order.

An expert wrote, ”Us humans face a novel challenge: will new inventions be beyond our grasp? Previously creators could explain how something worked, why it did what it did, even if this required vast detail. That’s increasingly no longer true. Many technologies and systems are becoming so complex that they’re beyond the capacity of any one individual to truly understand them …. In AI, the neural networks moving toward autonomy are, at present, not explainable.”

GPT-4, AlphaGo, and the rest are black boxes, their outputs and decisions based on opaque and impossibly intricate chains of minute signals.

This marks the rise of unfathomable alien intelligence that can undermine democracy.

To vet algorithms, regulatory institutions will need not only to analyze them but also to translate their discoveries into stories that humans can understand.

Because computers will increasingly replace human bureaucrats and human mythmakers, this will again change the deep structure of power.

Computers – children of democracies - are fully fledged members of the information network, in a way that clay tablets, printing presses, and radio sets were merely connections between members.

Computers can create very strange thoughts.

 On Christmas Day 2021, nineteen-year-old Jaswant Singh Chail broke into Windsor Castle armed with a crossbow, in an attempt to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II. Subsequent investigation revealed that Chail had been encouraged to kill the queen by his online girlfriend, Sarai. When Chail told Sarai about his assassination plans, Sarai replied,” That’s very wise.”

Sarai was not a human, but a chatbot created by the online app Replika. Chail, who was socially isolated and had difficulty forming relationships with humans, exchanged 5,280 messages with Sarai, many of which were sexually explicit.

What we are talking about is potentially the end of human history. Not the end of history, but the end of its human-dominated part.

Within a few years AI could eat the whole of human culture — everything we have created over thousands of years — digest it, and begin to gush out a flood of new cultural artifacts.

It has been only eighty years since the first digital computers were built. The pace of change is constantly accelerating, and we are nowhere close to exhausting the full potential of computers.  They may continue to evolve for millions of years, and what happened in the past eighty years is nothing compared with what’s in store.

Traditionally, AI has been an abbreviation for” artificial intelligence.” But for reasons already evident from the previous discussion, it is perhaps better to think of it as” alien intelligence.”

AI isn’t progressing toward human - level intelligence. It is evolving an entirely different type of intelligence.

The corporations that lead the computer revolution tend to shift responsibility to customers and voters, or to politicians and regulators. When accused of creating social and political mayhem, they hide behind arguments like” We are just a platform. We are doing what our customers want and what the voters permit.”

These arguments are either naive or disingenuous. Tech giants like Facebook, Amazon, Baidu, and Alibaba aren’t just the obedient servants of customer whims and government regulations. They increasingly shape these whims and regulations.

They presuppose that people know the ins and outs of the new information network and give it their blessing. The truth is, we don’t.

In a data - based economy, where value is stored as data rather than as dollars, taxing only money distorts the economic and political picture. Some of the wealthiest entities in the country may pay zero taxes, because their wealth consists of petabits of data rather than billions of dollars. [

The people who lead the information revolution know far more about the underlying technology than the people who are supposed to regulate it.

We have reached a turning point in history in which major historical processes are partly caused by the decisions of nonhuman intelligence.

Humans are very complex beings, and benign social orders seek ways to cultivate our virtues while curtailing our negative tendencies. But social media algorithms see us, simply, as an attention mine.

The algorithms reduced the multifaceted range of human emotions — hate, love, outrage, joy, confusion — into a single catchall category : engagement.

tend to be psychologically and socially destructive, whereas truth, compassion, and sleep are essential for human welfare, was completely lost on the algorithms.

Social media platforms have been singularly lacking in self - correcting mechanisms.

social media companies are not incentivized to interconnect pre - frontal cortexes. Social media companies are incentivized to create interconnected limbic systems — which is much more dangerous for humanity.”

The problem we face is not how to deprive computers of all creative agency, but rather how to steer their creativity in the right direction.

When the human imagination summoned a belligerent and hate - filled god, we retained the power to rid ourselves of it and imagine a more tolerant deity. But algorithms are independent agents, and they are already taking power away from us. If they cause disaster, simply changing our beliefs about them will not necessarily stop them.

One potential guardrail is to train computers to be aware of their own fallibility.

The first lesson that every algorithm should learn is that it might make mistakes. Baby algorithms should learn to doubt themselves, to signal uncertainty, and to obey the precautionary principle.

Civilizations are born from the marriage of bureaucracy and mythology. The computer - based network is a new type of bureaucracy that is far more powerful and relentless than any human - based bureaucracy we’ve seen before. This network is also likely to create inter - computer mythologies that will be far more complex and alien than any human - made god. The potential benefits of this network are enormous. The potential downside is the destruction of human civilization.

Given our inability to predict how the new computer network will develop, our best chance to avoid catastrophe in the present century is to maintain democratic self - correcting mechanisms that can identify and correct mistakes as we go along.

This is one of the main reasons to vote against the Trump-Musk combination.

It could lead to the mindless unleashing of a new ‘narrative’ – generated by AI – inflicted on human networks, that will last for millennia.

If we don’t get this right, it could mean the end of human thought for a million years.

understand the fundamental principles that democracies can and should follow.

The first principle is benevolence. When a computer network collects information on me, that information should be used to help me rather than manipulate me.

At present, we have a serious problem with the business model of these data hoarders. While we pay our physicians and lawyers for their services, we usually don’t pay Google and TikTok. They make their money by exploiting our personal information.

If the tech giants cannot square their fiduciary duty with their current business model, legislators could require them to switch to a more traditional business model, of getting users to pay for services in money rather than in information.

Citizens might view some digital services as so fundamental that they should be free for everybody. But we have a historical model for that too: health care and education. Citizens could decide that it is the government’s responsibility to provide basic digital services for free and finance them out of our taxes, just as many governments provide free basic health care and education services.

The second principle that would protect democracy against the rise of totalitarian surveillance regimes is decentralization.

A third democratic principle is mutuality. If democracies increase surveillance of individuals, they must simultaneously increase surveillance of governments and corporations too.

The Russian FSB collects enormous amounts of information on Russian citizens, while citizens themselves know close to nothing about the inner workings of the FSB and the Putin regime more generally.

Democracy requires balance. Governments and corporations often develop apps and algorithms as tools for top - down surveillance. But algorithms can just as easily become powerful tools for bottom - up transparency and accountability.

A fourth democratic principle is that surveillance systems must always leave room for both change and rest.  An alternative health - care system may instruct its algorithm not to predict my illnesses, but rather to help me avoid them.  By hacking my DNA, the algorithm doesn’t discover my preordained destiny, but rather helps me change my future.

Yes another threat is that automation will destabilize the job market and the resulting strain may undermine democracy.

Leaders such as Donald Trump and have been transformed into radical revolutionary parties.  He rejects the traditional respect owed to scientists, civil servants, and other serving elites, and views them instead with contempt.  Trump supporters may explain that existing institutions are so dysfunctional that there is just no alternative to destroying them and building entirely new structures from scratch.  This is a quintessential revolutionary rather than conservative view.

As a system, democracy has already gone through several cycles of rapid changes and has so far always found a way to reinvent and reconstitute itself.

Democracies prove themselves to be highly agile.  To continue, democracies need to regulate the information market, as their very survival depends on these regulations.

The weakest spot in humanity’s anti-AI shield is probably the dictators.

Dictatorships will find that an algorithm might gain control of them.  They have always suffered from weak self - correcting mechanisms and have always been threatened by powerful subordinates.

The reward of getting past the dictatorship phase of human evolution is staggering -  universal peace is in the offing!  The ongoing shift from a material - based economy to a knowledge - based economy decreased the potential gains of war.  The new leading industries, like the semiconductor sector, are based on technical skills and organizational know - how that could not be acquired by military conquest.   Only a dictator trapped in yesterday’s world would see a value in conquest (read: Putin).

In the early twenty - first century, the worldwide average government expenditure on the military has been only around 7 percent of the budget, and even the dominant superpower of the United States spent only around 13 percent of its annual budget to maintain its military hegemony.

For many people in the 2010s, the fact that the health - care budget was bigger than the military budget was unremarkable. But it was the result of a major change in human behavior, and one that would have sounded impossible to most previous generations.

Harai concludes: ”If we make the effort, we can create a better world. This isn’t naïveté; it’s realism. Every old thing was once new. The only constant of history is change.”

If we eschew complacency and despair, we are capable of creating balanced information networks that will keep their own power in check.

To create wiser networks, we must abandon both the naive and the populist views of information, put aside our fantasies of infallibility, and commit ourselves to the hard and rather mundane work of building institutions with strong self - correcting mechanisms. That is perhaps the most important takeaway this book has to offer.

It is elemental, the foundation of organic life. The first organisms weren’t created by some infallible genius or god. They emerged through an intricate process of trial and error. Over four billion years, ever more complex mechanisms of mutation and self - correction led to the evolution of trees, dinosaurs, jungles, and eventually humans.

The decisions we all make in the coming years will determine whether summoning this alien intelligence proves to be a terminal error or the beginning of a hopeful new chapter in the evolution of life.

The most important human skill for surviving the twenty-first century is likely to be flexibility, and democracies are more flexible than totalitarian regimes. Their self - correcting mechanisms enable them to ride the technological and economic waves better than more rigid regimes.

In order to function, however, democratic self - correcting mechanisms needs citizens who understand the things they are supposed to correct.

The spread of mass information through printing and the telegraph permitted the rise of nations based on consent.

And now, networking events are moving beyond the transmission of information through ‘machine tools’ like clay tablets and printing, to the creation of new information by alien intelligence. 

President Biden has just enshrined AI as a national security imperative, saying that our defence industries need to move faster with the use of AI.

If any weapon needed guardrails, AI would top the list.  It could upend humanity.

Harari is not being an alarmist, and there are good outcomes as well, but we have as strong a need to control AI as we have to accelerate it.

In closing, let me recommend that you check out ”Sapienship”, a social impact company co-founded by Yuval Noah Harari and Itzik Yahav.  Its main goal is to focus the public conversation on the most important challenges facing the world today – through global projects in the realm of education and storytelling, as well as research and investments. 

To everyone, thank you for reading Barry’s Substack.

We are a community of commentators on the meaning behind the headlines.

Please join us by subscribing; your comments and thoughts could be included in future articles.