How not to treat Yuval Noah Harari

Artificial intelligence is a major subject in Yuval Noah Harari’s latest book, Nexus, about the history of information networks. Illustration by C Y Gopinath using AI

If human beings are so smart, why are we so dumb?"

It's a simple enough question, but when author and thinker Yuval Noah Harari poses it, it stops you in your tracks. He continues, digging deeper. Why do we kill our own kind? Why are we destroying the planet that sustains us? Why are only a handful of people making world-changing decisions about AI, the very technology that can make all of us extinct?

Yuval was speaking at an event organised by a noted bookshop that serves as the city's premier cultural hub, a vibrant venue for book lovers of all stripes. The topic was AI, which he calls alien intelligence. It is a major subject in his latest book, Nexus, about the history of information networks.

His interlocutor had come well prepared. His questions were to the point, barely more than a sentence or two, allowing Yuval all the time he needed to answer.

Yuval spoke in spontaneous memes.
"Truth is only a small subset of reality."
"It is impossible for truth to be an exact replica of reality."
"Most people today need an information diet, just as our bodies need food diets. We should decide what we put into our heads."
"Social media's algorithms have hacked our brains' codes. We are at the end of the age of individualism. Algorithms know your life better than you do."

Don't even try to guess the name of the bookshop behind this illuminating event; you'd lose miserably.

It was not Crossword, though it's true that they hosted Yuval at the back lawn of The LaLiT last Saturday. I went. It was an expensive affair that had been promoted as an opportunity to hear Aamir Khan, the reflective man's actor, in conversation with one of the most luminous minds of our time.

I gladly paid Rs 6,000 for the privilege; Aamir and Yuval are on my short list of exceptional humans. Aamir's incisive, heartfelt conversations in his TV show Satyamev Jayate about India's pervasive social predicaments have always moved me.

I keenly looked forward to his exchanges with Yuval.

Instead, the organisers pulled a sloppy rabbit out of their hat, introducing an unknown third person who had not even been listed on the ticket. He was elaborately introduced as a neurophysicist, researcher and polymath, poet, painter, author, quizzer, India's leading psychiatrist, and master of six languages (now learning Sanskrit and Greek), all while setting up the department of AI and medicine at a city hospital. No one can be all that and also humble.

All Yuval got was an abbreviated welcome with the caveat that he "needed no introduction anyway".

Shortly afterward, Aamir recused himself, confessing that although he had received Nexus some time back, he had not yet read it because "my schedule in the last couple of months has been crazy".

The neurophysicist, who had read the book and seemed to believe he was part of a double billing, thought that asking Yuval why books were important would be a stunning start. Like me, you know in your bones that Crossword planted that question. Most people seated there did not need to hear why books were important.

We had paid to listen to Yuval, not an unknown Gujarati polymath. But the neurophysicist, sure that he was fascinating, delivered rambling entrées leading to inch-deep questions, and regularly hogged the mic through the evening.

When Yuval, talking about the confluence of biology, neurology and AI, said that biology moved slower than technology, the neurophysicist could not resist piping in to correct him. Yuval could not have felt good.
Towards the end, with the organisers frantically signalling him to wrap up, he cutely started a pointless chat to ask Copilot, Microsoft's chatbot, what it thought about Yuval. That was the wrong chatbot anyway. Also, if AIs were plotting the demise of humanity, they'd hardly be likely to announce it at a public meeting.

A literary evening should not feel like an evening at a disco, but this one did. Libraries and literary events are reverent places where minds commune through the printed word. Muted voices, subtle music born of reverie or ecstasy, and unobtrusive arrangements should be the norm. The author is the star; the moment and the mic belong to them.

I felt cheated and others must have too. Crossword's event was irreverence, insensitivity and cacophony on a plate. Our ears were hammered by the bass boom-boom-boom of technopop music at ear-shattering volume, in direct competition with an endless loop of ads for The LaLiT and Crossword, also at full blast.

I thought the two stars on stage, Yuval and Aamir, were treated shabbily. Rather than being discreetly spirited out when the show ended, they were squeezed through a narrow passage packed with men waiting to urinate, towards the open lobby where armed paparazzi lay in wait.

Walk with me if you want to see how a professional bookshop would have conducted the same event. On September 16, Washington DC's Politics and Prose Bookshop hosted Yuval in conversation about Nexus with Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic. It was Yuval unfettered, questioned intelligently and allowed to reveal his amazing mind without interruptions. You can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5oodNOqgUg

If someone convened Aamir and Yuval again, but without the mic-happy neurophysicist, I might still pay money to hear them. We would hope, of course, that this time Aamir would have read the book.

You can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopi@gmail.com
Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.