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Authoritarian Algorithms: Deconstructing Myths of the Future

Popular rhetoric from the likes of Yuval Noah Harari fails us in our most weary and desperate hour.

Odin Halvorson
Predict
9 min readJul 26, 2023

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“Artificial Intelligence is no match for Natural Stupidity” by Sean Davis is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Over supper with an interviewer from the New Yorker in 2020, Yuval Noah Harari “noted that, in the Middle Ages, “only what kings and queens did was important, and even then, not everything they did,”” (Parker, 2020). It’s easy enough to understand his point: from a certain perspective, big changes in history seem to be about one or two big figures, traipsing along, knocking over all age-old precedents in their way.

But history is less about the figures at the head than about the folk that surround them. All the Einstein’s, Hitler’s, Shakespeare’s, Stalin’s, and Harari’s of the world have been the product of a living system of humanity.

You are every bit as important as any of Harari’s kings, every bit as valid a player on the grand human scale. The truth of history is that it changes depending on your perspective — your lens. As with all of Harari’s writing, we end…

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Odin Halvorson
Odin Halvorson

Written by Odin Halvorson

A futurist/socialist/fantasist writer, editor, and scholar. MFA/MLIS. Free access to my articles at OdinHalvorson.substack.com | More over at OdinHalvorson.com.

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