Infowars: Yuval Noah Harari's new book on AI

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  The Economist Hi there, it's Jason Palmer here,

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  co-host of The Intelligence, our daily news and current affairs podcast.

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  This is Editor's Picks.

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  You're about to hear an article from the latest edition of The Economist read aloud.

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  Enjoy.

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  Let Truth and Falsehood Grapple argue John Milton in Areopagitica,

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  a pamphlet published in 1644 defending the freedom of the press.

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  Such freedom would, he admitted, allow incorrect or misleading works to be published,

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  but bad ideas would spread anyway even without printing,

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  so better to allow everything to be published and let rival views compete on the battlefield of ideas.

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  Good information Milton confidently believed would drive out bad.

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  The dust and cinders of falsehood may not yet serve to polish and brighten the armoury of truth.

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  Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli historian,

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  lambasts this position as the naive view of information in a timely new book.

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  It is mistaken, he argues,

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  to suggest that more information is always better and likely to lead to the truth,

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  the internet did not end totalitarianism and racism cannot be fact-checked anyway.

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  But he also argues against a populist view that objective truth does not exist and that information should be wielded as a weapon.

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  It is ironic, he notes, that the notion of truth as illusory,

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  which has been embraced by right-wing politicians,

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