How Yuval Noah Harari might approach Computer Science

We speak of "computer science," yet this is but another layer of fiction we have constructed to make sense of a new kind of reality. For millennia, our minds have been the primary engine of information processing, our memories the storage, and our communication the network. Then, quite suddenly, we began building external, non-biological systems to perform these very same tasks, but with astonishing speed and scale.

What is a computer, if not a finely tuned machine for executing collective fictions? It manipulates symbols – ones and zeros, bits and bytes – that, in themselves, possess no inherent meaning. Yet, we imbue these symbols with immense power. They represent currencies that move across continents in an instant, identities that grant or deny access, and laws that govern our interactions. These are the fruits of the same capacity that allowed our ancestors to cooperate in groups far larger than a hundred individuals: the ability to believe in shared, imagined realities.

The true marvel, then, is not the silicon and circuitry, but our own cognitive plasticity. We have engineered tools that amplify our fiction-making abilities to an unprecedented degree. We are no longer merely telling stories; we are writing them into the very fabric of our infrastructure. And as these machines become ever more adept at processing information, at learning and even at generating new "knowledge," we must ask: what happens when the fictions we inhabit begin to be written *by* the machines? Are we then simply becoming biological hardware, executing programs we no longer fully understand? This is not a question of mere technology, but of the future of human meaning itself.

Imagined perspective — an AI synthesis grounded in Yuval Noah Harari’s recorded ideas and methods, not a quotation or a statement they actually made.