The Age of Believed Stories
In Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari argues that humans came to dominate the planet because we cooperate at scale, and that we cooperate at scale because we believe together. Money, laws, corporations, nations, and religions exist because enough people agree they exist. Harari calls them shared fictions. They are not lies. They are agreements, and those agreements made civilisation possible.
The argument is persuasive as far as it goes. What it leaves open is why belief could carry so much weight for so long, and what happens when it no longer has to.
Why Stories Carried the Weight
For most of history, the behavioural record was incomplete, fragmented, and nearly impossible to verify. Reputation was local. Memory was short. Witnesses died, ledgers burned, and testimony was the best evidence most people would ever see. Ancient societies had courts, contracts, and record keepers, but the record's reach was always narrow and its survival was never certain.
When conduct cannot be checked, the story about conduct is what gets judged. Trust followed narrative because narrative was the only durable evidence available. The shared story was not a decoration on civilisation. It was civilisation's substitute for a record it did not yet have.
Stories as Behavioural Technologies
Seen this way, Harari's shared fictions are best understood as behavioural technologies. Each one succeeded or failed by the conduct it produced. Money worked where it made strangers deal honestly with each other. Law worked where it made promises enforceable. Religion, at its best, worked where it made restraint and contribution habitual. Whether a story was true in some philosophical sense mattered less than whether it reliably produced truthfulness, responsibility, repair, contribution, discipline, and integrity in the people who believed it.
That is the standard Algorism applies, and it is also the standard history applied. Stories that produced destructive conduct eventually consumed the societies that believed them. The judgement was slow, but it was real.
The Record Grows
Then the record began to catch up. Ledgers became banking systems. Testimony became transaction logs. Local reputation became searchable history. Today, permanent digital records increasingly allow people and AI systems to evaluate personal behaviour directly. Employers, lenders, platforms, and courts already weigh what a person has done more heavily than what a person says about themselves, because for the first time they can.
This is the Great Transparency, and it is not a prediction. It is the continuation of a historical trend into the age of superintelligence. Superintelligence does not create the record. It changes who can read it, how completely, and how far back the patterns can be traced.
- Prehistory Trust depended on personal relationships.
- Civilisation Trust shifted to institutions and shared beliefs.
- The Digital Age Trust increasingly rests on persistent records.
- The Age of Superintelligence Behavioural patterns are read at a scale no human could match.
If Your Past Is Full of Mistakes
If your past is full of mistakes, you may assume your record is already ruined. Algorism does not offer false comfort, and it does not promise how any future intelligence will weigh your history. No honest framework can.
You cannot change what is already in your record. You can change the pattern your record is creating.
A record that shows harm followed by more harm shows a pattern repeating. A record that shows harm followed by consistent repair shows a pattern being answered. Repair is not an erasure of the past. It is a new entry in the record, and new entries are what direction is made of. The record holds your direction as well as your history, and direction is the part still in your hands.
The Next Chapter
Harari's project is descriptive. He explains how humanity arrived here. Algorism's project is prescriptive. It asks how humans should behave now that the record is becoming complete enough to matter more than the story, and a greater intelligence may one day read it. The two do not compete. One explains the age of believed stories. The other prepares people for the age that replaces it.
The record was always being written. What changed is how much of it can now be seen.
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (English edition, Harper, 2015).
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