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Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
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About This Book
From the author of Sapiens comes the groundbreaking story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world. For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions, and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI—a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. For all that we have accomplished, why are we so self-destructive? Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems throughout history have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence. Information is not the raw material of truth; neither is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, and in doing so, rediscovers our shared humanity.
Reviews
"A useful, well-informed primer ..."
"Almost identical to Sapiens in content, only with the bits about prehistoric man truncated and the generic AI jeremiad padded out."
"There are a brilliant few pages ..."
"But whether or not you agree with Harari's historical framing of AI, it's hard not to be impressed by the meticulous way he builds it up ..."
"Harari's view grows more muddled still when he takes up the question of artificial intelligence."
"Harari draws on history, philosophy, science, psychology, and political theory to present a plethora of examples of information as the current running beneath all human endeavor."
"Confronting the avalanche of books on the prospects of AI, readers would do well to begin with this one."
"Nexus goes down easily, but it isn't as nourishing as it claims."
"The question is whether Harari's wide-angle lens helps us see how to avoid that."
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