Yuval Harari - Nexus
APAvar: Yuval Noah Harari (2024). Nexus: A brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI. Random House.
Link: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/762444/nexus-by-yuval-noah-harari/ebook/
My review: Harari is concerned about the current adoption of new AI systems (LLMs and AGIs). He argues that information networks is a useful frame with which to examine the potential impacts on current human societies of AI system adoption. He examines other human information networks that have supported religion, education, governance in the past and the present. He comes down hard on institutions like religions and bureaucracies.
The excerpts below are what I underlined while reading (page numbers are from the ebook version I purchased). They are not a summary of his argument.
page 5:
What do the cautionary fables of the [sorcerer's] apprentice and of Phaethon tell us in the twenty-first century? ... The fables offer no answers. ... [They] encourage people to abdicate responsibility and put their faith in gods and sorcerers .... The tendency to create powerful things with unintended consequences started not with the invention of the steam engine or AI but with the invention of religion.
... The Phaethon myth and Goethe's poem fail to provide useful advice because they mis-construe the way humans gain power. .... human power is never the outcome of individual initiative. Power always stems from cooperation between large numbers of humans.
... The main argument of this book is that humankind gains enormous power by building large networks of cooperation, but the way those networks are built predisposes us to use that power unwisely. Our problem, then, is a network problem.
page 8:
... the real hero of history has always been information, rather than Homo sapiens, and that scientists increasingly understand not just history but also biology, politics, and economics in terms of information flows. Animals, states, and markets are all information networks, absorbing data from the environment, making decisions, and releasing data back.
[reducing everything to information does provide Harari a framework, but not an explanation of what "information" is (or even "history"?]
page 14:
... information has no essential link to truth. ... Its defining feature is connection rather than representation, and information is whatever connects different points into a network. Information doesn’t necessarily inform us about things. Rather, it puts things in formation.
page 15:
Viewing information as a social nexus helps us understand many aspects of human history that confound the naive view of information as representation.