Builds, of course, on Harari’s string of tremendous successes, and it surely is a reflection of this success that the latest offering has the air of a big-budget production with several hands contributing to its manufacture ... In one particularly weak section, Harari cites animal precedents for many classic human myths and folk tales ... Harari’s view grows more muddled still when he takes up the question of artificial intelligence.
His grimmest work yet ... Harari writes well at the scale of the species. As a book, Nexus doesn’t reach the high-water mark of Sapiens, but it offers an arresting vision of how AI could turn catastrophic. The question is whether Harari’s wide-angle lens helps us see how to avoid that.
A useful, well-informed primer ... Not all of Nexus feels original. If you pay attention to the news, you will recognize some of the stories Harari tells. But, at its best, his book summarizes the current state of affairs with a memorable clarity ... Frustrating.
A dollop of historical anecdote is seasoned with a pinch of social science and a spoonful of speculation, topped with a soggy crust of prescription, and lightly dusted with premonitions of the apocalypse that will overcome us if we refuse a second serving. Nexus goes down easily, but it isn’t as nourishing as it claims. Much of it leaves a sour taste ... Most interesting, and most flawed, when it examines our current situation.
Engrossing ... Has some curious blind spots; it’s odd, in a critique of a technology driven largely by profit-seeking corporations, that capitalism is hardly mentioned at all. 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 ... Operates primarily as a diagnosis and a call to action, and on those terms it’s broadly successful.
Nexus...contains many too-brief but fascinating discussions on subjects ... There are a brilliant few pages ... When Harari is not in his mode of oracular pontification, he can be a superb narrative writer. But oracular pontification is what, we must assume, his readers want.
Almost identical to Sapiens in content, only with the bits about prehistoric man truncated and the generic AI jeremiad padded out. Given Harari’s track record with predictions, the reader will be forgiven for not taking too seriously his insistence that our species will be extinct by the end of the century.
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. Indeed, it is Harari’s genius to untangle complex patterns to reveal complicated structures while illuminating the connections to our everyday lives. An important and timely must-read as our survival is at the mercy of information.
