"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"--
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.
