Book Review: Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari, 2024
If you’ve been worried that AI might cost you your job or expose your personal information, you’re thinking too small. In Nexus, Yuval Noah Harari takes us on a journey that reveals the far-reaching implications of AI, beyond just our personal lives.
Harari, a historian, places AI within the broader context of human information systems. He starts by reminding us how storytelling was the first way humans created large networks of shared information. Think of the Bible, laws, nations, corporations, and currency. These stories help us make sense of the world and connect us.
The book delves into the contrasting information networks that support democracies and autocracies. Democracies strive for truth and have self-correcting mechanisms, while autocracies seek power and order, often at the expense of truth. Harari explains how AI threatens these political systems by shifting power from politicians and bureaucrats to computers.
Unlike previous technologies, like the radio or the printing press, computers are active agents, and they’ve proved themselves capable of spreading hate. As a case in point, Harari describes the 2016-17 ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Myanmar. In the 2010s, people in Myanmar used Facebook as a source of news. Facebook’s algorithm seeks engagement, and it learned quickly that hatred is sticky, so it fed them messages full of hatred for the Rohingya. The result? 25,000 Rohingya civilians killed, up to 60,000 raped or sexually abused, and about 730,000 brutally expelled.
Harari warns that while AI can interpret and create without human intervention, we must not give up our search for truth. He argues that the way forward is through liberal democracy, with its built-in self-correcting mechanisms. This is crucial to avoid the pitfalls of past technologies, which led to imperialism, Nazism, and Stalinism.
In Nexus, Harari reminds us that AI is the first technology capable of making decisions and generating ideas independently. While we need order to function, we must strengthen the self-correcting features of our systems to avoid violent conflicts and maintain our human and civil rights.
Nexus is a thought-provoking read that challenges us to think beyond the immediate impacts of AI and consider its broader implications for our political systems and society as a whole. Harari’s ability to weave historical context with futuristic insights makes this book a must-read for anyone interested in the future of AI and its impact on humanity.
