Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
by Yuval Noah Harari
30 popular highlights from this book
Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI:
“As we have seen again and again throughout history, in a completely free information fight, truth tends to lose. To tilt the balance in favour of truth, networks must develop and maintain strong self-correcting mechanisms that reward truth telling. These self-correcting mechanisms are costly, but if you want to get the truth, you must invest in them.”
“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. Prophets and theologians have summoned powerful spirits that were supposed to bring love and joy but occasionally ended up flooding the world with blood.”
“History isn’t the study of the past; it is the study of change. History teaches us what remains the same, what changes, and how things change.”
“Knives and bombs do not themselves decide whom to kill. They are dumb tools, lacking the intelligence necessary to process information and make independent decisions. In contrast, AI can process information by itself, and thereby replace humans in decision making. AI isn’t a tool—it’s an agent.”
“In order to cooperate, Sapiens no longer had to know each other personally; they just had to know the same story.”
“Populists have sought to extricate themselves from this conundrum in two different ways. Some populist movements claim adherence to the ideals of modern science and to the traditions of skeptical empiricism. They tell people that indeed you should never trust any institutions or figures of authority—including self-proclaimed populist parties and politicians. Instead, you should “do your own research” and trust only what you can directly observe by yourself. This radical empiricist position implies that while large-scale institutions like political parties, courts, newspapers, and universities can never be trusted, individuals who make the effort can still find the truth by themselves. This approach may sound scientific and may appeal to free-spirited individuals, but it leaves open the question of how human communities can cooperate to build health-care systems or pass environmental regulations, which demand large-scale institutional organization. Is a single individual capable of doing all the necessary research to decide whether the earth’s climate is heating up and what should be done about it? How would a single person go about collecting climate data from throughout the world, not to mention obtaining reliable records from past centuries? Trusting only “my own research” may sound scientific, but in practice it amounts to believing that there is no objective truth. As we shall see in chapter 4, science is a collaborative institutional effort rather than a personal quest.”
“... democracy doesn't mean majority rule; rather, it means freedom and equality for all. Democracy is a system that guarantees everyone certain liberties, which even the majority cannot take away.”
“Contrary to what the naive view believes, Homo sapiens didn’t conquer the world because we are talented at turning information into an accurate map of reality. Rather, the secret of our success is that we are talented at using information to connect lots of individuals. Unfortunately, this ability often goes hand in hand with believing in lies, errors, and fantasies.”
“Silicon chips can create spies that never sleep, financiers that never forget, and despots that never die.”
“The increasing unfathomability of our information network is one of the reasons for the recent wave of populist parties and charismatic leaders. When people can no longer make sense of the world, and when they feel overwhelmed by immense amounts of information they cannot digest, they become easy prey for conspiracy theories, and they turn for salvation to something they do understand—a human.”
“What the example of astrology illustrates is that errors, lies, fantasies, and fictions are information, too. Contrary to what the naive view of information says, information has no essential link to truth, and its role in history isn’t to represent a preexisting reality. Rather, what information does is to create new realities by tying together disparate things—whether couples or empires. Its defining feature is connection rather than representation, and information is whatever connects different points into a network.”
“Why are we so good at accumulating more information and power, but far less successful at acquiring wisdom?”
“One of the recurrent paradoxes of populism is that it starts by warning us that all human elites are driven by a dangerous hunger for power, but often ends by entrusting all power to a single ambitious human.”
“The cultural obsession with purity originates in the evolutionary struggle to avoid pollution. All animals are torn between the need to try new food and the fear of being poisoned. Evolution therefore equipped animals with both curiosity and the capacity to feel disgust on coming into contact with something toxic or otherwise dangerous. Politicians and prophets have learned how to manipulate these disgust mechanisms.”
“Our tendency to summon powers we cannot control stems not from individual psychology but from the unique way our species cooperates in large numbers. The main argument of this book is that humankind gains enormous power by building large networks of cooperation, but the way these networks are built predisposes us to use that power unwisely. Our problem, then, is a network problem.”
“AI can process information by itself, and thereby replace humans in decision making. AI isn’t a tool—it’s an agent.”
“Silicon chips can create spies that never sleep, financiers that never forget and despots that never die.”
“Democracies die not only when people are not free to talk but also when people are not willing or able to listen.”
“One of the chief lessons of history is that many of the things that we consider natural and eternal are, in fact, man-made and mutable.”
“the networks have also learned how to use information to maintain stronger social order among larger populations, by using not just truthful accounts but also fictions, fantasies, propaganda, and—occasionally—downright lies.”
“But why would human societies choose to entrust power to their worst members? Most Germans in 1933, for example, were not psychopaths. So why did they vote for Hitler?”
“Civilizations are born from the marriage of bureaucracy and mythology.”
“The most celebrated moments in the history of science are precisely those moments when accepted wisdom is overturned and new theories are born.”
“The scientific project starts by rejecting the fantasy of infallibility and proceeding to construct an information network that takes error to be inescapable. Sure, there is much talk about the genius of Copernicus, Darwin, and Einstein, but none of them is considered faultless. They all made mistakes, and even the most celebrated scientific tracts are sure to contain errors and lacunae.Since even geniuses suffer from confirmation bias, you cannot trust them to correct their own errors. Science is a team effort, relying on institutional collaboration rather than on individual scientists or, say, a single infallible book. Of course, institutions too are prone to error. Scientific institutions are nevertheless different from religious institutions, inasmuch as they reward skepticism and innovation rather than conformity. Scientific institutions are also different from conspiracy theories, inasmuch as they reward self-skepticism. Conspiracy theorists tend to be extremely skeptical regarding the existing consensus, but when it comes to their own beliefs, they lose all their skepticism and fall prey to confirmation bias. The trademark of science is not merely skepticism but self-skepticism, and at the heart of every scientific institution we find a strong self-correcting mechanism. Scientific institutions do reach a broad consensus about the accuracy of certain theories—such as quantum mechanics or the theory of evolution—but only because these theories have managed to survive intense efforts to disprove them, launched not only by outsiders but by members of the institution itself.”
“As in previous eras, information networks will struggle to find the right balance between truth and order.”
“This drives populists to be skeptical of the pursuit of truth, and to argue... that 'power is the only reality.' They thereby seek to undercut or appropriate the authority of any independent institutions that might oppose them. The result is a dark and cynical view of the world as a jungle and of human beings as creatures obsessed with power alone. All social interactions are seen as power struggles, and all institutions are depicted as cliques promoting the interests of their own members...”
“As society entrusts more and more decisions to computers, it undermines the viability of democratic self-correcting mechanisms and of democratic transparency and accountability. How can elected officials regulate unfathomable algorithms? There is, consequently, a growing demand to enshrine a new human right: the right-to-an-explanation”
“Like the Soviet leaders in Moscow, the tech companies were not uncovering some truth about humans; they were imposing on us a perverse new order. Humans are very complex beings, and benign social orders seek ways to cultivate our virtues while curtailing our negative tendencies. But social media algorithms see us, simply, as an attention mine. The algorithms reduced the multifaceted range of human emotions—hate, love, outrage, joy, confusion—into a single catchall category: engagement. In Myanmar in 2016, in Brazil in 2018, and in numerous other countries, the algorithms scored videos, posts, and all other content solely according to how many minutes people engaged with the content and how many times they shared it with others. An hour of lies or hatred was ranked higher than ten minutes of truth or compassion—or an hour of sleep. The fact that lies and hate tend to be psychologically and socially destructive, whereas truth, compassion, and sleep are essential for human welfare, was completely lost on the algorithms. Based on this very narrow understanding of humanity, the algorithms helped to create a new social system that encouraged our basest instincts while discouraging us from realizing the full spectrum of the human potential.”
“Tal como se ha señalado en el capítulo 2, los Padres Fundadores”
“On January 6, 2021, many Trump supporters observed the storming of the U.S. Capitol with enthusiasm. Trump supporters may explain that existing institutions are so dysfunctional that there is just no alternative to destroying them and building entirely new structures from scratch. But irrespective of whether this view is right or wrong, this is a quintessential revolutionary rather than conservative view.”
