Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI By Yuval Noah Harari
Author(s): Yuval Noah Harari
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Year: 2024
Language: English
Pages: 528
ISBN: 9780593734223, 9780593736814, 9780593734247
Size: 801 kB
Extension: epub
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Sapiens tells the ground-breaking story of how information networks created and destroyed our civilization.
For the past 100,000 years, we, the Sapiens, have gathered great power. Despite our discoveries, inventions, and triumphs, we are now facing an existential crisis. The planet is on the verge of ecological disaster. Misinformation abounds. And we’re speeding headlong into the age of AI, a new information network that threatens to destroy us. Why are we so self-destructive, with all that we have accomplished?
Nexus examines the long lens of human history to see how the flow of knowledge has shaped us and our planet. Yuval Noah Harari takes us on a journey from the Stone Age to the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the current resurgence of populism, asking us to contemplate the complex link between knowledge and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He investigates how many communities and political institutions throughout history have used knowledge to achieve their objectives, both good and bad. And he discusses the important decisions we must make when non-human intelligence threatens our own existence.
Information is not the basic material of truth, nor is it simply a weapon. Nexus seeks the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, rediscovering our common humanity.
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI By Yuval Noah Harari