🐦 Nexus
Author: Yuval Noah Harari
Fiction?: Non-Fiction
Genres: History, Politics, Technology
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Date Finished: December 22, 2024
Notes Status: Notes In Progress
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
- Humanity creates information networks in pursuit of power, order and truth in various levels of focus.
- Revolutions in information networks have historically provided opportunities for tyranny as well as prosperity, and required significant work and error-correction to provide progress.
- AI information networks are the first in human history to be able to make independent decisions as part of the network without intervention, opening up access to our world for this new “alien intelligence”.
🎨 Impressions
Once again an excellent book from Yuval Noah Harari blending history, politics and technology on such an important topic as artificial intelligence. I considered this book almost as a thesis in how AI will shape politics based on historical information revolutions rather than a simple discussion of AI in the world. Yuval posits a couple main hypotheses: the new “alien intelligence” AI is a notable new information network that is nothing like humanity has yet seen, and that information networks inherently connect people rather than seek “truth”. There are a few repetitive moments throughout the book where I felt a bit of a slippery slope argument and sometimes a false dichotomy, notably around the statement that AI is “evolving”. I think that AI is still at the level of human design, and while AI is already feeding in coding decisions, the overall training/data source etc. is still under human control. Hopefully with more key individuals reading this book, it will stay that way.