Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

by Yuval Noah Harari

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.

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. Even more specifically, it is an information problem. Information is the glue that holds networks together. But for tens of thousands of years, Sapiens built and maintained large networks by inventing and spreading fictions, fantasies, and mass delusions—about gods,

“the reality is that nearly every aspect of life is getting progressively better as a result of exponentially improving technology.” Looking back at the grand sweep of human history, he cites examples like the invention of the printing press to argue that by its very nature information technology tends to spawn “a virtuous circle advancing nearly every aspect of human well-being, including literacy, education, wealth, sanitation, health, democratization and reduction in violence.”[6]

The naive view of information is perhaps most succinctly captured in Google’s mission statement “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Google’s answer to Goethe’s warnings is that while a single apprentice pilfering his master’s secret spell book is likely to cause disaster, when a lot of apprentices are given free access to all the world’s information, they will not only create useful enchanted brooms but also learn to handle them wisely.

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.

Thus, understanding the process through which the allegedly infallible Bible was canonized provides valuable insight about present-day claims for AI infallibility. Similarly, studying the early modern witch hunts and Stalin’s collectivization offers stark warnings about what might go wrong as we give AIs greater control over twenty-first-century societies. A deep knowledge of history is also vital to understand what is new about AI, how it is fundamentally different from printing presses and radio sets, and in what specific ways an AI dictatorship could be very unlike anything we have seen before.

Information is increasingly seen by many philosophers and biologists, and even by some physicists, as the most basic building block of reality, more elementary than matter and energy.[1]

The point is that even the most truthful accounts of reality can never represent it in full. There are always some aspects of reality that are neglected or distorted in every representation. Truth, then, isn’t a one-to-one representation of reality. Rather, truth is something that brings our attention to certain aspects of reality while inevitably ignoring other aspects. No account of reality is 100 percent accurate, but some accounts are nevertheless more truthful than others.

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. This is why even technologically advanced societies like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union have been prone to hold delusional ideas, without their delusions necessarily weakening them. Indeed, the mass delusions of Nazi and Stalinist ideologies about things like race and class actually helped them make tens of millions of people march together in lockstep.

Interestingly, Jesus’s last supper was the Jewish Passover meal, which according to the Gospel accounts Jesus shared with his disciples just before his crucifixion. In Jewish tradition, the whole purpose of the Passover meal is to create and reenact artificial memories. Every year Jewish families sit together on the eve of Passover to eat and reminisce about “their” exodus from Egypt. They are supposed not only to tell the story of how the descendants of Jacob escaped slavery in Egypt but to remember how they personally suffered at the hands of the Egyptians, how they personally saw the sea part, and how they personally received the Ten Commandments from Jehovah at Mount Sinai. The Jewish tradition doesn’t mince words here. The text of the Passover ritual (the Haggadah) insists that “in every generation a person is obligated to regard himself as if he personally had come out of Egypt.” If anyone objects that this is a fiction, and that they didn’t personally come out of Egypt, Jewish sages have a ready answer. They claim that the souls of all Jews throughout history were created by Jehovah long before they were born and all these souls were present at Mount Sinai.[10] As Salvador Litvak, a Jewish social media influencer, explained to his online followers in 2018, “You and I were there together…. When we fulfill the obligation to see ourselves as if we personally left Egypt, it’s not a metaphor. We don’t imagine the Exodus, we remember it.”[11] So every year, in the most im...

almost all states pass at least temporarily through a phase during which their existence is contested, when struggling for independence. Did the United States come into existence on July 4, 1776, or only when other states like France and finally the U.K. recognized it? Between the declaration of U.S. independence on July 4, 1776, and the signing of the Treaty of Paris on September 3, 1783, some people like George Washington believed the United States existed, while other people like King George III vehemently rejected this idea. Disagreements about the existence of states cannot be resolved by an objective test, such as a DNA survey or a sonar scan. Unlike animals, states are not an objective reality. When we ask whether a particular state exists, we are raising a question about intersubjective reality. If enough people agree that a particular state exists, then it does. It can then do things like sign legally binding agreements with other states as well as NGOs

History is often shaped not by deterministic power relations, but rather by tragic mistakes that result from believing in mesmerizing but harmful stories.

When it comes to uniting people, fiction enjoys two inherent advantages over the truth. First, fiction can be made as simple as we like, whereas the truth tends to be complicated, because the reality it is supposed to represent is complicated. Take, for example, the truth about nations. It is difficult to grasp that the nation to which one belongs is an intersubjective entity that exists only in our collective imagination. You rarely hear politicians say such things in their political speeches. It is far easier to believe that our nation is God’s chosen people, entrusted by the Creator with some special mission. This simple story has been repeatedly told by countless politicians from Israel to Iran and from the United States to Russia. Second, the truth is often painful and disturbing, and if we try to make it more comforting and flattering, it will no longer be the truth. In contrast, fiction is highly malleable. The history of every nation contains some dark episodes that citizens don’t like to acknowledge and remember. An Israeli politician who in her election speeches details the miseries inflicted on Palestinian civilians by the Israeli occupation is unlikely to get many votes. In contrast, a politician who builds a national myth by ignoring uncomfortable facts, focusing on glorious moments in the Jewish past, and embellishing reality wherever necessary may well sweep to power. That’s the case not just in Israel but in all countries. How many Italians or Indians want ...

What makes scientific self-correcting mechanisms particularly strong is that scientific institutions are not just willing to admit institutional error and ignorance; they are actively seeking to expose them. This is evident in the institutions’ incentive structure. In religious institutions, members are incentivized to conform to existing doctrine and be suspicious of novelty. You become a rabbi, imam, or priest by professing doctrinal loyalty, and you can advance up the ranks to become pope, chief rabbi, or grand ayatollah without criticizing your predecessors or advancing any radical new notions. Indeed, many of the most powerful and admired religious leaders of recent times—such as Pope Benedict XVI, Chief Rabbi of Israel David Lau, and Ayatollah Khamenei of Iran—have won fame and supporters by strict resistance to new ideas and trends like feminism.[110] In science it works the other way around. Hiring and promotions in scientific institutions are based on the principle of “publish or perish,” and to publish in prestigious journals, you must expose some mistake in existing theories or discover something your predecessors and teachers didn’t know. Nobody wins a Nobel Prize for faithfully repeating what previous scholars said and opposing every new scientific theory. Of course, just as religion has room for self-correcting, so science has ample room for conformism, too. Science is an institutional enterprise, and scientists rely on the institution for almost everything t...

Populist critics of scientific institutions may counter that, in fact, these institutions use their power to stifle unorthodox views and launch their own witch hunts against dissenters. It is certainly true that scholars who oppose the current orthodox view of their discipline sometimes experience negative consequences: having articles rejected or research grants denied, facing nasty ad hominem attacks, and in rare cases even getting fired from their job.[111] I do not wish to belittle the suffering such things cause, but it is still a far cry from being physically tortured and burned at the stake.

Unfortunately, things are far more complicated. There is a reason why institutions like the Catholic Church and the Soviet Communist Party eschewed strong self-correcting mechanisms. While such mechanisms are vital for the pursuit of truth, they are costly in terms of maintaining order. Strong self-correcting mechanisms tend to create doubts, disagreements, conflicts, and rifts and to undermine the myths that hold the social order together. Of course, order by itself isn’t necessarily good. For example, the social order of early modern Europe endorsed, among other things, not only witch hunts but also the exploitation of millions of peasants by a handful of aristocrats, the systematic mistreatment of women, and widespread discrimination against Jews, Muslims, and other minorities. But even when the social order is highly oppressive, undermining it doesn’t necessarily lead to a better place. It could just lead to chaos and worse oppression. The history of information networks has always involved maintaining a balance between truth and order. Just as sacrificing truth for the sake of order comes with a cost, so does sacrificing order for truth. Scientific institutions have been able to afford their strong self-correcting mechanisms because they leave the difficult job of preserving the social order to other institutions. If a chemist finds that a thief has broken into their lab or a psychiatrist receives death threats, they don’t complain to a peer-reviewed journal; they cal...