Matthew Kern

“To function, a democracy needs to meet two conditions: it needs to enable a free public conversation on key issues, and it needs to maintain a minimum of social order and institutional trust.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“How can you tell, then, whether someone is part of the people or not? Easy. If they support the leader, they are part of the people. This, according to the German political philosopher Jan-Werner Müller, is the defining feature of populism.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“People often confuse intelligence with consciousness, and many consequently jump to the conclusion that non-conscious entities cannot be intelligent. But intelligence and consciousness are very different. Intelligence is the ability to attain goals, such as maximising user engagement on a social media platform. Consciousness is the ability to experience subjective feelings like pain, pleasure, love and hate. In humans and other mammals, intelligence often goes hand in hand with consciousness.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“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.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI