Nexus Quotes

“The principles that “the customer is always right” and that “the voters know best” presuppose that customers, voters, and politicians know what is happening around them. They presuppose that customers who choose to use TikTok and Instagram comprehend the full consequences of this choice, and that voters and politicians who are responsible for regulating Apple and Huawei fully understand the business models and activities of these corporations. They presuppose that people know the ins and outs of the new information network and give it their blessing.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Most people don’t view themselves as one-dimensional creatures obsessed solely with power. Why, then, hold such a view about everyone else?”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“When a paper was submitted to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the lead question the editors asked was not “How many people would pay to read this?” but “What proof is there that this is true?”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“While computers don’t feel pain, love, or fear, they are capable of making decisions that successfully maximize user engagement and might also affect major historical events.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“ability to experience subjective feelings like pain, pleasure, love, and hate. In humans and other mammals, intelligence often goes hand in hand with consciousness. Facebook executives and engineers rely on their feelings in order to make decisions, solve problems, and attain their goals.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“The problem is that algorithms make decisions by relying on numerous data points, whereas humans find it very difficult to consciously reflect on a large number of data points and weigh them against each other. We prefer to work with single data points. That’s why when faced by complex issues—whether a loan request, a pandemic, or a war—we often seek a single reason to take a particular course of action and ignore all other considerations. This is the fallacy of the single cause.[39]”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

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

“An institution can call itself by whatever name it wants, but if it lacks a strong self-correcting mechanism, it is not a scientific institution.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“The clearest pattern we observe in the long-term history of humanity isn’t the constancy of conflict, but rather the increasing scale of cooperation. A hundred thousand years ago, Sapiens could cooperate only at the level of bands. Over the millennia, we have found ways to create communities of strangers, first on the level of tribes and eventually on the level of religions, trade networks, and states.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“For millennia, the theory goes, humans have tried to camouflage this unchanging reality under a thin and mutable veneer of myths and rituals, but we have never really broken free from the law of the jungle.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“if democracies do collapse, it will likely result not from some kind of technological inevitability but from a human failure to regulate”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“governments should outlaw fake humans as decisively as they have previously outlawed fake money.[54]”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“2022 study by the digital intelligence agency Similarweb found that 5 percent of Twitter users were probably bots, but they generated “between 20.8% and 29.2% of the content”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“When both conservatives and progressives resist the temptation of radical revolution, and stay loyal to democratic traditions and institutions, democracies prove themselves to be highly agile.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“What makes it interesting for us to watch and connect with human athletes and chess masters is that their feelings make them much more relatable than a robot. We share an emotional experience with them and can empathize with how they feel.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“More crucially for the issue of emotional intelligence, the patients themselves evaluated ChatGPT as more empathic than the human doctors.[”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Another 2023 study prompted patients to ask online medical advice from ChatGPT and human doctors, without knowing whom they were interacting with. The medical advice given by ChatGPT was later evaluated by experts to be more accurate and appropriate than the advice given by the humans.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“crucial that the rest of us understand the fundamental principles that democracies can and should follow. The key message is that these principles are neither new nor mysterious. They have been known for centuries, even millennia. Citizens should demand that they be applied to the new realities of the computer age. The first principle is benevolence.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“We are just a platform. We are doing what our customers want and what the voters permit. We don’t force anyone to use our services, and we don’t violate any existing law. If customers didn’t like what we do, they would leave. If voters didn’t like what we do, they would pass laws against us. Since the customers keep asking for more, and since no law forbids what we do, everything must be okay.”[47]”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Equally alarmingly, we might increasingly find ourselves conducting lengthy online discussions about the Bible, about QAnon, about witches, about abortion, or about climate change with entities that we think are humans but are actually computers. This could make democracy untenable. Democracy is a conversation, and conversations rely on language. By hacking language, computers could make it extremely difficult for large numbers of humans”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“But intelligence and consciousness are very different. Intelligence is the ability to attain goals, such as maximizing user engagement on a social media platform.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

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

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

“Instead of building a network from human-to-human chains alone—as the Neanderthals, for example, did—stories provided Homo sapiens with a new type of chain: human-to-story chains. In order to cooperate, Sapiens no longer had to know each other personally; they just had to know the same story.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“we are the only animals that can cooperate flexibly in large numbers. I have explored this idea in my previous books Sapiens and Homo Deus,”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“history of information from the Stone Age to the Silicon Age, we therefore see a constant rise in connectivity, without a concomitant rise in truthfulness or wisdom.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“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. Information doesn’t necessarily inform us about things.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“En el siglo XXI, para dominar una colonia ya no es necesario desplegar la artillería. Basta con apoderarse de sus datos.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“To conclude, information sometimes represents reality, and sometimes doesn’t. But it always connects. This is its fundamental characteristic.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“In a nutshell, populism views information as a weapon.[20]”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI