Nexus Quotes

“its core tenet is that information is an essentially good thing,”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“In opposition to 1 Timothy, during the second, third and fourth centuries CE there were important Christian texts that saw women as equal to men, and even authorised women to occupy leadership roles, like the Gospel of Mary or the Acts of Paul and Thecla.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Or we might find ourselves nowhere at all, as Earth becomes inhospitable for human life.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“populists are eroding trust in large-scale institutions and international cooperation just when humanity confronts the existential challenges of ecological collapse, global war, and out-of-control technology”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“History is often shaped not by deterministic power relations, but rather by tragic mistakes that result from believing in mesmerizing but harmful stories.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Instead of a march of progress, the history of human information networks is a tightrope walk trying to balance truth with order. In the twenty-first century we aren't much better at finding the right balance than our ancestors were in the Stone Age.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“la información es un intento de representar la realidad, y cuando este intento tiene éxito lo denominamos verdad. Aunque este libro discrepa en muchos aspectos de esta visión ingenua, sí está de acuerdo en que la verdad es una representación exacta de la realidad. Pero este libro también sostiene que la mayoría de la información no intenta representar la realidad y que lo que define la información es algo completamente diferente. La mayoría de la información en la sociedad humana, y sin duda en otros sistemas biológicos y físicos, no representa nada.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“If you build a bomb and ignore the facts of physics, the bomb will not explode. But if you build an ideology and ignore the facts, the ideology may still prove explosive. While power depends on both truth and order, it is usually the people who know how to build ideologies and maintain order who give instructions to the people who merely know how to build bombs or hunt mammoths. Robert Oppenheimer obeyed Franklin Delano Roosevelt rather than the other way around. Similarly, Werner Heisenberg obeyed Adolf Hitler, Igor Kurchatov deferred to Joseph Stalin, and in contemporary Iran experts in nuclear physics follow the orders of experts in Shiite theology.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“In history, power stems only partially from knowing the truth. It also stems from the ability to maintain social order among a large number of people. Suppose you want to make an atom bomb. To succeed, you obviously need some accurate knowledge of physics. But you also need lots of people to mine uranium ore, build nuclear reactors, and provide food for the construction workers, miners, and physicists. The Manhattan Project directly employed about 130,000 people, with millions more working to sustain them. Robert Oppenheimer could devote himself to his equations because he relied on thousands of miners to extract uranium at the Eldorado mine in northern Canada and the Shinkolobwe mine in the Belgian Congo —not to mention the farmers who grew potatoes for his lunch. If you want to make an atom bomb, you must find a way to make millions of people cooperate.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“simply increasing the speed and efficiency of our information technology doesn’t necessarily make the world a better place. It only makes the need to balance truth and order more urgent.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“As a much more extreme example, consider Jesus.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“En conclusión, a veces la información representa la realidad y a veces no. Pero siempre conecta.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“Pone énfasis en el paso de las redes de información orgánicas a las redes inorgánicas. El Imperio romano, la Iglesia católica, la Unión Soviética dependían todos de cerebros compuestos de carbono para procesar la información y tomar decisiones. Los ordenadores compuestos de silicio que dominan la nueva red de información funcionan de maneras muy distintas. Para lo bueno y para lo malo, los chips de silicio están libres de muchas de las limitaciones que la bioquímica orgánica impone a las neuronas de carbono. Los chips de silicio pueden generar espías que nunca duermen, banqueros que nunca olvidan y déspotas que nunca mueren. ¿Cómo cambiará esto la sociedad, la economía y la política?”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“Aunque no todos podemos ser expertos en IA, sí hemos de tener presente que es la primera tecnología de la historia que puede tomar decisiones y generar nuevas ideas por sí misma. Todo invento humano previo ha servido para conferir poder a los humanos, porque, con independencia del alcance que tuviera la nueva herramienta, las decisiones acerca de su uso se han mantenido en nuestras manos. Los cuchillos y las bombas no deciden por sí mismos a quien matar. Son instrumentos sin criterio que carecen de la inteligencia necesaria para procesar información y tomar decisiones independientes. En cambio, la IA puede procesar información por sí sola y, por lo tanto, sustituir a los humanos en la toma de decisiones. La IA no es una herramienta, es un agente.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“El argumento principal de este libro es que la humanidad consigue un poder enorme mediante la construcción de grandes redes de cooperación, pero la forma en que se construyen dichas redes las predispone a hacer un uso imprudente del poder. Nuestro problema, por lo tanto, tiene que ver con las redes. Más concretamente, es un problema de información. La información es el pegamento que mantiene unidas las redes. Pero, durante miles de años, los sapiens construyeron y mantuvieron grandes redes al inventar y expandir ficciones, fantasías, ilusiones: sobre dioses, sobre palos de escoba encantados, sobre la IA y sobre muchas otras cosas. Mientras que cada individuo humano suele interesarse por conocer la verdad acerca de sí mismo y del mundo, las grandes redes ponen en contacto a sus miembros y crean orden al generar dependencia en ficciones y fantasías. Así es como, por ejemplo, vimos surgir el nazismo y el estalinismo. Estas eran unas redes poderosísimas sostenidas por ideas excepcionalmente equivocadas. Tal como afirmó con acierto George Orwell, la ignorancia es fuerza.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“The immediate results of the print revolution included witch hunts and religious wars alongside scientific discoveries, while newspapers and radio were exploited by totalitarian regimes as well as by democracies. As for the Industrial Revolution, adapting to it involved catastrophic experiments such as imperialism and Nazism. If the AI revolution leads us to similar kinds of experiments, can we really be certain we will muddle through again?”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Every old thing was once new. The only constant of history is change.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“For many people in the 2010s, the fact that the health-care budget was bigger than the military budget was unremarkable. But it was the result of a major change in human behaviour, and one that would have sounded impossible to most previous generations.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“For centuries, new information technologies fuelled the process of globalisation and brought people all over the world into closer contact. Paradoxically, information technology today is so powerful it can potentially split humanity by enclosing different people in separate information cocoons, ending the idea of a single shared human reality. While the web has been our main metaphor in recent decades, the future might belong to cocoons.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Imagine a situation – in twenty years, say – when somebody in Beijing or San Francisco possesses the entire personal history of every politician, journalist, colonel and CEO in your country: every text they ever sent, every web search they ever made, every illness they suffered, every sexual encounter they enjoyed, every joke they told, every bribe they took. Would you still be living in an independent country, or would you now be living in a data colony?”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“In the twenty-first century, to dominate a colony, you no longer need to send in the gunboats. You need to take out the data.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Truth and reality are nevertheless different things, because no matter how truthful an account is, it can never represent reality in all it's aspects.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Elections establish what the majority of people desire, rather than what the truth is. And people often desire the truth to be other than what it is.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“No matter which technology we develop, we will have to maintain bureaucratic institutions that will audit algorithms and give or refuse them the seal of approval. Such institutions will combine the powers of humans and computers to make sure that new algorithmic systems are safe and fair. Without such institutions, even if we pass laws that provide humans with a right to an explanation, and even if we enact regulations against computer biases, who could enforce these laws and regulations?”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“The increasing unfathomability of our information network is one of the reasons for the recent wave of populist parties and charismatic leaders. 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

“what happens when crucial decisions not just about individual lives but even about collective matters like the Federal Reserve’s interest rate are made by unfathomable algorithms? Human voters may keep choosing a human president, but wouldn’t this be just an empty ceremony? Even today, only a small fraction of humanity truly understands the financial system.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“For a dictatorship, being unfathomable is helpful, because it protects the regime from accountability. For a democracy, being unfathomable is deadly. If citizens, lawmakers, journalists and judges cannot understand how the state’s bureaucratic system works, they can no longer supervise it, and they lose trust in it.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“The most important human skill for surviving the twenty-first century is likely to be flexibility, and democracies are more flexible than totalitarian regimes. While computers are nowhere near their full potential, the same is true of humans. This is something we have discovered again and again throughout history.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“But can liberal democracy itself survive in the twenty-first century? This question is not concerned with the fate of democracy in specific countries, where it might be threatened by unique developments and local movements. Rather, it is about the compatibility of democracy with the structure of twenty-first-century information networks.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Looking back, most people today are horrified by what the Stalinists and Nazis perpetrated, but at the time their audacious visions mesmerised millions. In 1940 it was easy to believe that Stalin and Hitler were the models for harnessing industrial technology, whereas the dithering liberal democracies were on their way to the dustbin of history.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI