Nexus Quotes

“Por consiguiente, siempre que alguien diga algo, la pregunta no ha de ser «¿qué ha dicho? ¿Es cierto?», sino más bien «¿quién lo dice? ¿A qué privilegios sirve?».”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“Cabe insistir en que esta idea de la información centrada en el poder y profundamente escéptica no es un fenómeno nuevo ni la inventaron los antivacunas, los terraplanistas, los bolsonaristas ni los partidarios de Trump. Se propagaron opiniones similares mucho antes de 2016,”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“This is why the naive view is wrong to believe that creating more powerful information technology will necessarily result in a more truthful understanding of the world. If no additional steps are taken to tilt the balance in favor of truth, an increase in the amount and speed of information is likely to swamp the relatively rare and expensive truthful accounts by much more common and cheap types of information.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“stories are able to create a third level of reality: intersubjective reality. Whereas subjective things like pain exist in a single mind, intersubjective things like laws, gods, nations, corporations, and currencies exist in the nexus between large numbers of minds. More specifically, they exist in the stories people tell one another. The information humans exchange about intersubjective things doesn’t represent anything that had already existed prior to the exchange of information; rather, the exchange of information creates these things.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“stories are able to create a third level of reality: intersubjective reality. Whereas subjective things like pain exist in a single mind, intersubjective things like laws, gods, nations, corporations, and currencies exist in the nexus between large numbers of minds. More specifically, they exist in the stories people tell one another.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“That does not mean, of course, that there are several entirely separate realities, or that there are no historical facts. There is just one reality, but it is complex.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“To fully understand COVID-19 requires taking into account mathematical, biological, and historical phenomena, but academic bureaucracy”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Bureaucracy literally means “rule by writing desk.” The term was invented in eighteenth-century France, when the typical official sat next to a writing desk with drawers—a bureau.[19] At the heart of the bureaucratic order, then, is the drawer. Bureaucracy seeks to solve the retrieval problem by dividing the world into drawers, and knowing which document goes into which drawer.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Rather, to survive and flourish, every human information network needs to do two things simultaneously: discover truth and create order.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“According to the Clausewitzian model, only once the political goal is clear can armies decide on a military strategy that will hopefully achieve it. From”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Among humans, the precondition for cooperation isn't similarity; it is the ability to exchange information. As long as we are able to converse, we might find some shared story that can bring us closer.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Así como los marxistas afirmaban que los medios de comunicación funcionan como un portavoz de la clase capitalista y que instituciones científicas como las universidades difunden desinformación con el fin de perpetuar el control capitalista, los populistas acusan a estas mismas instituciones de trabajar para promover los intereses de las «élites corruptas» a expensas del «pueblo».”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“contrast, the financial value of money—and pizzas—depends entirely on our beliefs. How many pizzas can you purchase for a dollar, or for a bitcoin? In 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz bought two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins. It was the first known commercial transaction involving bitcoin—and with hindsight, also the most expensive pizza ever. By November 2021, a single bitcoin was valued at more than $69,000, so the bitcoins Hanyecz paid for his two pizzas were worth $690 million, enough to purchase millions of pizzas.[14] While the caloric value of pizza is an objective reality that remained the same between 2010 and 2021, the financial value of bitcoin is an intersubjective reality that changed dramatically during the same period, depending on the stories people told and believed about bitcoin.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“brand” is a specific type of story. To brand a product means to tell a story about that product, which may have little to do with the product’s actual qualities but which consumers nevertheless learn to associate with the product. For example, over the decades the Coca-Cola corporation has invested tens of billions of dollars in advertisements that tell and retell the story of the Coca-Cola drink.[6] People have seen and heard the story so often that many have come to associate a certain concoction of flavored water with fun, happiness, and youth (as opposed to tooth decay, obesity, and plastic waste). That’s branding.[7”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“All human political systems are based on fictions, but some admit it, and some do not. Being truthful about the origins of our social order makes it easier to make changes in it. If humans like us invented it, we can amend it. But such truthfulness comes at a price. Acknowledging the human origins of the social order makes it harder to persuade everyone to agree on it. If humans like us invented it, why should we accept it?”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“for tens of thousands of years, Sapiens built and maintained large networks by inventing and spreading fictions, fantasies, and mass delusions—about gods, about enchanted broomsticks, about AI, and about a great many other things.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“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

“We have already driven the earth's climate out of balance and have summoned billions of enchanted brooms, drones, chatbots, and other algorithmic spirits that may escape our control and unleash a flood of unintended consequences.

What should we do, then? The fables offer no answers, other than to wait for some god or sorcerer to save us. This, of course, is an extremely dangerous message. It encourages people to abdicate respon-sibilitv and put their faith in gods and sorcerers instead. Even worse, it fails to appreciate that gods and sorcerers are themselves a human in-vention-just like chariots, brooms, and algorithms. The tendency to create powerful things with unintended consequences started not with the invention of the steam engine or Al but with the invention of religion. Prophets and theologians have summoned powerful spirits that were supposed to bring love and joy but occasionally ended up flooding the world with blood.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“En el centro de toda religión se halla la fantasía de conectar con una inteligencia sobrehumana e infalible. Este es el motivo por el que, como exploraremos en el capítulo 8, estudiar la historia de la religión es tan importante para los debates actuales acerca de la IA.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

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

“La historia no es el estudio del pasado, sino el estudio del cambio. La historia nos enseña lo que se mantiene inmutable, lo que cambia y cómo cambian las cosas. Esto es tan relevante para las revoluciones de la información como para cualquier otro tipo de transformación”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“AI isn’t a tool—it’s an agent.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Even at the present moment, in the embryonic stage of the AI revolution, computers already make decisions about us—whether to give us a mortgage, to hire us for a job, to send us to prison.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

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

“Most Germans in 1933, for example, were not psychopaths. So why did they vote for Hitler?”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

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

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

“We can choose what we want, but we shouldn’t deny the true meaning of our choice.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Nazism and Stalinism were two of the strongest networks humans ever created.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“unintended consequences started not with the invention of the steam engine or AI but with the invention of religion. Prophets and theologians have summoned powerful spirits that were supposed to bring love and joy but occasionally ended up flooding the world with blood.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI