Nexus Quotes

“En democracia se considera que «el pueblo» es la única fuente legítima de autoridad política. Solo los representantes del pueblo deben gozar de autoridad para declarar guerras, aprobar leyes y recaudar impuestos. El populismo valora este principio democrático”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“Si todo esto parece complicado es porque la democracia debe ser complicada.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“We may reach a point when computers dominate the financial markets, and invent completely new financial tools beyond our understanding.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“As a key example, consider the role of women in the church. Some early Christian leaders saw women as intellectually and ethically inferior to men, and argued that women should be restricted to subordinate roles in society and in the Christian community. These views were reflected in texts like the First Epistle to Timothy. In one of its passages, this text, attributed to Saint Paul, says, “A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety” (2:11–15). But modern scholars as well as some ancient Christian leaders like Marcion have considered this letter a second-century forgery, ascribed to Saint Paul but actually written by someone else.[54] 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 authorized women to occupy leadership roles, like the Gospel of Mary[55] or the Acts of Paul and Thecla. The latter text was written at about the same time as 1 Timothy, and for a time was extremely popular.[56] It narrates the adventures of Saint Paul and his female disciple Thecla, describing how Thecla not only performed numerous miracles but also baptized herself with her own hands and often”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Datos procedentes de Egipto y Malasia podrían enriquecer a una compañía en San Francisco o Pekín, mientras que los ciudadanos de El Cairo o Kuala Lumpur seguirían siendo pobres porque no recibirían ni los beneficios ni el poder.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“Estos son los derechos clave que los hombres fuertes pretenden violar.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“Las democracias prohíben que el 99 por ciento de una población pueda exterminar al 1 por ciento restante porque esto viola el derecho humano más básico, que es el derecho a la vida. La”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“Los hombres fuertes no suelen dar el paso final de abolir directamente las elecciones. En su lugar, las mantienen como un ritual que sirve para proporcionar legitimidad y para mantener una fachada democrática, tal como ocurre, por ejemplo, con la Rusia de Putin.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“Es habitual que, para socavar la democracia, los hombres fuertes ataquen uno a uno sus sistemas de autocorrección, a menudo empezando por los tribunales y los medios de comunicación.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“Las carreras de hombres fuertes como Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Rodrigo Duterte, Jair Bolsonaro o Benjamin Netanyahu demuestran cómo un líder que se sirve de la democracia para acceder al poder puede después utilizar este poder para socavar la democracia.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“Hitler empezó a enviar a judíos y comunistas a campos de concentración a los pocos meses de ascender al poder mediante unas elecciones democráticas,”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“Las elecciones son un mecanismo para que la red diga: «Hemos cometido un error; probemos otra cosa». Pero, si el centro puede privar a voluntad a la gente del derecho al voto, dicho mecanismo de autocorrección queda anulado.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“Una democracia no es un sistema en el que una mayoría, del tamaño que sea, puede decidir exterminar a las minorías impopulares; es un sistema en el que se ponen límites claros al poder del centro.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“Porque «democracia» no es lo mismo que «dictadura de la mayoría».”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“Conseguem identificar corretamente os gatos? Quando nos pedem para fazer isso, entre cem imagens de gatos identificamos corretamente 95 delas. Em 2010, os melhores algoritmos tinham um índice de acerto de apenas 72%. Em”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: Uma breve história das redes de informação, da Idade da Pedra à inteligência artificial

“Na verdade, estamos fazendo uma ia”.4 Dispor de montes de dados facilita criar uma ia. E a ia pode converter montes de dados em montes de poder. Nos anos 2010, o sonho já estava se tornando realidade. Como todas as grandes revoluções históricas, o surgimento da ia foi um processo gradual, encadeando inúmeros passos. E como em todas as revoluções, alguns desses passos são vistos como pontos de inflexão, tal como fora a inauguração da Ferrovia Liverpool-Manchester. Na prolífica estória da ia, dois eventos são muito lembrados na bibliografia especializada. O primeiro foi quando, em 30 de setembro de 2012, uma rede neural convolucional chamada AlexNet venceu o desafio de reconhecimento visual em grande escala da ImageNet. Se você não faz ideia do que é uma rede neural convolucional e nunca ouviu falar do desafio ImageNet, não está sozinho. Mais de 99% de nós estamos na mesma situação, e é por isso que a vitória da AlexNet quase nem figurou nas manchetes da imprensa em 2012. Mas alguns seres humanos tinham ouvido falar da vitória da AlexNet e entenderam o significado daquilo. Sabiam, por exemplo, que a ImageNet é uma base de dados com milhões de imagens digitais anotadas. Alguma vez um site já lhe pediu que você provasse não ser um robô olhando um conjunto de imagens e marcando quais delas continham um carro ou um gato? As imagens em que você clicou provavelmente vieram da base de dados da ImageNet. O mesmo pode ter acontecido com imagens de seu gato postadas por você na internet. O desafio de reconhecimento visual em grande escala da ImageNet testa vários”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: Uma breve história das redes de informação, da Idade da Pedra à inteligência artificial

“São ferramentas obtusas, sem a inteligência necessária para processar informação e tomar decisões independentes. A ia, por sua vez, pode processar sozinha a informação e, portanto, substituir os seres humanos em tomadas de decisão. A ia não é uma ferramenta — é um agente.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: Uma breve história das redes de informação, da Idade da Pedra à inteligência artificial

“A democracy is not a system in which a majority of any size can decide to exterminate unpopular minorities; it is a system in which there are clear limits on the power of the center.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“What’s true of counterfeiting money should also be true of counterfeiting humans. If governments took decisive action to protect trust in money, it makes sense to take equally decisive measures to protect trust in humans. Prior to the rise of AI, one human could pretend to be another, and society punished such frauds. But society didn’t bother to outlaw the creation of counterfeit humans, since the technology to do so didn’t exist. Now that AI can pass itself off as human, it threatens to destroy trust between humans and to unravel the fabric of society. Dennett suggests, therefore, that governments should outlaw fake humans as decisively as they have previously outlawed fake money.[54]

The law should prohibit not just deepfaking specific real people—creating a fake video of the U.S. president, for example—but also any attempt by a nonhuman agent to pass itself off as a human. If anyone complains that such strict measures violate freedom of speech, they should be reminded that bots don’t have freedom of speech. Banning human beings from a public platform is a sensitive step, and democracies should be very careful about such censorship. However, banning bots is a simple issue: it doesn’t violate anyone’s rights, because bots don’t have rights.[55]

None of this means that democracies must ban all bots, algorithms, and AIs from participating in any discussion. Digital agents are welcome to join many conversations, provided they don’t pretend to be humans. For example, AI doctors can be extremely helpful. They can monitor our health twenty-four hours a day, offer medical advice tailored to our individual medical conditions and personality, and answer our questions with infinite patience. But the AI doctor should never try to pass itself off as a human.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Civilizations are born from the marriage of bureaucracy and mythology. The computer-based network is a new type of bureaucracy that is far more powerful and relentless than any human-based bureaucracy we’ve seen before. This network is also likely to create inter-computer mythologies that will be far more complex and alien than any human-made god. The potential benefits of this network are enormous. The potential downside is the destruction of human civilization.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“We have reached a turning point in history in which major historical processes are partly caused by the decisions of nonhuman intelligence. It is this that makes the fallibility of the computer network so dangerous. Computer errors become potentially catastrophic only when computers become historical agents.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“As more things are valued in terms of information, while being “free” in terms of money, at some point it becomes misleading to evaluate the wealth of individuals and corporations in terms of the number of dollars or pesos they possess. A person or corporation with little money in the bank but a huge data bank of information could be the wealthiest, or most powerful, entity in the country. In theory, it might be possible to quantify the value of their information in monetary terms, but they never actually convert the information into dollars or pesos. Why do they need dollars, if they can get what they want with information?

This has far-reaching implications for taxation. Taxes aim to redistribute wealth. They take a cut from the wealthiest individuals and corporations, in order to provide for everyone. However, a tax system that knows how to tax only money will soon become outdated as many transactions no longer involve money. In a data-based economy, where value is stored as data rather than as dollars, taxing only money distorts the economic and political picture. Some of the wealthiest entities in the country may pay zero taxes, because their wealth consists of petabits of data rather than billions of dollars.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Just as human artists like Bach can break with tradition and innovate, computers too can make cultural innovations, composing music or making images that are somewhat different from anything previously produced by humans. These innovations will in turn influence the next generation of computers, which will increasingly deviate from the original human models, especially because computers are free from the limitations that evolution and biochemistry impose on the human imagination. For millennia human beings have lived inside the dreams of other humans. In the coming decades we might find ourselves living inside the dreams of an alien intelligence.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“As humankind enters the second quarter of the twenty-first century, a central question is how well democracies and totalitarian regimes will handle both the threats and the opportunities resulting from the current information revolution. Will the new technologies favor one type of regime over the other, or will we see the world divided once again, this time by a Silicon Curtain rather than an iron one?”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Because the chief aim of totalitarian information networks is to produce order rather than discover truth, when alarming information threatens to undermine social order, totalitarian regimes often suppress it. It is relatively easy for them to do so, because they control all the information channels.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“If a NILI agent wrote that there are ten thousand Ottoman soldiers in Gaza, and there were indeed ten thousand soldiers there, this accurately pointed to a certain aspect of reality, but it neglected many other aspects.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“In the twenty-first century, some new totalitarian regime may well succeed where Hitler and Stalin failed, creating an all-powerful network that could prevent future generations from even attempting to expose its lies and fictions. We should not assume that delusional networks are doomed to failure. If we want to prevent their triumph, we will have to do the hard work ourselves.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“The whole point of writing this book is that by making informed choices, we can prevent the worst outcomes. If we cannot change the future, why waste time discussing it?”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“For better or worse, silicon chips are free from many of the limitations that organic biochemistry imposes on carbon neurons.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“The most common method strongmen use to undermine democracy is to attack its self-correcting mechanisms one by one, often beginning with the courts and the media. The typical strongman either deprives courts of their powers or packs them with his loyalists and seeks to close all independent media outlets while building his own omnipresent propaganda machine.[5] Once the courts are no longer able to check the government’s power by legal means, and once the media obediently parrots the government line, all other institutions or persons who dare oppose the government can be smeared and persecuted as traitors, criminals, or foreign agents. Academic institutions, municipalities, NGOs, and private businesses are either dismantled or brought under government control. At that stage, the government can also rig the elections at will, for example by jailing popular opposition leaders, preventing opposition parties from participating in the elections, gerrymandering election districts, or disenfranchising voters. Appeals against these antidemocratic measures are dismissed by the government’s handpicked judges. Journalists and academics who criticize these measures are fired. The remaining media outlets, academic institutions, and judicial authorities all praise these measures as necessary steps to protect the nation and its allegedly democratic system from traitors and foreign agents. The strongmen don’t usually take the final step of abolishing the elections outright. Instead, they keep them as a ritual that serves to provide legitimacy and maintain a democratic facade, as happens, for example, in Putin’s Russia. Supporters of strongmen often don’t see this process as antidemocratic. They are genuinely baffled when told that electoral victory doesn’t grant them unlimited power. Instead, they see any check on the power of an elected government as undemocratic. However, democracy doesn’t mean majority rule; rather, it means freedom and equality for all. Democracy is a system that guarantees everyone certain liberties, which even the majority cannot take away.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI