Nexus Quotes

“Power lies at the nexus where the information channels merge. Since Tiberius allowed the information channels to merge in the person of Sejanus, the latter became the true center of power, while Tiberius was reduced to a puppet.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“To paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, practical people, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any religious influence, are usually the slaves of some mythmaker.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Whereas deontologists struggle to find universal rules that are intrinsically good, utilitarians judge actions by their impact on suffering and happiness.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Deontologists (from the Greek word deon, meaning “duty”) believe that there are some universal moral duties, or moral rules, that apply to everyone. These rules do not rely on alignment to a higher goal, but rather on their intrinsic goodness. If such rules indeed exist, and if we can find a way to program them into computers, then we can make sure the computer network will be a force for good.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“La IA podría sintetizar un nuevo patógeno, pedírselo a un laboratorio comercial o incluso imprimirlo a través de una impresora biológica 3D, y a continuación diseñar la mejor estrategia para esparcirlo por el mundo,”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“populism as an antiestablishment worldview long predated Trump and is relevant to numerous other historical contexts now and in the future. In a nutshell, populism views information as a weapon.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Robert Oppenheimer obedecía a Franklin Delano Roosevelt, y no al revés. De un modo similar, Werner Heisenberg obedecía a Adolf Hitler, Igor Kurchatov defería a Iósif Stalin y en el Irán contemporáneo los expertos en física nuclear siguen las órdenes de expertos en teología chiita.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“Los cazadores también tenían que jugarse la vida y mostrar un gran valor. El convencimiento de que un conjuro garantizaba la vida eterna para los cazadores muertos incrementaba las posibilidades de éxito de sus expediciones. Aunque el conjuro no aportara beneficios a los cazadores muertos, fortalecer el valor y la solidaridad entre los cazadores vivos contribuía de manera crucial al éxito de la caza.[25]”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“A menudo, la historia es moldeada no tanto por relaciones deterministas de poder como por errores trágicos que derivan de creer en relatos cautivadores pero dañinos.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“Por suerte, dado que los relatos intersubjetivos moldean la historia, a veces podemos evitar y resolver conflictos hablando, alterando los relatos en los que creemos o desarrollando un relato nuevo que todos podamos aceptar.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“Al contrario de lo que sostiene el pensamiento marxista, en la historia las identidades e intereses a gran escala son siempre intersubjetivos, nunca objetivos.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“Para la formación de la Iglesia cristiana, por ejemplo, fue esencial que la gente recordara lo que Jesús dijo en la Última Cena, pero el paso definitivo se dio al hacer que la gente creyera que Jesús era un dios en lugar de un simple rabino carismático.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“Entre la Declaración de Independencia de Estados Unidos en julio de 1776 y la firma del Tratado de París el 3 de septiembre de 1783 hubo gente que, como George Washington, consideraba que Estados Unidos existía, mientras que otros, como el rey Jorge III, rechazaban esta idea con vehemencia.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“El conflicto israelí-palestino, por ejemplo, gira en torno a esta cuestión, porque hay gente y gobiernos que rehúsan reconocer la existencia de Israel y otros que rehúsan reconocer la existencia de Palestina. En”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

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

“The anarchical potential of AI is particularly alarming, because it is not only new human groups that it allows to join the public debate. For the first time ever, democracy must contend with a cacophony of nonhuman voices, too. On many social media platforms, bots constitute a sizable minority of participants. One analysis estimated that out of a sample of 20 million tweets generated during the 2016 U.S. election campaign, 3.8 million (almost 20 percent) were generated by bots.[48] By the early 2020s, things got worse. A 2020 study assessed that bots were producing 43.2 percent of tweets.[49] A more comprehensive 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 posted to Twitter.”[50] When humans try to debate a crucial question like whom to elect as U.S. president, what happens if many of the voices they hear are produced by computers?”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“De modo que cada año, en la celebración más importante del calendario judío, millones de judíos fingen recordar cosas que no presenciaron y que con toda probabilidad nunca ocurrieron.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“Hasta donde podemos saber, el Jesús real fue un típico predicador judío que se hizo con un pequeño grupo de seguidores después de pronunciar sermones y curar enfermos.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“gente cree que conecta con la persona, pero en realidad conecta con el relato que se cuenta sobre la persona, y a menudo la brecha que se abre entre ambos es enorme.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“la compañía Coca-Cola lleva décadas invirtiendo decenas de miles de millones de dólares en anuncios que cuentan y vuelven a contar el relato de la bebida.[6] La gente ha visto y oído el relato con tanta frecuencia que muchos han llegado a asociar un determinado brebaje de agua saborizada con la diversión, la felicidad y la juventud (en oposición al deterioro dental, la obesidad y los residuos plásticos). Esto es construir una identidad de marca.[”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“«No, no lo eres —replicó Stalin—. Tú no eres Stalin y yo no soy Stalin. Stalin es el poder soviético. Stalin es lo que es en los periódicos y en los retratos, no tú, no… ¡ni siquiera yo!».[”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“Los sapiens dominamos el mundo no debido a que seamos muy sabios, sino a que somos los únicos animales capaces de cooperar de manera flexible y en gran número.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“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

“What the people at the top know, which nuclear physicists don’t always realize, is that telling the truth about the universe is hardly the most efficient way to produce order among large numbers of humans.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Stalinism and Nazism were also extremely costly experiments in how to construct industrial societies. Leaders like Stalin and Hitler argued that the Industrial Revolution had unleashed immense powers that only totalitarianism could rein in and exploit to the full. They pointed to World War I—the first “total war” in history—as proof that survival in the industrial world demanded totalitarian control of all aspects of politics, society, and the economy. On the positive side, they also claimed that the Industrial Revolution was like a furnace that melts all previous social structures with their human imperfections and weaknesses and provides the opportunity to forge perfect societies inhabited by unalloyed superhumans. On the way to creating the perfect industrial society, Stalinists and Nazis learned how to industrially murder millions of people. Trains, barbed wire, and telegraphed orders were linked to create an unprecedented killing machine. Looking back, most people today are horrified by what the Stalinists and Nazis perpetrated, but at the time their audacious visions mesmerized 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. The”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

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

“One analysis estimated that out of a sample of 20 million tweets generated during the 2016 U.S. election campaign, 3.8 million (almost 20 percent) were generated by bots.[48] By the early 2020s, things got worse. A 2020 study assessed that bots were producing 43.2 percent of tweets.[49] A more comprehensive 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 posted to Twitter.”[50]”
― 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. 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

“If three years of up to 25 percent unemployment could turn a seemingly prospering democracy into the most brutal totalitarian regime in history, what might happen to democracies when automation causes even bigger upheavals in the job market of the twenty-first century?”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Populists are suspicious of institutions that in the name of objective truths override the supposed will of the people. They tend to see this as a smoke screen for elites grabbing illegitimate power.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI