Nexus Quotes

“According to this view, the bigger the information network, the closer it must be to the truth.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“The naive view argues that by gathering and processing much more information than individuals can, big networks achieve a better understanding of medicine, physics, economics, and numerous other fields, which makes the network not only powerful but also wise.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

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

“The history of print and witch-hunting indicates that an unregulated information market doesn’t necessarily lead people to identify and correct their errors, because it may well prioritize outrage over truth. For truth to win, it is necessary to establish curation institutions that have the power to tilt the balance in favor of the facts. However, as the history of the Catholic Church indicates, such institutions might use their curation power to quash any criticism of themselves, labeling all alternative views erroneous and preventing the institution’s own errors from being exposed and corrected. Is it possible to establish better curation institutions that use their power to further the pursuit of truth rather than to accumulate more power for themselves? Early modern Europe saw the foundation of exactly such curation institutions, and it was these institutions—rather than the printing press or specific books like On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres—that constituted the bedrock of the scientific revolution. These key curation institutions were not the universities.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“While each individual human is typically interested in knowing the truth about themselves and the world, large networks bind members and create order by relying on fictions and fantasies.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“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

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

“information.[14] 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

“Cuando los ciudadanos pierden la capacidad de entablar una conversación y se ven unos a otros como enemigos, en lugar de como meros rivales políticos, la democracia se vuelve insostenible.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: Una breve historia de las redes de informacion desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA - Yaval Noah Harari

“puesto que las sociedades humanas son redes de información, no cabe duda de que inventar nuevas tecnologías de la información cambiará la sociedad.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“Communist true believers confronted by the horrors of Stalinism often replied that the happiness that future generations would experience under “real socialism” would redeem any short-term misery in the gulags.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Un populista se define como tal cuando afirma representar al pueblo y considera que cualquiera que no esté de acuerdo con él —ya se trate de burócratas estatales, de grupos minoritarios o incluso de la mayoría de los votantes— o es víctima de falsa consciencia o realmente no forma parte del pueblo.[12]”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“역사의 중요한 교훈 중 하나는 우리가 자연스럽고 영원하다고 생각하는 많은 것들이 사실은 인간이 만들었으며 바뀔 수 있다는 것이다. ..... 모든 오래된 것은 한때 새로운 것이었다. 역사의 유일한 상수는 변화다.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

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

“technically possible to counterfeit them. Counterfeiting posed an existential danger to the financial system, because it eroded people’s trust in money. If bad actors flooded the market with counterfeit money, the financial system would have collapsed. Yet the financial system managed to protect itself for thousands of years by enacting laws against counterfeiting money. As a result, only a relatively small percentage of money in circulation was forged, and people’s trust in it was maintained.[53] 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”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Ban the Bots In the face of the threat algorithms pose to the democratic conversation, democracies are not helpless. They can and should take measures to regulate AI and prevent it from polluting our infosphere with fake people spewing fake news. The philosopher Daniel Dennett has suggested that we can take inspiration from traditional regulations in the money market.[52] Ever since coins and later banknotes were invented, it was”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“a dictatorship is a centralized information network, lacking strong self-correcting mechanisms. A democracy, in contrast, is a distributed information network, possessing strong self-correcting mechanisms.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“them. My goal here is to balance these utopian visions by focusing on the more sinister potential of algorithmic pattern recognition. Hopefully, we can harness the positive potential of algorithms while regulating their destructive capacities.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Of course, pattern recognition also has enormous positive potential. Algorithms can help identify corrupt government officials, white-collar criminals, and tax-evading corporations. The algorithms can similarly help flesh-and-blood sanitation officials to spot threats to our drinking water;[12] help doctors to discern illnesses and burgeoning epidemics;[13] and help police officers and social workers to identify abused spouses and children.[14] In the following pages, I dedicate relatively little attention to the positive potential of algorithmic bureaucracies, because the entrepreneurs leading the AI revolution already bombard the public with enough rosy predictions about”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“an AI dictatorship could be very unlike anything we have seen before.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Soviet propaganda depicted Stalin as an infallible genius, and Roman propaganda treated emperors as divine beings. Even when Stalin or Nero made a patently disastrous decision, there were no robust self-correcting mechanisms in the Soviet Union or the Roman Empire that could expose the mistake and push for a better course of action.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“However, since humans are interested in truth, there is a chance to resolve at least some conflicts peacefully, by talking to one another, acknowledging mistakes, embracing new ideas, and revising the stories we believe.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“The lesson to the apprentice – and to humanity – is clear: never summon powers you cannot control.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“It took four billion years for terrestrial evolution to produce a civilization of highly intelligent apes. If we are gone, and it takes evolution another hundred million years to produce a civilization of highly intelligent rats, it will. The universe is patient.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Most symphonies, melodies, and tunes don’t represent anything, which is why it makes no sense to ask whether they are true or false. Over the years people have created a lot of bad music, but not fake music.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“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

“As you climb the academic ladder, the pressure to specialize only increases. The academic world is ruled by the law of publish or perish. If you want a job, you must publish in peer-reviewed journals. But journals are divided by discipline, and publishing an article on virus mutations in a biology journal demands following different conventions from publishing an article on the politics of pandemics in a history journal. There are different jargons, different citation rules, and different expectations. Historians should have a deep understanding of culture and know how to read and interpret historical documents. Biologists should have a deep understanding of evolution and know how to read and interpret DNA molecules. Things that fall in between categories—like the interplay between human political ideologies and virus evolution—are often left unaddressed.[20]”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

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

“Tanto populistas como marxistas creen que nuestras opiniones están determinadas por nuestros privilegios, y que para cambiar las opiniones de la gente primero hay que arrebatarles sus privilegios, lo que por lo general requiere el uso de la fuerza. Sin embargo, puesto que a los humanos nos interesa la verdad, es posible resolver ciertos conflictos pacíficamente, hablando, asumiendo errores, adoptando nuevas ideas y revisando los relatos en los que creemos. Esta es la asunción básica de las redes democráticas y de las instituciones científicas.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“El populismo defiende que el poder es la única realidad, que toda interacción humana es una lucha por el poder y que la información es solo un arma que usamos para derrotar a nuestros enemigos.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA