Nexus
From the author of Sapiens comes the groundbreaking story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world. For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions, and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI—a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. For all that we have accomplished, why are we so self-destructive? Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems throughout history have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence. Information is not the raw material of truth; neither is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, and in doing so, rediscovers our shared humanity.
Stats for nerds
7recommend
14mentions
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2025–2026years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I won't answer your questions, but I think you'll find a lot of answers in Sapiens and Nexus, both books from Yuval Noah Harari. They explain a lot about the fantastic questions that you are posing.
- > The reality in the way information is used, I believe, is the opposite from what we think of. We believe that if there is sufficient information, we can use it to form an accurate model of reality.
You should read Yuval Noah Harari's Nexus. He calls this "the naive view of information," which is ignorant of the existence of what he astutely identifies as "intersubjective" realities (see also Angela Cooper-White's entry on "intersubjectivism" in The Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion):
This is the endgame of postmodernist and constructivist thinking that exalts narrative and story as the ground source of truth. In some ways what we are seeing is a return to religious and superstitious thinking where sufficient belief in a dogma or a pantheon is enough to reify those narratives into consensus reality.[...] its deepest and most complex usage is related to the postmodern philosophical concept of constructivism or, in social psychology, social constructionism – the notion that reality is co- constructed by participants in a relationship and in society.Historically Jungian psychology and indeed religion (a form of proto-psychology, from which Jung inherits by way of the alchemical tradition; see Jung's Psychology and Alchemy) was humanity's collective storehouse of wisdom and techniques for managing intersubjective realities and group "information hygiene." Such techniques are now being lost to antiquity with the late 20th and 21st century focus on only objectively verifiable, quantitative measurements (as opposed to the private subjective, qualitative phenomena experienced as the inner ruminations, contemplations, and dream life of the individual).
https://vimeo.com/387207936White Rose: Do you ever think that if you imagined or believed in something, it could come true... Simply by will? Angela: Yes. Actually, I did believe that. But I'm slowly having to admit that's just not the real world... Even if I want it to be. White Rose: Well, I guess it all depends on what your definition of real is. - > AI doesn't add anything to the ability to do mass surveillance
I recommend reading Yuval Noah Harari's Nexus for a deep discussion around this.
He makes the point that what makes this AI age much more dangerous for mass surveillance isn't just the collection of data, which has indeed been possible for a while, but the new ability to have AI sift through that enormous volume of information, an ability which until recently has not been possible in a meaningful way without a ton of manual work to support it.
Older attempts at mass control of a population already involved mass surveillance, even in a large amount of detail, but even when capturing in detail all citizens' activities, there were just not enough people around to be able to dig through that and analyze it. This has been somewhat true even with the help of computers, though computers have certainly already been making this easier.
But now you can just give all that data to an AI with your instructions, and it'll apply some sort of "judgement" on your behalf, completely autonomously, and even perform actions against those folks it finds, again autonomously, without needing to manually build a whole infrastructure to do that with manual rules. That's a very meaningful upgrade for someone wanting to control a population.
- I was listening to Yuval Harari's "Nexus" earlier this year. Great book, terrible narrator (for me).
I kept wishing it was Scott Brick(one of my favorite narrators) instead.
That frustration turned into ClonEpub - a desktop app that converts EPUBs to audiobooks using voice cloning.
Upload a 10-30 second sample of any voice, and it reads your book in that voice.
It runs entirely locally on CPU. My M1 MacBook Air with 8GB RAM handles it fine. Generated an audiobook of Animal Farm in about 100 minutes.
Why local? No API costs. And honestly, if I want to clone Scott Brick's voice for my own listening pleasure, that's between me and my headphones.
Built with Electron + Python, powered by @kyutai_labs's excellent Pocket TTS (100M params, ~240MB).
Try it out if you are an audiobook lover like me. :)
Note: the tool only supports English book generation at the moment due to restrictions of the TTS model used, and I only made the distribution for Mac Apple Silicon users, but theoretically it should work on all machines with a CPU, and since it's 100% open source, you can make your own distribution.
- Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari
Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel
The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
- Nexus by Yuval Harari is one of the most influential books I’ve read.
