The key ideas

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

Yuval Noah Harari, 2024

We know more about the world than any generation before us, and yet we are closer to self-destruction than ever. Yuval Noah Harari explains this paradox through the history of information networks: from witch hunts and Stalin's surveillance to Facebook's algorithms. You'll understand why artificial intelligence has, for the first time, become not a tool but a member of these networks, and what can keep it under control.

Who it is for

For anyone who scrolls a feed every day and wants to understand who puts it together and why. For everyone who worries about artificial intelligence and is tired of arguments where some promise paradise and others the end of the world.

If we are so wise, why are we so self-destructive?

Why a clever species destroys itself

The sorcerer's apprentice in Goethe's ballad is left alone in the workshop and enchants a broom to carry water from the river. He doesn't know the words that stop it. The broom hauls water without end, the workshop floods, and when the apprentice, in despair, chops the broom in two, now two brooms carry water. Only the master's return saves him.

Yuval Noah Harari opens the book with a question: if our species is so wise, why is it so close to destroying itself? Old myths blame the pride of one person who got too much power. Harari answers differently. Power is never a one-person affair: it comes from networks of many people. And what holds those networks together is information, and very often it is fiction rather than truth.

Harari argues with two views. The naive view of information promises that the more of it there is, the closer we get to the truth. The populist view insists on the opposite: all information is just a weapon in the struggle for power. The author looks for a path between them.

Ahead are a carrier pigeon, the author's grandfather without the right piece of paper, a book about hunting witches, Chernobyl and an algorithm that chose hatred. Let's start with a simple question: what is information?

The pigeon that saved a battalion. Or didn't

In October 1918 an American battalion of more than five hundred soldiers was cut off behind German lines, and its own artillery was shelling it by mistake. Major Charles Whittlesey sent the carrier pigeon Cher Ami with a note: “For heaven's sake, stop it.” The wounded bird made it, and legend has it that the pigeon is what saved the battalion.

In 2021 the historian Frank Blazich went through the military archives. It turned out that headquarters had learned where the battalion was twenty minutes before the pigeon arrived. There isn't even proof that Cher Ami was the bird carrying the note. But the story was so good that the survivors themselves believed it. Decades later, one officer took his children to see the stuffed pigeon in the museum and told them they all owed their lives to that bird.

Hence the book's main idea. The naive view holds that information represents reality. Harari answers that its main job is to connect people. It can represent the truth, but it doesn't have to. The Bible is wrong about the origins of humanity and the causes of epidemics, yet it has united billions of people.

True information is rare and costly, while fiction is cheap and simple. So it helps to ask about any piece of news not only “is it true?” but also “whom does it unite, and around what?”

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About the author

Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli historian who teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus”.

All books by this author: Yuval Noah Harari

Terms from the book

  • Goethe
  • Bureaucracy
  • Kramer
  • Pauling
  • DSM
  • Alignment problem
  • Naive view of information: Harari's name for the belief that information mostly represents reality, so the more of it there is, the closer people get to truth and wisdom. This is the author's term.
  • Populist view: Harari's name for the opposite belief: there is no truth, only power, and all information is just a weapon. The author considers both extremes mistaken.
  • Whittlesey: Charles Whittlesey, an American major who commanded a battalion surrounded in the Argonne Forest in France in October 1918.
  • Cher Ami: A US Army carrier pigeon that became a hero of the First World War. After the bird died, it was stuffed and put on display at the Smithsonian.
  • Blazich: Frank Blazich, an American military historian. In 2021 he checked the archives and showed that the legend of Cher Ami is largely exaggerated.
  • Luttinger: Bruno Luttinger (born 1913), Harari's maternal grandfather. In 1938 he lost his Romanian citizenship, in 1940 he fled to Palestine, and he fought in the British army.
  • Czernowitz: A city in western Ukraine, today called Chernivtsi. Until 1918 it belonged to Austria-Hungary, and then to Romania.
  • Snow: John Snow (1813–1858), an English physician. In 1854, using lists of the sick, he found the source of cholera in London: a water pump on Broad Street.
  • Hammer of the Witches: Heinrich Kramer's treatise (1486) on how to find and punish witches. It was reprinted many times and became a model for witch hunters.
  • Würzburg: A city in Bavaria. In the late 1620s it saw one of the cruelest witch hunts in Europe.
  • Shechtman: Dan Shechtman, an Israeli chemist. He discovered quasicrystals and received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it.
  • Quasicrystals: Solids whose atoms are ordered, but whose pattern doesn't repeat periodically the way it does in an ordinary crystal.
  • Self-correcting mechanism: Harari's name for the ways an institution finds and fixes its own mistakes: peer review in science, independent courts, free elections.
  • Three Mile Island: A nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, USA. The accident there in March 1979 was the most serious in the history of American nuclear power.
  • Stalin: Joseph Stalin (1878–1953), leader of the Soviet Union from the late 1920s until his death.
  • Doctors' plot: A campaign in the USSR in 1951–1953: a group of doctors, most of them Jewish, were accused of conspiring to murder Soviet leaders.
  • Myanmar: A country in Southeast Asia, formerly called Burma.
  • Rohingya: A Muslim minority in western Myanmar, in Rakhine State. For decades it has faced discrimination.
  • Wirathu: A Buddhist monk from Myanmar known for sermons of hatred against Rohingya Muslims.
  • GPT-4: A language model from OpenAI, released in March 2023.
  • CAPTCHA: A check on websites that tells a human from a program, for example by asking you to read distorted letters.
  • Amodei: Dario Amodei, an American artificial intelligence researcher.
  • Iosifescu: Gheorghe Iosifescu, one of Romania's first computer programmers.
  • Wisconsin: A state in the northern United States.
  • Loomis: Eric Loomis, a Wisconsin resident. He challenged a sentence handed down with an algorithm's assessment taken into account, but in 2016 the state Supreme Court ruled against him.
  • COMPAS: A commercial algorithm that estimates the risk that a convicted person will commit another crime. Courts in several US states have used it.

All terms

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