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

Over the past 100,000 years, we, intelligent humans, have amassed enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions, and conquests, we are now in an existential crisis. The world is on the brink of ecological collapse. We are boiling in a flood of misinformation. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI — a new information network that threatens to destroy us. So why, despite all our achievements, are we so eager for self-destruction? In his new book, Yuval Noah Harari offers to look through the prism of human history to understand how the flow of information has shaped us and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, witch hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and today's resurgence of populism, the author invites us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. It explores how societies and political systems throughout history have used information to achieve their goals, and highlights the urgent need for decisions that face us as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence.