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The intellectual author Yuval Noah Harari who brought Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow to the world’s consciousness has another book up his sleeve.

Bringing us more of those disruptive ideas that we love, his latest book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, is a sweeping exploration of the history and future of human networks. It also comes with a warning about Artificial Intelligence hacking “the operating system of human civilisation”.

Drawing on a wide range of historical and contemporary examples, Harari illustrates how information has shaped and continues to shape human societies, reports The Conversation.

Sapiens lays the foundation, where Harari explored the cognitive revolution that gave humans the unique ability to create shared myths and narratives. Nexus shifts the focus to how these narratives are transmitted, maintained and transformed through networks of information.

At the heart of this new book is Harari’s argument that AI marks a major turning point in the evolution of human civilisation, a topic he also delved into in a 2023 article about AI’s ability to shape language, culture, and society. In the article, he warned that AI has “hacked the operating system of human civilisation,” which offers an important perspective for understanding Nexus.

Image: Amazon

The book covers a vast stretch of history, from the rise of Homo sapiens and their encounters with Neanderthals, all the way to Elon Musk’s Neuralink (a device that lets people communicate with computers using just their thoughts) and the potential impact of AI on the future of human civilisation.

Harari takes readers on a journey across millennia, and his ability to sustain a coherent argument about the centrality of information networks is one of the book’s greatest strengths. The connections he draws between ancient history and modern technology challenge readers to rethink how they understand both past and present.

Because Harari forces link between seemingly disparate events and phenomena under the broad umbrella of “networks”, the book might come across as arrogant, but then again, it could also be highly stimulating.

Nexus centres on the idea that networks – whether social, political, economic or technological – are the bedrock of human cooperation and power. However, Nexus is not just a history of networks. It is also a cautionary tale about the dangers posed by the most advanced and rapidly evolving networks in today’s world: AI and other forms of digital technology that he refers to as “alien intelligence” that could potentially operate beyond human control.

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI is definitely the book to grab if you want to understand where humans and AI are headed.

[source:theconversation]