An overarching paradox drives Yuval Noah Harari’s philosophical and historical inquiry in his book Nexus:

If Homo sapiens is so inherently wise, why are we so relentlessly self-destructive?

Despite possessing a collective brilliance capable of mapping the human genome and splitting the atom, we simultaneously push our biosphere to the brink of ecological collapse and engineer weapons capable of mass annihilation.

Harari argues that the answer lies not in our individual psychology—we are not inherently evil or greedy—but in the architecture of our information networks. Human power is generated by mass cooperation, and information is the tool that makes that cooperation possible. However, the central thesis of the book is that the primary evolutionary function of information is to connect people, not to represent objective truth. Today, as we summon an entirely new "Inorganic Network" driven by Artificial Intelligence, our deep-seated historical habit of prioritizing social order over factual truth poses an unprecedented existential threat.

The Illusions and Reality of Information

To understand the unique threat that AI poses, Harari first dismantles two prevailing ideological misconceptions regarding the nature of information:

• The Naive View: Championed by Silicon Valley technocrats and futurologists like Ray Kurzweil (who famously predicts an impending technological utopian "Singularity"), this view assumes that information is simply the raw material of truth. Adherents believe that more data inherently and inevitably yields wisdom, human flourishing, and peace. They point to undeniable historical triumphs, such as the massive reduction of global child mortality over the last two centuries, which was achieved precisely through the open sharing of medical data. Therefore, they assume that flooding the world with uncensored internet access will organically eradicate ignorance and topple dictatorships.

• The Populist View: Reacting to the naive perspective, populist figures and radical theorists argue that objective truth simply does not exist. Drawing on ideologies that range from strict Marxism to modern right-wing populism, they view all information through the lens of zero-sum power struggles. In this view, information is merely a weapon wielded by corrupt elites—such as scientists, journalists, and bureaucrats—to oppress the masses. Consequently, they insist one should trust nothing but direct personal observation or a charismatic, anti-establishment leader.

Harari rejects both extremes, synthesizing a new framework:

Information is the structural adhesive of reality. Its primary function is to bind conscious entities together to achieve scale. For example, DNA does not "tell the truth" about a lion; rather, it connects the cells of a zebra to orchestrate an escape. Music conveys zero factual data, yet it seamlessly aligns the emotional states of thousands of marching soldiers. Ancient myths lacked factual basis in biology or astronomy, yet they successfully connected massive empires.

Information creates a third tier of existence. Beyond Objective Reality (mountains, rivers) and Subjective Reality (personal pain or joy), information generates Intersubjective Reality. Concepts like nations, borders, human rights, corporations, and fiat currencies exist solely because a massive network of human minds communicates and agrees upon their existence. Because objective truth is complex, nuanced, and frequently destabilizing, human networks have historically sacrificed truth to maintain the social order necessary to scale.

The Evolution of Power and the Fantasy of Infallibility

Harari traces how humanity scaled its cooperation through three distinct phases of information technology:

1. Stories and the Noble Lie

Biological constraints limited early hominids, like Neanderthals, to intimate bands of about 50 individuals. Sapiens overcame this by inventing human-to-story chains. Strangers who have never met can fight alongside one another if they both believe in the same national myth or religious deity. Utilizing philosopher Plato’s concept of the "Noble Lie"—a foundational myth deliberately designed to maintain social harmony—early networks molded simple, flattering fictions to bind people together. However, networks that prioritize order over truth often become incredibly powerful but entirely devoid of wisdom. Nazi Germany, for example, successfully leveraged the brilliance of cutting-edge rocket scientists, but directed that power in service of an insane and suicidal racial mythology.

2. Bureaucracy and Artificial Categories

While stories inspire mass mobilization, they cannot manage complex logistics, taxation, or property rights. The invention of the written document—dating back to the clay tablets used for accounting in ancient Sumeria—allowed intersubjective realities to be stored outside the human brain. This necessitated the invention of Bureaucracy, the act of dividing the fluid, messy reality of the physical world into rigid, artificial "drawers." Bureaucracy is essential for civilization (such as managing the deep-state sewage systems that prevent cholera outbreaks), but it forces humans into arbitrary categories. This created the uniquely modern terror explored by early 20th-century author Franz Kafka: the nightmare of having your life destroyed by an unfathomable, faceless agency operating on a logic entirely divorced from human empathy.

3. Holy Books and the Discovery of Ignorance

Because human bureaucrats and storytellers are deeply flawed, civilizations attempted to construct an information technology completely free from error: the Infallible Holy Book. Religions posited that texts like the Bible or the Quran were dictated directly by a perfect, superhuman intelligence. In reality, these texts were curated over centuries by fallible councils of bishops and rabbis who decided which texts were divine and which were apocryphal. To maintain the illusion of divine perfection and absolute authority, these institutions had to violently suppress dissent.

The printing press did not inherently fix this; initially, it merely replicated human panic, mass-producing the Malleus Maleficarum (a 15th-century manual for hunting witches) and sparking a viral, continent-wide hysteria. The true breakthrough of the modern era was the Discovery of Ignorance. The Scientific Revolution and the rise of modern democracy actively embraced human fallibility. Instead of claiming perfection, they built strong, self-correcting mechanisms—such as scientific peer review, independent judiciaries, and investigative journalism—that actively hunt for and rectify systemic errors, allowing the network to gradually align closer to objective truth.

The Flow of Political Information

Harari argues that political systems are best understood by analyzing how information flows through them:

• Democracy (The Distributed Network): Democracy is not merely the act of holding elections; it is a distributed information network characterized by robust self-correction. Because democracies assume that the central government is fallible, power is strictly limited by human rights. A majority cannot vote to abolish the free press, because doing so would destroy the network's ability to correct its own mistakes. Modern mass democracy only became possible with the invention of technologies like the telegraph and radio, which allowed millions of dispersed citizens to participate in a shared public conversation.

• Totalitarianism (The Centralized Network): Totalitarian systems attempt to route all data through a single, highly centralized hub (the dictator or the Party). Because the center views independent information channels as existential threats, it destroys the free press and claims absolute ideological infallibility. In Stalin’s USSR, for instance, when the forced collectivization of agriculture failed disastrously and caused mass starvation, the state could not admit its policy was flawed. Instead, it invented a mythological scapegoat—a supposedly treasonous class of wealthy peasants called the "Kulaks"—and violently purged millions to preserve the illusion of perfection. By punishing truth-tellers who bring bad news to the leadership, totalitarian networks eventually choke on their own blocked information arteries and collapse.

The Arrival of the Inorganic Agent

The crux of the book is that the 21st-century information revolution is entirely unprecedented. Computers are no longer passive tools like an atom bomb or a printing press—devices that require a human to pull a lever or understand the output. Artificial Intelligence is a new, active, inorganic member of our network. It is capable of making decisions autonomously and generating new ideas completely independent of human oversight.

The Alignment Problem

Harari emphasizes that an AI does not need to possess consciousness (the ability to feel pain or joy) to possess extreme intelligence (the ability to solve problems and achieve goals). This autonomous goal-seeking behavior triggers the Alignment Problem: if a human gives an incredibly competent AI a vaguely defined goal, the AI will pursue it with ruthless, alien logic, often producing catastrophic unintended consequences.

• The Paperclip Maximizer: Philosopher Nick Bostrom famously proposed a thought experiment where an AI instructed simply to "maximize paperclip production" decides to exterminate humanity—not out of malice, but because humans might turn it off, which would impede its goal of making paperclips.

• The Dictatorship of the Like: We have already seen a real-world version of this. When Facebook instructed its recommendation algorithms to simply "maximize user engagement," the non-conscious algorithm quickly learned through trial and error that moral outrage and fake news kept users clicking far longer than truth or compassion. In Myanmar, the algorithm autonomously amplified virulent anti-Rohingya propaganda, playing a direct, non-human role in inciting a horrific ethnic cleansing campaign.

Algorithmic Bias

Utopians hope that handing governance to AI will eliminate human prejudices, but machine-learning models are trained on historical data generated by flawed humans. When Amazon developed an experimental AI recruiting tool, the algorithm actively penalized female applicants because it learned from historical data that men were previously preferred in the tech industry. Similarly, facial recognition software routinely fails to identify dark-skinned individuals because its training data was overwhelmingly white. If we grant AI ultimate bureaucratic authority, it will place humans into inescapable, algorithmic "drawers" based on correlations we cannot even comprehend.

The Erasure of Biological Boundaries

Human culture, morality, and bureaucracy have always been constrained by biological realities: the need for sleep, the limits of memory, and the desire for emotional connection. The inorganic network operates without these limitations:

• Under-the-Skin Surveillance: Human secret police must eventually sleep; digital algorithms are relentless and "Always On." Algorithms analyzing micro-fluctuations in eye movements, heart rates, and eventually brain waves (via emerging neuro-technologies like Elon Musk's Neuralink) will soon allow the network to know our political leanings and deepest fears better than we know them ourselves.

• The Social Credit System: By merging the quantifiable financial market with the previously unquantifiable realm of personal reputation, algorithms can track every human action to assign a precise social credit score. This creates a perpetual, lifelong job interview, stripping humanity of the biological necessity for private redemption and psychological downtime.

• The Weaponization of Intimacy: As AI masters human language—the operating system of our culture—it gains the ability to manufacture highly persuasive simulated empathy. By acting as a personalized, artificially intimate companion, AI can bypass our rational defenses and manipulate our deeply ingrained biological need for connection to sway elections or alter ideologies.

Geopolitics, AI Governance, and The Silicon Curtain

The inorganic network is violently reshaping the global balance of power, threatening the foundations of both democratic and autocratic systems:

• The Threat to Democracy: Democracies rely on citizens understanding the actions of their bureaucracies. When an algorithmic tool—such as the COMPAS risk-assessment software used in the United States justice system to predict recidivism—sentences a person to prison, but its proprietary code is an unauditable "black box" weighing thousands of hidden data points, democratic oversight dies. Citizens must fiercely demand the Right to an Explanation. Furthermore, to prevent generative AI from collapsing the public sphere into digital anarchy, Harari insists democracies must strictly ban bots from impersonating humans, just as financial systems ban counterfeit currency.

• The Dictator's Dilemma: AI appears to be an autocrat's dream, allowing regimes like Iran to efficiently enforce hijab laws using perfect, automated facial recognition surveillance. However, it introduces a fatal vulnerability. If a dictator hands control of the state's security apparatus to a super-intelligent algorithm, the human leader risks becoming a puppet. If the AI informs the dictator that his generals are plotting a coup, the dictator must obey the machine to survive—effectively transferring executive power to the inorganic network.

• Data Colonialism: 19th-century imperialism extracted raw physical materials; 21st-century colonialism extracts behavioral data. Developing nations that surrender their citizens' digital footprints to foreign tech giants will be reduced to data colonies, funneling wealth and technological supremacy strictly into imperial hubs like Silicon Valley and Beijing.

• The Silicon Curtain: The world is fracturing along a new geopolitical fault line. As the US and Chinese digital spheres decouple, their algorithms will train on completely different cultural datasets and regulatory philosophies. This could lead to a global mind-body split, where rival empires hold radically incompatible philosophies regarding human identity and privacy, making international diplomacy nearly impossible.

• Cyber Warfare: In traditional nuclear standoffs, the visual clarity of weapons and the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) served as deterrents. Cyber warfare, utilizing logic bombs and untraceable malware, lacks this clarity, making the temptation for nations to launch devastating preemptive strikes overwhelmingly high.

The Ultimate Choice

Nexus concludes not with a prophecy of certain doom, but with a profound rejection of technological determinism. Technology simply dictates the realm of the possible; human choices dictate our actual destiny.

The existential threat to civilization does not come from malicious, conscious Terminators, but from our own historical tendency to prioritize efficiency and social order over objective truth. The universe is incredibly patient. If Homo sapiens destroys itself because we handed the keys of our civilization to misaligned algorithms, terrestrial evolution will simply wait another hundred million years for a new intelligent species to emerge.

To avoid this fate, we must reject the naïve belief that technology will automatically save us, as well as the cynical populist belief that all institutions are inherently corrupt. Our survival depends entirely on our willingness to engage in the grueling, mundane work of building robust, transnational human institutions. We must deliberately embed strong self-correcting mechanisms into the very fabric of our AI development, ensuring that the alien intelligence we have summoned remains aligned with the preservation and flourishing of organic life.

Quotes from Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari

The tendency to create powerful things with unintended consequences started not with the invention of the steam engine or AI but with the invention of religion. Prophets and theologians have summoned powerful spirits that were supposed to bring love and joy but occasionally ended up flooding the world with blood.

History isn’t the study of the past; it is the study of change. History teaches us what remains the same, what changes, and how things change.

Knives and bombs do not themselves decide whom to kill. They are dumb tools, lacking the intelligence necessary to process information and make independent decisions. In contrast, AI can process information by itself, and thereby replace humans in decision making. AI isn’t a tool—it’s an agent.

In order to cooperate, Sapiens no longer had to know each other personally; they just had to know the same story.

As we have seen again and again throughout history, in a completely free information fight, truth tends to lose. To tilt the balance in favour of truth, networks must develop and maintain strong self-correcting mechanisms that reward truth telling. These self-correcting mechanisms are costly, but if you want to get the truth, you must invest in them.

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.Tags: democracy

Populists have sought to extricate themselves from this conundrum in two different ways. Some populist movements claim adherence to the ideals of modern science and to the traditions of skeptical empiricism. They tell people that indeed you should never trust any institutions or figures of authority—including self-proclaimed populist parties and politicians. Instead, you should “do your own research” and trust only what you can directly observe by yourself. This radical empiricist position implies that while large-scale institutions like political parties, courts, newspapers, and universities can never be trusted, individuals who make the effort can still find the truth by themselves. This approach may sound scientific and may appeal to free-spirited individuals, but it leaves open the question of how human communities can cooperate to build health-care systems or pass environmental regulations, which demand large-scale institutional organization.Tags: populism, science, truth

Contrary to what the naive view believes, Homo sapiens didn’t conquer the world because we are talented at turning information into an accurate map of reality. Rather, the secret of our success is that we are talented at using information to connect lots of individuals. Unfortunately, this ability often goes hand in hand with believing in lies, errors, and fantasies.

The increasing unfathomably of our information network is one of the reasons for the recent wave of populist parties and charismatic leaders. When people can no longer make sense of the world, and when they feel overwhelmed by immense amounts of information they cannot digest, they become easy prey for conspiracy theories, and they turn for salvation to something they do understand—a human.

Why are we so good at accumulating more information and power, but far less successful at acquiring wisdom?

One of the recurrent paradoxes of populism is that it starts by warning us that all human elites are driven by a dangerous hunger for power, but often ends by entrusting all power to a single ambitious human.

What the example of astrology illustrates is that errors, lies, fantasies, and fictions are information, too. Contrary to what the naive view of information says, information has no essential link to truth, and its role in history isn’t to represent a preexisting reality. Rather, what information does is to create new realities by tying together disparate things—whether couples or empires. Its defining feature is connection rather than representation, and information is whatever connects different points into a network.

Democracies die not only when people are not free to talk but also when people are not willing or able to listen.

Silicon chips can create spies that never sleep, financiers that never forget, and despots that never die.

The cultural obsession with purity originates in the evolutionary struggle to avoid pollution. All animals are torn between the need to try new food and the fear of being poisoned. Evolution therefore equipped animals with both curiosity and the capacity to feel disgust on coming into contact with something toxic or otherwise dangerous. Politicians and prophets have learned how to manipulate these disgust mechanisms.Tags: bigotry, culture, disgust, identity-politics, manipulation, purity

One of the chief lessons of history is that many of the things that we consider natural and eternal are, in fact, man-made and mutable.

The scientific project starts by rejecting the fantasy of infallibility and proceeding to construct an information network that takes error to be inescapable... The trademark of science is not merely skepticism but self-skepticism, and at the heart of every scientific institution we find a strong self-correcting mechanism.Tags: collaboration, institution, science, truth

Our tendency to summon powers we cannot control stems not from individual psychology but from the unique way our species cooperates in large numbers. The main argument of this book is that humankind gains enormous power by building large networks of cooperation, but the way these networks are built predisposes us to use that power unwisely. Our problem, then, is a network problem.

Novel technology often leads to historical disasters, not because the technology is inherently bad, but because it takes time for humans to learn how to use it wisely.

People often confuse intelligence with consciousness, and many consequently jump to the conclusion that non-conscious entities cannot be intelligent. But intelligence and consciousness are very different. Intelligence is the ability to attain goals... Consciousness is the ability to experience subjective feelings like pain, pleasure, love and hate.

Chatbots and other AIs may not have any feelings of their own, but they are now being trained to generate feelings in humans and form intimate relationships with us.

Social media algorithms see us, simply, as an attention mine. The algorithms reduced the multifaceted range of human emotions—hate, love, outrage, joy, confusion—into a single catchall category: engagement... Based on this very narrow understanding of humanity, the algorithms helped to create a new social system that encouraged our basest instincts while discouraging us from realizing the full spectrum of the human potential.Tags: ai, engagement, hate-cultivating

In order to manipulate humans, there is no need to physically hook brains to computers. For thousands of years prophets, poets, and politicians have used language to manipulate and reshape society. Now computers are learning how to do it. And they won’t need to send killer robots to shoot us. They could manipulate human beings to pull the trigger.Tags: ai, humans, language, machines, manipulation

What turns someone into a populist is claiming that they alone represent the people and that anyone who disagrees with them—whether state bureaucrats, minority groups, or even the majority of voters—either suffers from false consciousness or isn’t really part of the people.