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Media type:
Book
Title:
Nexus
:
a brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI
Contains:
Prologue -- Part I: Human networks / Chapter 1: What is information -- Chapter 2: Stories: Unlimited connections -- Chapter 3: Documents: The bite of the paper tigers -- Chapter 4: Errors: The fantasy of infallibility -- Chapter 5: Decisions: A brief history of democracy and totalitarianism -- Part II: The inorganic network / Chapter 6: The new members: How computers are different from printing presses -- Chapter 7: Relentless: The network is always on -- Chapter 8: Fallible: The network is often wrong -- Part III: Computer politics / Chapter 9: Democracies: Can we still hold a conversation? -- Chapter 10: Totalitarianism: All power to the algorithms? -- Chapter 11: The silicon curtain: Global empire or global split? -- Epilogue -- Acknowledgements -- Notes -- Index
Description:
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. International and political tensions are rising. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI - an alien 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 brought us here. Taking us from the Stone Age through the canonisation of the Bible, the invention of print, the rise of mass media and the recent resurgence of populism, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how systems like the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church and the Soviet Union 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, nor is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes and, in doing so, rediscovers our shared humanity