Harari's New Book: "Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI"

Mark your calendars: on September 10, 2024, Yuval Noah Harari, the acclaimed historian and futurist, will release his highly anticipated new book.

From renowned historian and №1 Sunday Times bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari comes the story of how information networks have made and unmade our world.

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. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI – a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. If we are so wise, why are we so self-destructive?

Excerpt from "Nexus"

🔴 AI is an unprecedented threat to humanity because it is the first technology in history to make decisions and create new ideas by itself.

🔴 AI isn’t a tool — it’s an agent. The biggest threat of AI is that we are summoning to Earth countless new powerful agents that are potentially more intelligent and imaginative than us and that we don’t fully understand or control.

🔴Even at the present moment, in the embryonic stage of the AI revolution, computers already make decisions about us — whether to give us a mortgage, to hire us for a job, or to send us to prison. Meanwhile, generative AIs like GPT-4 already create new poems, stories and images. This trend will only increase and accelerate.

🔴 In the next few decades, AI is likely to gain the ability even to create new life forms, either by writing genetic code or inventing an inorganic code to animate inorganic entities. Therefore, AI could alter the course of our species’ history and the evolution of all life forms.

Praise for "Nexus"

Harari has a unique ability to unite both history’s finest details and its grandest megatrends in a single view. This deeply important book comes at a critical time as we all think through the implications of AI

Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind

👉 You can order the book here.

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