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

I did the audio version of the book. Yuval Harari is an excellent storyteller and always leaves you with an afterthought.

Nexus is meant to be a reflection on where humanity is heading, especially with the rise of AI, disinformation, and global instability. But to be honest, I didn’t enjoy it as much. It felt like a lot of repetition and basically a recap of his earlier books. The same themes from Sapiens and Homo Deus kept popping up, just re-worded. In those earlier books, his perspective felt fresh and thought-provoking. This one didn’t have that same spark.

Also, his fatalistic or anthropomorphic take on AI—and the hype he’s building around it—comes off as a bit shallow. While many of his concerns are valid, he presents them like they’re just around the corner, almost inevitable. What he misses, though, is that there are already a lot of conversations and efforts underway to address these risks, whether it’s through policy, regulation, or improvements in design.

Yes, it’s important to stay cautious and not blindly embrace every new piece of tech, but at the same time, mistakes—sometimes big ones—are part of how progress happens. That doesn’t mean we should stop, just that we need to learn as we go.

We live in a very complicated and unequal world, and AI is going to both help and hurt us. It’ll improve our quality of life in some ways while challenging it in others. That duality is inevitable. Overall, an okay read. Maybe more useful for someone who hasn’t read his earlier work, but for me, it didn’t bring anything particularly new to the table.

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