BOOK REVIEW: Harari’s New Book Explores The Nexus of Society & Information
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari should be required reading for everyone. I don’t agree with everything Harari asserts in the massive nonfiction book, but it’s an eye-opening exploration of the themes within human history. There’s even a three-part graphic novel if you prefer illustrations instead of nearly 500 pages of solid text.
What you’ll learn from reading the book (or any of Harari’s other work) is that it’s a deeper exploration of not what happened in history, but why it happened and what conclusions we can draw about these motivations in our modern age.
Nexus (his next book releasing in September 2024) is the next logical progression from Sapiens. Building from the ideas presented about the human cognitive revolution, Harari delves into the spread of information and how they shape human narratives and societies.
I was particularly interested in this book because it extends the notion of storytelling as a uniquely human trait. Unlike other species on Earth, we can invent intangible things like governments, laws, companies, and money through stories. I’ve written several books about storytelling so these ideas deepened my appreciation for the power of human narratives.
Like Sapiens, Nexus is a lengthy and challenging read. At over 500 pages, Nexus rambles on about the history of bureaucracies, the differences between democracy and totalitarianism, and the fallibility of religious texts like The Bible. Once again, I don’t fully agree with every conclusion Harari draws within the book, but I’m intrigued by his arguments and appreciate the facts used to support them.
Nexus is an especially important book for our current time because it addresses two major global trends: the rise of populist authoritarian figures and the rise of Artificial Intelligence. Harari seeks to use historical lessons to point to how we can deal with these two potential threats.
Remember, Sapiens was written (originally in Hebrew) in 2011 — before Donald Trump, COVID-19, or Chat-GPT. The world has changed astoundingly in the 13 years since and Nexus feels like a quick update to account for these changes.
If Sapiens was a look at the past, Harari’s two other books — 21 Lessons For the 21st Century and Homo Deus — looked into the present and future, respectively. I’ve read both of these books as well, but with more mixed feelings. I had the biggest issues with Homo Deus and its bleak, almost-nihilistic look at how technology will warp humanity and transform us into gods.
Perhaps the biggest knock on Deus was the author’s confident assertion that we would never again have a global pandemic. This was in 2018, less than two years before it would be proved painfully wrong. It was only asserted once in the text, but it was a microcosm to show Harari’s own fallibility.
Reading Homo Deus was a disturbingly surreal experience that extended outside of Harari’s strength, which is history. Nexus is a more grounded version of this future-facing perspective. It does a better job of staying founded on historical examples and doesn’t reach as far into the unknown.
No one knows what will really happen with artificial intelligence (or alien intelligence, as Harari argues we should say). Many people are willing to guess with levels of accuracy and confidence. I appreciate this look at our collective future and how it weaves together disparate information to weave an interconnected look at the network of human information.
Nexus presents an interesting perspective on the history of human networks as a means of guessing what might happen with AI. It’s pure Harari — both the good and the bad of what that means. It’s worth reading and taking with a few grains of salt.
Note: I received a free advance copy of the book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair review, which you hopefully just read.
