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Yuval Noah Harari, Yuval Noah Harari: Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI (Hardcover, 2024, Fern Press) 5 stars

The story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world from the #1 …

Information as foundation

5 stars

This was way more comprehensive and interesting than I expected.

Regardless of how AI actually goes, it's clear that it is going to have an immense impact on our civilisation.

I guess I'd never deeply thought into the implications for us when information is more important than currency, and that your store of information impacts your power (either on the world stage or in business) differently than classical economical power.

I liked the example of how a local restaurant can compete with McDonalds by cooking quality food or providing a good service. A local/small company cannot ever compete with the likes of Google because of the proportion of the world's information that goes through them.

I enjoyed the broad historical approach of this book and its discussion of mythology and bureaucracy. Definitely left me with a bit of a feeling of AI being a bit of a pandora's box - once true AI is out there interacting with other AIs, I'm not sure we'll have much to say on anything...