As I read Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI , I am reminded of this note from Benjamin Franklin, in a letter about his experiments with electricity:
I have already made this paper too long, for which I must crave pardon, not having now time to make it shorter.1
Nexus is about a rapidly evolving topic; it is fair to say that Harari did not have time to make it shorter. One could spend years writing and then revising a book such as Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harari, 2011), and still have the book be relevant and accurate. But much of Nexus is about generative AI; spending more than six months writing it could have made it unpublishable.
If Harari had had more time, Nexus could have been shorter. A good developmental editor and a good copy editor could have helped Harari produce a more concise, and, I think, more persuasive work. Like Sapiens, Nexus contains some gems of sentences or paragraphs that made me sit up and take notice, made me see the world in a different way. But unlike Sapiens, Nexus scatters these gems among repetitious content, mostly along the lines of “The world is not like you think. Information is not what you think. Bad things are going to happen!”
I’m mostly glad to be reading Nexus, but I can’t say I’d recommend it to someone without a particular interest in generative AI. For something shorter that captures the key ideas—and which isn’t behind a paywall—try “Why AI poses an existential danger to humanity,” from The Globe and Mail (Canada).
For a more complete review of Nexus, I recommend Rage against the machine, in The Guardian (UK).
- https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ ↩︎