Nexus and the Shape of Information

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI is a book that clarified my perspective about all available information technology, bureaucracy, and mythology, which affected humankind a lot up until now. It is not just about artificial intelligence, and it teaches many aspects of the information networks we built over the past thousands of years.

One idea that stayed with me is that information is not the same as truth. This sounds obvious, but it explains a lot about why information networks can become powerful without becoming wise. A network can move messages faster, store more records, and connect more people, while still amplifying fiction or bad assumptions. Maybe the real question is not how much information a system has, but how well it can correct itself.

I read the Turkish translation, Neksus: Tas Devri’nden Yapay Zekaya Bilgi Aglarinin Kisa Tarihi. I liked it so much that I may come back to this book later many times, as I usually do with Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham. Especially one of the last parts of this book reminded me of Asimov’s Robot series, which described how AI can go out of hand when used extensively. Nexus made me think of Asimov because both are less about machines becoming evil and more about systems scaling beyond human correction. This is a very wide topic for many writers, but Yuval Noah Harari does a very good job with it.