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NEXUS By Yuval Noah Harari Fern Press - £28 ISBN: 978-1-911-71708-9 • Sam North

The Sunday Times gave Nexus a rave review- I bought the book - a week later the Saturday Times trashed it.  So now I have to make up own mind about Harari’s follow up to Sapiens and Homo Deus (both of which I have read but completely forgotten the content thereof). I remember being impressed at the time, as were the twenty-five million readers of Sapiens but unlike fiction, it doesn’t seem to have stuck.  That’s entirely my fault but I fear the same thing will happen with Nexus. This tomb encompasses so much territory from the Stone Age to our immediate AI future I suspect many readers will struggle to retain the information.

The idea is that mankind’s history is all about the stories we tell ourselves and the ‘truth about life and how to live it’ is shaped by those stories. He goes into some detail about how the Bible was formed and finally solidified into one book – albeit Old Testament and New.  But is it the truth? It’s made up of stories, mostly by people who weren’t there in the case of the New Testament and the Old Testament is definitely corrupted by the retelling and shaped by political agendas of those who preserved the stories.  For those who accept the Bible as the true word of God, it is so far from the 'truth'. It is at best hearsay and they built into it a terrible misogynistic theme that relegated women to second class forever, as did all the other religious text books that so called civilization is based upon.

Moving on from clay tablets to the printing press – he cities how new science breakthroughs were propagated but how hate won the popularity stakes – particularly a book about Witches, which led to thousands of women in Europe being burned or drowned. This same tale reoccurs in history time and time again in different guises usually blaming Jews for bad weather or bad luck or anything at all and guess what it’s back as Trump and J.D. Vance tell stories about immigrants eating your precious cats and dogs. The algorithms of the internet in the hands of META or MUSK are designed to promote hate to earn them billions. Hate sells.
 
Harari delves into how autocrats seeks to control opinion and society to keep themselves in power – something Stalin perfected, concentrating all information in Moscow. Think of how more terrifying life would have been for Russians if Stalin had social media to hand or AI.

As the right-wing gain power again in Europe (and with Trump if he wins) total control of citizen’s lives will be the main objective (Project 2025).  We will all be boiling frogs and will realise too late that we have lost all freedoms.  The Social Credit system in China is utterly terrifying and woe betide any citizen who loses points as once you go into minus for any kind of infringement (consorting with someone they disapprove of or reading something on-line that they don’t like) you run the risk of losing your job or travel rights or in fact all your human rights.

Nexus is not a book to be read in a hurry, it can be a tad repetitive in places as he hammers a point home, and if you are seeking information as to where AI and humanity are headed, I suspect that there are 1000 sci-fi novels out there that have already dealt with this and created more impact.

Nexus is interesting, definitely depressing and quite possibly already out of date as AI progresses apace and seeps into every aspect of our lives.

© Sam North 9.16.24
Editor of hackwriters
author of Another Place To Die: Endtime Chronicles and Magenta

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