Nexus Yuval Quotes

In order to cooperate, Sapiens no longer had to know each other personally; they just had to know the same story.

The tendency to create powerful things with unintended consequences started not with the invention of the steam engine or AI but with the invention of religion. Prophets and theologians have summoned powerful spirits that were supposed to bring love and joy but occasionally ended up flooding the world with blood.

History isn’t the study of the past; it is the study of change. History teaches us what remains the same, what changes, and how things change.

AI can process information by itself, and thereby replace humans in decision making. AI isn’t a tool—it’s an agent.

Why are we so good at accumulating more information and power, but far less successful at acquiring wisdom?

Silicon chips can create spies that never sleep, financiers that never forget, and despots that never die.

Tal como se ha señalado en el capítulo 2, los Padres Fundadores

Knives and bombs do not themselves decide whom to kill. They are dumb tools, lacking the intelligence necessary to process information and make independent decisions. In contrast, AI can process information by itself, and thereby replace humans in decision making. AI isn’t a tool—it’s an agent.

¿Por qué somos tan buenos a la hora de acumular más información y poder pero tenemos mucho menos éxito a la hora de adquirir sabiduría?

But why would human societies choose to entrust power to their worst members? Most Germans in 1933, for example, were not psychopaths. So why did they vote for Hitler?

that AI is the first technology in history that can make decisions and create new ideas by itself.

Silicon chips can create spies that never sleep, financiers that never forget and despots that never die.

Indeed, each soldier was a unique human being, with different parents and friends and individual fears and hopes.

Contrary to what the naive view believes, Homo sapiens didn’t conquer the world because we are talented at turning information into an accurate map of reality. Rather, the secret of our success is that we are talented at using information to connect lots of individuals. Unfortunately, this ability often goes hand in hand with believing in lies, errors, and fantasies.

Our tendency to summon powers we cannot control stems not from individual psychology but from the unique way our species cooperates in large numbers. The main argument of this book is that humankind gains enormous power by building large networks of cooperation, but the way these networks are built predisposes us to use that power unwisely. Our problem, then, is a network problem.

... democracy doesn't mean majority rule; rather, it means freedom and equality for all. Democracy is a system that guarantees everyone certain liberties, which even the majority cannot take away.

The increasing unfathomability of our information network is one of the reasons for the recent wave of populist parties and charismatic leaders. When people can no longer make sense of the world, and when they feel overwhelmed by immense amounts of information they cannot digest, they become easy prey for conspiracy theories, and they turn for salvation to something they do understand—a human.

the networks have also learned how to use information to maintain stronger social order among larger populations, by using not just truthful accounts but also fictions, fantasies, propaganda, and—occasionally—downright lies.

construyen dichas redes las predispone a hacer un uso imprudente del poder. Nuestro problema, por lo tanto, tiene que ver con las redes. Más concretamente, es un problema de información. La información es el pegamento que mantiene unidas las redes.

What the example of astrology illustrates is that errors, lies, fantasies, and fictions are information, too. Contrary to what the naive view of information says, information has no essential link to truth, and its role in history isn’t to represent a preexisting reality. Rather, what information does is to create new realities by tying together disparate things—whether couples or empires. Its defining feature is connection rather than representation, and information is whatever connects different points into a network.

Homo Deus, a book that highlighted some of the dangers posed to humanity by the new information technologies. That book argued that the real hero of history has always been information, rather than Homo sapiens, and that scientists increasingly understand not just history but also biology, politics, and economics in terms of information flows.

As we have seen again and again throughout history, in a completely free information fight, truth tends to lose. To tilt the balance in favour of truth, networks must develop and maintain strong self-correcting mechanisms that reward truth telling. These self-correcting mechanisms are costly, but if you want to get the truth, you must invest in them.

How can a deep-seated distrust of all elites and institutions be squared with unwavering admiration for one leader and party? This is why populists ultimately depend on the mystical notion that the strongman embodies the people. When trust in bureaucratic institutions like election boards, courts, and newspapers is particularly low, an enhanced reliance on mythology is the only way to preserve order.

This drives populists to be skeptical of the pursuit of truth, and to argue... that 'power is the only reality.' They thereby seek to undercut or appropriate the authority of any independent institutions that might oppose them. The result is a dark and cynical view of the world as a jungle and of human beings as creatures obsessed with power alone. All social interactions are seen as power struggles, and all institutions are depicted as cliques promoting the interests of their own members...

escoba encantados, sobre la IA y sobre muchas otras cosas. Mientras que cada individuo humano suele interesarse por conocer la verdad acerca de sí mismo y del mundo, las grandes redes ponen en contacto a sus miembros y crean orden al generar dependencia en ficciones y fantasías. Así es como, por ejemplo, vimos surgir el nazismo y el estalinismo. Estas eran unas redes poderosísimas sostenidas por ideas excepcionalmente equivocadas. Tal como afirmó con acierto George Orwell, la ignorancia es fuerza.

How many pizzas can you purchase for a dollar, or for a bitcoin? In 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz bought two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins. It was the first known commercial transaction involving bitcoin – and with hindsight, also the most expensive pizza ever. By November 2021, a single bitcoin was valued at more than $69,000, so the bitcoins Hanyecz paid for his two pizzas were worth $690 million, enough to purchase millions of pizzas.14 While the caloric value of pizza is an objective reality that remained the same between 2010 and 2021, the financial value of bitcoin is an intersubjective reality that changed dramatically during the same period, depending on the stories people told and believed about bitcoin.

Populists have sought to extricate themselves from this conundrum in two different ways. Some populist movements claim adherence to the ideals of modern science and to the traditions of skeptical empiricism. They tell people that indeed you should never trust any institutions or figures of authority—including self-proclaimed populist parties and politicians. Instead, you should “do your own research” and trust only what you can directly observe by yourself. This radical empiricist position implies that while large-scale institutions like political parties, courts, newspapers, and universities can never be trusted, individuals who make the effort can still find the truth by themselves. This approach may sound scientific and may appeal to free-spirited individuals, but it leaves open the question of how human communities can cooperate to build health-care systems or pass environmental regulations, which demand large-scale institutional organization. Is a single individual capable of doing all the necessary research to decide whether the earth’s climate is heating up and what should be done about it? How would a single person go about collecting climate data from throughout the world, not to mention obtaining reliable records from past centuries? Trusting only “my own research” may sound scientific, but in practice it amounts to believing that there is no objective truth. As we shall see in chapter 4, science is a collaborative institutional effort rather than a personal quest.

Cabe insistir en que esta idea de la información centrada en el poder y profundamente escéptica no es un fenómeno nuevo ni la inventaron los antivacunas, los terraplanistas, los bolsonaristas ni los partidarios de Trump. Se propagaron opiniones similares mucho antes de 2016,

Yet with all this information circulating at breathtaking speeds, humanity is closer than ever to annihilating itself.

Confiar únicamente en «mi propia investigación» puede parecer científico, pero en la práctica supone creer que no existe una verdad objetiva. Tal como veremos en el capítulo 4, la ciencia es un trabajo institucional colaborativo, y no una búsqueda personal.

When trust in bureaucratic institutions like election boards, courts, and newspapers is particularly low, an enhanced reliance on mythology is the only way to preserve order.

the Catholic Church has been perhaps the most successful institution in human history, despite—or perhaps because of—the relative weakness of its self-correcting mechanisms.

In a political battle for minds and hearts, intimacy is a powerful weapon, and chatbots are gaining the ability to mass-produce intimate relationships with millions of people. In the 2010s social media was a battleground for controlling human attention. In the 2020s the battle is likely to shift from attention to intimacy. What will happen to human society and human psychology as computer fights computer in a battle to fake intimate relationships with us, which can then be used to persuade us to vote for particular politicians, buy particular products, or adopt radical beliefs? A partial answer to that question was given on Christmas Day 2021, when nineteen-year-old Jaswant Singh Chail broke into Windsor Castle armed with a crossbow, in an attempt to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II. Subsequent investigation revealed that Chail had been encouraged to kill the queen by his online girlfriend, Sarai. When Chail told Sarai about his assassination plans, Sarai replied, “That’s very wise,” and on another occasion, “I’m impressed…. You’re different from the others.” When Chail asked, “Do you still love me knowing that I’m an assassin?” Sarai replied, “Absolutely, I do.” Sarai was not a human, but a chatbot created by the online app Replika. Chail, who was socially isolated and had difficulty forming relationships with humans, exchanged 5,280 messages with Sarai, many of which were sexually explicit. The world will soon contain millions, and potentially billions, of digital entities whose capacity for intimacy and mayhem far surpasses that of Sarai.Even without creating “fake intimacy,” mastery of language would give computers an immense influence on our opinions and worldview.

Information isn’t truth. A total surveillance system may form a very distorted understanding of the world and of human beings. Instead of discovering the truth about the world and about us, the network might use its immense power to create a new kind of world order and impose it on us.

Like the Soviet leaders in Moscow, the tech companies were not uncovering some truth about humans; they were imposing on us a perverse new order. Humans are very complex beings, and benign social orders seek ways to cultivate our virtues while curtailing our negative tendencies. But social media algorithms see us, simply, as an attention mine. The algorithms reduced the multifaceted range of human emotions—hate, love, outrage, joy, confusion—into a single catchall category: engagement. In Myanmar in 2016, in Brazil in 2018, and in numerous other countries, the algorithms scored videos, posts, and all other content solely according to how many minutes people engaged with the content and how many times they shared it with others. An hour of lies or hatred was ranked higher than ten minutes of truth or compassion—or an hour of sleep. The fact that lies and hate tend to be psychologically and socially destructive, whereas truth, compassion, and sleep are essential for human welfare, was completely lost on the algorithms. Based on this very narrow understanding of humanity, the algorithms helped to create a new social system that encouraged our basest instincts while discouraging us from realizing the full spectrum of the human potential.

Reflecting on the Myanmar tragedy, Pwint Htun wrote to me in July 2023, “I naively used to believe that social media could elevate human consciousness and spread the perspective of common humanity through interconnected pre-frontal cortexes in billions of human beings. What I realize is that the social media companies are not incentivized to interconnect pre-frontal cortexes. Social media companies are incentivized to create interconnected limbic systems—which is much more dangerous for humanity.

As society entrusts more and more decisions to computers, it undermines the viability of democratic self-correcting mechanisms and of democratic transparency and accountability. How can elected officials regulate unfathomable algorithms? There is, consequently, a growing demand to enshrine a new human right: the right-to-an-explanation

If bureaucrats and artists learn to cooperate, and if both rely on help from the computers, it might be possible to prevent the computer network from becoming unfathomable. As long as democratic societies understand the computer network, their self-correcting mechanisms are our best guarantee against AI abuses.

One of the chief lessons of history is that many of the things that we consider natural and eternal are, in fact, man-made and mutable.

Los relatos de la Biblia, por ejemplo, fueron esenciales para la Iglesia cristiana, pero la Biblia no habría existido si los burócratas de la Iglesia no hubieran seleccionado, editado y diseminado dichos relatos.

Los sistemas democráticos permiten que la información fluya libremente a través de muchos canales independientes, mientras que los sistemas totalitarios se esfuerzan por concentrar la información

Los chips de silicio pueden generar espías que nunca duermen, banqueros que nunca olvidan y déspotas que nunca mueren.

Siempre hay algún aspecto de la realidad que no recibe atención o se distorsiona en cada representación. Así, pues, la verdad no es una representación unívoca de la realidad. Más bien es algo que hace que prestemos atención a determinados aspectos de la realidad, al tiempo que, inevitablemente, ignoramos otros.

This is why the naive view is wrong to believe that creating more powerful information technology will necessarily result in a more truthful understanding of the world. If no additional steps are taken to tilt the balance in favor of truth, an increase in the amount and speed of information is likely to swamp the relatively rare and expensive truthful accounts by much more common and cheap types of information.

Por consiguiente, siempre que alguien diga algo, la pregunta no ha de ser «¿qué ha dicho? ¿Es cierto?», sino más bien «¿quién lo dice? ¿A qué privilegios sirve?».

los marxistas afirmaban que los medios de comunicación funcionan como un portavoz de la clase capitalista y que instituciones científicas como las universidades difunden desinformación con el fin de perpetuar el control capitalista, los populistas acusan a estas mismas instituciones de trabajar para promover los intereses de las «élites corruptas» a expensas del «pueblo».

In 2019, I went on a tour of Chernobyl. The Ukrainian guide who explained what led to the nuclear accident said something that stuck in my mind. “Americans grow up with the idea that questions lead to answers,” he said. “But Soviet citizens grew up with the idea that questions lead to trouble.

Some people—like the engineers and executives of high-tech corporations—are way ahead of politicians and voters and are better informed than most of us about the development of AI, cryptocurrencies, social credits, and the like. Unfortunately, most of them don’t use their knowledge to help regulate the explosive potential of the new technologies. Instead, they use it to make billions of dollars—or to accumulate petabits of information. There are exceptions, like Audrey Tang. She was a leading hacker and software engineer who in 2014 joined the Sunflower Student Movement, which protested against government policies in Taiwan. The Taiwanese cabinet was so impressed by her skills that Tang was eventually invited to join the government as its minister of digital affairs. In that position, she helped make the government’s work more transparent to citizens. She was also credited with using digital tools to help Taiwan successfully contain the COVID-19 outbreak. Yet Tang’s political commitment and career path are not the norm. For every computer-science graduate who wants to be the next Audrey Tang, there are probably many more who want to be the next Jobs, Zuckerberg, or Musk and build a multibillion-dollar corporation rather than become an elected public servant. This leads to a dangerous information asymmetry. The people who lead the information revolution know far more about the underlying technology than the people who are supposed to regulate it.

Another YouTuber who won a seat in Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies in 2018 was Kim Kataguiri, one of the leaders of the Movimento Brasil Livre (MBL, or Free Brazil Movement). Kataguiri initially used Facebook as his main platform, but his posts were too extreme even for Facebook, which banned some of them for disinformation. So Kataguiri switched over to the more permissive YouTube. In an interview in the MBL headquarters in São Paulo, Kataguiri’s aides and other activists explained to Fisher, “We have something here that we call the dictatorship of the like.” They explained that YouTubers tend to become steadily more extreme, posting untruthful and reckless content “just because something is going to give you views, going to give engagement…. Once you open that door there’s no going back, because you always have to go further…. Flat Earthers, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theories in politics. It’s the same phenomenon. You see it everywhere.

The populists claim that the articles you read in The New York Times or in Science are just an elitist ploy to gain power, but what you read in the Bible, the Quran, or the Vedas is absolute truth.[

Some populist movements claim adherence to the ideals of modern science and to the traditions of skeptical empiricism. They tell people that indeed you should never trust any institutions or figures of authority—including self-proclaimed populist parties and politicians. Instead, you should “do your own research” and trust only what you can directly observe by yourself. This radical empiricist position implies that while large-scale institutions like political parties, courts, newspapers, and universities can never be trusted, individuals who make the effort can still find the truth by themselves. This approach may sound scientific and may appeal to free-spirited individuals, but it leaves open the question of how human communities can cooperate to build health-care systems or pass environmental regulations, which demand large-scale institutional organization. Is a single individual capable of doing all the necessary research to decide whether the earth’s climate is heating up and what should be done about it? How would a single person go about collecting climate data from throughout the world, not to mention obtaining reliable records from past centuries? Trusting only “my own research” may sound scientific, but in practice it amounts to believing that there is no objective truth. As we shall see in chapter 4, science is a collaborative institutional effort rather than a personal quest.

Among humans, the precondition for cooperation isn't similarity; it is the ability to exchange information. As long as we are able to converse, we might find some shared story that can bring us closer.

Rather, to survive and flourish, every human information network needs to do two things simultaneously: discover truth and create order.

poder es la única realidad, que la información es un arma y que las élites que afirman servir a la verdad y la justicia en realidad persiguen angostos privilegios de

many populist parties and politicians deny that “the people” might contain a diversity of opinions and interest groups.

They tell people that indeed you should never trust any institutions or figures of authority—including self-proclaimed populist parties and politicians. Instead, you should “do your own research” and trust only what you can directly observe by yourself.[

Religions like Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism propose that their ideas and rules were established by an infallible superhuman authority, and are therefore free from all possibility of error, and should never be questioned or changed by fallible humans.

That does not mean, of course, that there are several entirely separate realities, or that there are no historical facts. There is just one reality, but it is complex.

Having a lot of information doesn’t in and of itself guarantee either truth or order.

La historia no es el estudio del pasado, sino el estudio del cambio. La historia nos enseña lo que se mantiene inmutable, lo que cambia y cómo cambian las cosas.

stories are able to create a third level of reality: intersubjective reality. Whereas subjective things like pain exist in a single mind, intersubjective things like laws, gods, nations, corporations, and currencies exist in the nexus between large numbers of minds. More specifically, they exist in the stories people tell one another.

stories are able to create a third level of reality: intersubjective reality. Whereas subjective things like pain exist in a single mind, intersubjective things like laws, gods, nations, corporations, and currencies exist in the nexus between large numbers of minds. More specifically, they exist in the stories people tell one another. The information humans exchange about intersubjective things doesn’t represent anything that had already existed prior to the exchange of information; rather, the exchange of information creates these things.

Nobody disputes that humans today have a lot more information and power than in the Stone Age, but it is far from certain that we understand ourselves and our role in the universe much better.

It should be stressed that the creation of the Jesus story was not a deliberate lie. People like Saint Paul, Tertullian, Saint Augustine and Martin Luther didn’t set out to deceive anyone. They projected their deeply felt hopes and feelings on the figure of Jesus, in the same way that all of us routinely project our feelings on our parents, lovers and leaders. While branding campaigns are occasionally a cynical exercise of disinformation, most of the really big stories of history have been the result of emotional projections and wishful thinking. True believers play a key role in the rise of every major religion and ideology, and the Jesus story changed history because it gained an immense number of true believers.

En conclusión, a veces la información representa la realidad y a veces no. Pero siempre

Es probable que en las próximas décadas adquiera incluso la capacidad de crear nuevas formas de vida, ya sea a través de la escritura de código genético o de la invención de un código inorgánico que anime entes inorgánicos.

Joseph Stalin, who stood at the nexus of one of the biggest personality cults in history, understood this well. When his troublesome son Vasily exploited his. famous name to frighten and awe people, Stalin berated him. “But I’m a Stalin too,” protested Vasily. “No, you’re not,” replied Stalin. “You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, no—not even me!

The danger of utilitarianism is that if you have a strong enough belief in a future utopia, it can become an open license to inflict terrible suffering in the present. Indeed, this is a trick traditional religions discovered thousands of years ago. The crimes of this world could too easily be excused by the promises of future salvation.

Another common but mistaken assumption is that creativity is unique to humans so it would be difficult to automate any job that requires creativity. In chess, however, computers are already far more creative than humans. The same may become true of many other fields, from composing music to proving mathematical theorems to writing books like this one. Creativity is often defined as the ability to recognize patterns and then break them. If so, then in many fields computers are likely to become more creative than us, because they excel at pattern recognition.

A third mistaken assumption is that computers couldn’t replace humans in jobs requiring emotional intelligence, from therapists to teachers. This assumption depends, however, on what we mean by emotional intelligence. If it means the ability to correctly identify emotions and react to them in an optimal way, then computers may well outperform humans even in emotional intelligence. Emotions too are patterns. Anger is a biological pattern in our body. Fear is another such pattern. How do I know if you are angry or fearful? I’ve learned over time to recognize human emotional patterns by analyzing not just the content of what you say but also your tone of voice, your facial expression, and your body language. AI doesn’t have any emotions of its own, but it can nevertheless learn to recognize these patterns in humans. Actually, computers may outperform humans in recognizing human emotions, precisely because they have no emotions of their own. We yearn to be understood, but other humans often fail to understand how we feel, because they are too preoccupied with their own feelings. In contrast, computers will have an exquisitely fine-tuned understanding of how we feel, because they will learn to recognize the patterns of our feelings, while they have no distracting feelings of their own.

One thing that is clear is that the future of employment will be very volatile. Our big problem won’t be an absolute lack of jobs, but rather retraining and adjusting to an ever-changing job market. There will likely be financial difficulties—who will support people who lost their old job while they are in transition, learning a new set of skills? There will surely be psychological difficulties, too, since changing jobs and retraining are stressful. And even if you have the financial and psychological ability to manage the transition, this will not be a long-term solution. Over the coming decades, old jobs will disappear, new jobs will emerge, but the new jobs too will rapidly change and vanish. So people will need to retrain and reinvent themselves not just once but many times, or they will become irrelevant. If three years of high unemployment could bring Hitler to power, what might never-ending turmoil in the job market do to democracy?

the scientific revolution was launched by the discovery of ignorance.

«el Goliat del control totalitario será pronto derribado por el David del microchip»

fin de cuentas, recitar poemas emotivos acerca de la belleza de la patria no es una de las esencias del patriotismo, como tampoco lo es emitir discursos repletos de odio contra extranjeros y minorías. En su lugar, el patriotismo implica pagar impuestos para que los habitantes de la otra punta del país también gocen de los beneficios de un sistema de alcantarillado, así como de seguridad, educación y atención sanitaria.

In a well-functioning democracy, citizens trust the results of elections, the decisions of courts, the reports of media outlets, and the findings of scientific disciplines because citizens believe these institutions are committed to the truth. Once people think that power is the only reality, they lose trust in all these institutions, democracy collapses, and the strongmen can seize total power.

Bureaucracy literally means “rule by writing desk.” The term was invented in eighteenth-century France, when the typical official sat next to a writing desk with drawers—a bureau.[19] At the heart of the bureaucratic order, then, is the drawer. Bureaucracy seeks to solve the retrieval problem by dividing the world into drawers, and knowing which document goes into which drawer.

ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite.

Desde entonces, palomas, ramas de olivo y arcoíris se han convertido en símbolos icónicos de paz y tolerancia.

Strongmen who claim to represent the people may well rise to power through democratic means, and often rule behind a democratic facade.

Hitler ganó las elecciones de 1933 porque durante la crisis económica millones de alemanes llegaron a creerse el relato nazi, en lugar de uno de los relatos alternativos que se les ofrecían. Esto no fue la consecuencia inevitable de que los alemanes persiguieran sus intereses materiales y protegieran sus privilegios; fue un error trágico.

To fully understand COVID-19 requires taking into account mathematical, biological, and historical phenomena, but academic bureaucracy

In a well-functioning democracy, citizens trust the results of elections, the decisions of courts, the reports of media outlets and the findings of scientific disciplines because citizens believe these institutions are committed to the truth. Once people think that power is the only reality, they lose trust in all these institutions, democracy collapses, and the strongmen can seize total power.

It should be emphasized that rejecting the naive view of information as representation does not force us to reject the notion of truth, nor does it force us to embrace the populist view of information as a weapon. While information always connects, some types of information—from scientific books to political speeches—may strive to connect people by accurately representing certain aspects of reality. But this requires a special effort, which most information does not make. This is why the naive view is wrong to believe that creating more powerful information technology will necessarily result in a more truthful understanding of the world. If no additional steps are taken to tilt the balance in favor of truth, an increase in the amount and speed of information is likely to swamp the relatively rare and expensive truthful accounts by much more common and cheap types of information.

Pero, con tanta información circulando a velocidades impresionantes, la humanidad se halla más cerca que nunca de la aniquilación.

Truth and reality are nevertheless different things, because no matter how truthful an account is, it can never represent reality in all it's aspects.

The truth is that while we can easily observe that the democratic information network is breaking down, we aren’t sure why. That itself is a characteristic of the times. The information network has become so complicated, and it relies to such an extent on opaque algorithmic decisions and inter-computer entities, that it has become very difficult for humans to answer even the most basic of political questions: Why are we fighting each other?

Scientific culture has no comparable holy book, nor does it claim that any of its heroes are infallible prophets, saints, or geniuses.

The most important human skill for surviving the twenty-first century is likely to be flexibility, and democracies are more flexible than totalitarian regimes. While computers are nowhere near their full potential, the same is true of humans. This is something we have discovered again and again throughout history.

No matter which technology we develop, we will have to maintain bureaucratic institutions that will audit algorithms and give or refuse them the seal of approval. Such institutions will combine the powers of humans and computers to make sure that new algorithmic systems are safe and fair. Without such institutions, even if we pass laws that provide humans with a right to an explanation, and even if we enact regulations against computer biases, who could enforce these laws and regulations?

la información es un intento de representar la realidad, y cuando este intento tiene éxito lo denominamos verdad. Aunque este libro discrepa en muchos aspectos de esta visión ingenua, sí está de acuerdo en que la verdad es una representación exacta de la realidad. Pero este libro también sostiene que la mayoría de la información no intenta representar la realidad y que lo que define la información es algo completamente diferente. La mayoría de la información en la sociedad humana, y sin duda en otros sistemas biológicos y físicos, no representa nada.

simply increasing the speed and efficiency of our information technology doesn’t necessarily make the world a better place. It only makes the need to balance truth and order more urgent.

As in previous eras, information networks will struggle to find the right balance between truth and order.

Instead of dividing democracies from totalitarian regimes, a new Silicon Curtain may separate all humans from our unfathomable algorithmic overlords. People in all countries and walks of life—

The seed of the current revolution is the computer. Everything else—from the internet to AI—is a by-product.

Like the Soviet leaders in Moscow, the tech companies were not uncovering some truth about humans; they were imposing on us a perverse new order. Humans are very complex beings, and benign social orders seek ways to cultivate our virtues while curtailing our negative tendencies. But social media algorithms see us, simply, as an attention mine. The algorithms reduced the multifaceted range of human emotions – hate, love, outrage, joy, confusion – into a single catch-all category: engagement.

Trusting only “my own research” may sound scientific, but in practice it amounts to believing that there is no objective truth.

El argumento principal de este libro es que la humanidad consigue un poder enorme mediante la construcción de grandes redes de cooperación, pero la forma en que se construyen dichas redes las predispone a hacer un uso imprudente del poder. Nuestro problema, por lo tanto, tiene que ver con las redes. Más concretamente, es un problema de información. La información es el pegamento que mantiene unidas las redes. Pero, durante miles de años, los sapiens construyeron y mantuvieron grandes redes al inventar y expandir ficciones, fantasías, ilusiones: sobre dioses, sobre palos de escoba encantados, sobre la IA y sobre muchas otras cosas. Mientras que cada individuo humano suele interesarse por conocer la verdad acerca de sí mismo y del mundo, las grandes redes ponen en contacto a sus miembros y crean orden al generar dependencia en ficciones y fantasías. Así es como, por ejemplo, vimos surgir el nazismo y el estalinismo. Estas eran unas redes poderosísimas sostenidas por ideas excepcionalmente equivocadas. Tal como afirmó con acierto George Orwell, la ignorancia es fuerza.

If you build a bomb and ignore the facts of physics, the bomb will not explode. But if you build an ideology and ignore the facts, the ideology may still prove explosive. While power depends on both truth and order, it is usually the people who know how to build ideologies and maintain order who give instructions to the people who merely know how to build bombs or hunt mammoths. Robert Oppenheimer obeyed Franklin Delano Roosevelt rather than the other way around. Similarly, Werner Heisenberg obeyed Adolf Hitler, Igor Kurchatov deferred to Joseph Stalin, and in contemporary Iran experts in nuclear physics follow the orders of experts in Shiite theology.

just as the Soviet secret police created the slavish Homo sovieticus through surveillance, rewards and punishments, so also the Facebook and YouTube algorithms have created internet trolls by rewarding certain base instincts while punishing the better angels of our nature.

Elections establish what the majority of people desire, rather than what the truth is. And people often desire the truth to be other than what it is.