Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

These leaders should be reminded, however, that in the era of AI the alpha predator is likely to be AI.

For the survival of democracy, some inefficiency is a feature, not a bug.

if democracies do collapse, it will likely result not from some kind of technological inevitability but from a human failure to regulate the new technology wisely.

people all over the world into closer contact. Paradoxically, information technology today is so powerful it can potentially split humanity by enclosing different people in separate information cocoons, ending the idea of a single shared human reality. While the web has been our main metaphor in recent decades, the future might belong to cocoons.

the past, organizations like newspapers, radio stations, and established political parties acted as gatekeepers, deciding who was heard in the public sphere. Social media undermined the power of these gatekeepers, leading to a more open but also more anarchical public conversation.

An increasingly important question is, Can people adopt any virtual identity they like, or should their identity be constrained by their biological body? If we follow the Lutheran position of sola fide, the biological body isn’t of much importance. To adopt a certain online identity, the only thing that matters is what you believe.

But before we rush to embrace the dynamic algorithm, we should note that it too has a downside. Human life is a balancing act between endeavoring to improve ourselves and accepting who we are. If the goals of the dynamic algorithm are dictated by an ambitious government or by ruthless corporations, the algorithm is likely to morph into a tyrant, re

This network is also likely to create inter-computer mythologies that will be far more complex and alien than any human-made god. The potential benefits of this network are enormous. The potential downside is the destruction of human civilization.

A third democratic principle is mutuality. If democracies increase surveillance of individuals, they must simultaneously increase surveillance of governments and corporations too.