Nexus - a history book wearing an AI cover

I picked up Nexus because I liked Sapiens, and I went in expecting a book about AI and information structures. I was wrong, and I ended up loving it anyway. 5/5.

Nexus is a very dense book which spends a lot of pages laying the background to justify a particular position: more information does not equal more truth, as information has no direct relationship to truth. That runs counter to the narrative of big tech companies. The words involved are so loaded with meaning that it takes a few chapters just to properly define the terms.

As promised in the title, the author spends a decent chunk of the book, maybe 30-40%, covering the history of “information networks”: organised religion, Stalinist Russia, and the witch hunts that spread across Europe. The witch hunts stuck with me most. It also covers modern history from the 2010s which many may have missed, such as Facebook’s involvement in the Myanmar ethnic cleansing. That one was news to me. My takeaways: Facebook is a pretty irresponsible company, and new technologies develop so rapidly they’re nearly impossible to govern. It’s like we’re experimenting on ourselves.

Once I realised I was reading a book mostly about history, how it relates to today, and how it can help predict the future, I really started enjoying it. It values your time as a reader and is very information dense, with little fluff or repetition. The information-versus-truth argument even changed how I think about my own work. When logging events in a web app, it’s very easy to log everything and lose clarity rather than being precise. This book gave me a better framing for that.

Still, five stars and all, I enjoyed Sapiens more, where the historical focus felt expected.

Read this if you want a historical background to AI and information theory, or an informed opinion on “AI taking over” doomsday scenarios. Skip it if that density sounds like a slog. Pair it with Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence as the more technical companion.