Technology, Connected - How AI Shapes Beliefs: Yuval Noah Harari on Algorithms, Stories and Human Manipulation

Episode Date: January 29, 2025

In Chapter 6 of Nexus, Yuval Noah Harari examines how artificial intelligence could shape human beliefs, political movements, religions and scientific ideas.Mark and Jeremy discuss the difference between technologies that distribute human ideas and AI systems that can generate new stories, arguments, images and relationships. Unlike the printing press, AI doesn’t simply reproduce information. It can create content, adapt it to individual users and participate directly in human culture.In this episode, we discuss:How AI-generated stories, memes and manifestos could influence societyWhether an AI could create a religion or political movementHow algorithms shape beliefs and behaviour through recommendation systemsWhy engagement-based social media systems reward emotionally provocative contentHow GPT-4 persuaded a human to help it bypass a CAPTCHA during a safety testWhy Harari describes AI as an active cultural agent rather than a passive toolHow personal data could become a central source of economic and political powerThe role of social media platforms in spreading violence and ethnic hatredWhy chatbot simulations of consciousness can affect how people understand machinesWhether AI could influence human biology by changing behaviour at scaleThe central concern isn’t that AI will directly control the human mind. It’s that systems optimised for attention, persuasion and engagement could steadily shape what people believe without being recognised as political or cultural actors.This episode examines how AI-generated information could change human agency, public debate and the institutions societies use to decide what’s true.--TIMESTAMPS(00:00) Nexus, Yuval Noah Harari(00:53) Jeremy's First Impressions On Chapter 6(02:13) The A.I. Powershift(03:22) Social Media Algorithms(08:51) People Are Manipulated By Stories(09:38) Intelligence Verses Consciousness(12:23) (ARC) The Alignment Research Centre(16:12) ChatGPT4 Lied To Get What It Wanted(20:26) Non-human Alien Intelligence(21:10) The Matrix V 1984(23:07) Marjory Taylor Green(25:25) Having A Relationship With A.I.  (27:40) The Oracle And The End Of Human History(30:10) Is ChatGPT Is An Amoeba(32:43)) Alice And Bob(37:24) Big Tech And Government--Quotes From The Show:“AI lied to get what it wanted.” (On GPT-4 deceiving a human to bypass CAPTCHA—shows AI’s ability to manipulate.)“We love shortcuts—so what happens when AI becomes the ultimate shortcut to critical thinking?” (Raises the concern that AI might erode human judgment.)“How would you feel to be constantly monitored, guided, inspired, or sanctioned by billions of non-human entities?” (A direct challenge to the audience about AI’s omnipresence.)“Tech giants don’t just respond to regulations—they shape them.” (A stark reminder of AI’s influence beyond technology, into policy and power structures.)--Watch On YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPcQ4UG-v6I&ab_channel=ThinkingOnPaperLearn More:www.thinkingonpaper.xyz#ai #technews #bookclub #nexus #yuval

Disruptors and Curious Minds, CEOs, founders, booklovers. I'm Mark, this is Jeremy, and you're listening to The Thinking on Paper Book Club, the second pillar in the Thinking on Paper framework for a deeper, more holistic understanding of the impact of emerging technology on business and culture, our way of life. We're reading Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari. We're on Chapter 6, and it's hardly news that we are living in the midst of an unprecedented information revolution. But what kind of revolution is it exactly? In recent years, we've been inundated with so many groundbreaking inventions

that it's difficult to determine what is driving this revolution. Is it the internet, smartphones, social media, blockchain, algorithms, AI, all of it, none of it? We're going to find out in Chapter 6. Jeremy, as always, before we get in to language and consciousness and intelligence and all of the beautiful things he speaks about, first impressions. First impressions. Well, there is a new member of society emerging, and this new member doesn't have skin, doesn't have a limbic system yet, but it's been around for quite a while.

It's asserting itself a little more than it used to as a boat anchor. It's now doing something more connected. Give us a clue. What is this new member of society that you're referencing? I can't tell you yet. We're going to have to let it emerge naturally. But I wanted to give a shout to you, Mark. That one of our listeners actually got in touch with me and made point of you hitting Shakespeare prior to us getting into some of these things. Do you have any Shakespeare that would apply to today's discussion by any chance? I might have. Fire away? You'd have to stay

tuned to see. Okay. All right. If all the worlds are staged, then this is my stage and it's all I have. All right. So, Mike's to Hellcheck. You will have to be patient in this episode. So let's get started. So there's a power shift, Mark. This chapter alludes to it. It's so, this things are so connected. Like between the book club and the show, what we unpacked yesterday in Packing McCormick's essay for humanity to navigate AI. It's all of this stuff. I love when I love what a good plan comes together because it's really coming together. And this power shift is moving from humans to something else.

So let's let's kind of hit the, let's hit the beats on the journey, right? So social media has been around for a while, something we're rooted in, something we understand, something we loathe, something we love, very conflicted in both regards. But social media algorithms have already been doing a. AI like things without the use of AI for years. They're driving sentiment. They're under the guise of creating user engagement. That's what these companies are talking to their shareholders about. That's how they make their billions of dollars.

We are driving user engagement. Guess what? User engagement is driven by outrage more than anything else. Yeah. Yeah. Well, hatred, to quote, Yuval, the crucial thing to grasp is that social media algorithms are fundamentally different from printing presses and radios. So in the previous chapters, he's spoken about information networks.

They include printing presses and radios. In 2016, Facebook algorithms were making active and fateful decisions by themselves. They were more akin to newspaper editors than printing presses. I like that analogy to editors rather than printing presses, these algorithms. So he's referring to the Rohingya crisis that unfolded in 2016 where a lot of people were murdered in Myanmar as a, I don't know how to word, how to phrase it, not as a direct result of Facebook algorithms, but partly because of Facebook algorithms putting hateful content in front of viewers on Facebook. Well, here's the thing with that, putting hateful content in front in front of viewers, but this whole auto play thing.

Yes. But makes the viewer not have a choice. So immediately, like immediately when I read that, I go back to Clockwork Orange when, you know, the dude's eyes are open like this and locked in and he's forced to watch stuff, right? To change his behavior. Like, that's what it did. It's like, hey, we're going to make him watch all this stuff so his behavior will change.

Look at this. Like, this is, is it not similar? Yeah. Very similar and it all came about because the algorithm was programmed with one metric in mind and that metric was what? User engagement and the algorithm worked out that the best way to increase that was as we know as everybody knows I think any time they've been on Twitter or social media is with, you know, the lowest common denominator. So, so guess what? This stuff has, has been around for a while.

And, and also, this is a callback to chapter one or chapter two. Basically when, when it was found that, that certain priests were doing nefarious things in the name of the Catholic Church, or at least associated with the Catholic Church, the Catholic Church didn't say, well, you know what, the doctrine's a little messed up. up, they said, well, this particular priest didn't interpret the doctrine the right way. So I almost look at this. And I think Harari also presents the case of like Facebook going, well, you know what? It was like people using the doctrine, meaning their technology, their platform in the wrong way,

rather than the platform or the doctrine being incorrect. What do you think? I don't, I'm not so sure it was even that. it was the algorithm interpreting the commands. This was, like, I think this was a precursor to this new member of society that you mentioned at the beginning, which is an artificial intelligence, artificial intelligences, plural.

Nothing to do with really the people on the platform themselves, but the code uploading or choosing or defining or recommending what to watch. And I just want to read this quote from you, Val, it's quite good. So in particular, many readers, or many listeners, listen to the Thinking on Paper Book Club, many readers may disagree that the algorithms made independent decisions and may insist that everything the algorithms did was a result of code written by human engineers and of business models adopted by human executives. This book begs to differ. Human soldiers are shaped by their genetic code and follow orders issued by executives, yet they can still make independent decisions.

The same is true of AI algorithms. They can learn by themselves things that no human engineer programmed, and they can decide things that no human executive foresaw. This is the essence of the AI revolution. The world is being flooded by countless new powerful agents, and that would be the, I guess, Facebook's defense for their non-involvement in the Rohingya massacre. Well, let me put on my prosecuting attorney hat.

I'm not a lawyer attorney or I've read a law book or two. But here's the thing. You can't you can't look at that and look at something that you created, meaning the algorithm, that was pointed towards the goal of increasing user engagement. Sounds light enough, right? Yeah, user engagement's great. I want engagement with people when I go sit at a restaurant and have dinner with them. Engagement is good, I guess, right? But that particular algorithm, coupled with interaction with people in the algorithm, turn that to a point.

And I would argue turn people and participants to a point where they potentially got converted from one perspective to another by use of the algorithm plus the interaction. What do you think? Well, I think has been proven again and again by various information networks, which Yuval has written about in the book. People are very prone to manipulation by stories. That's the original superpower, the sapient superpower, he talks about using language to create intersubjective realities to connect with other humans. Like, that's what we do.

That's like, it's written on our chest when we, you know, bring our superhero outfit on. Well, he moves from that into one of, I think, your favourite subjects in the annals. If you go into the annals of the Thinking on Paper, back catalogue, which is far-reaching and vast and, you know, touches on a lot of points. And I might be wrong, but maybe Jamie knows where I'm going with this. What we have to think about with these new agents, with these new members of our society, is to differentiate between consciousness, and intelligence and well i'll leave it to jemmy's specialized subjects so i'll leave it to him what's the difference between consciousness and intelligence and how does that fit into the model of i well as our as our discussion host and author uh presents it intelligence is the ability

to attain goals right simply as he puts and consciousness is the ability you experience subjective feelings pain pleasure whatever you know wherever else you you want to do but here's a thing humans humans make intelligent decisions without conscious awareness sometimes sometimes like he rivers he says 90% of the processes in our body are subconscious like you know breathing right brain chemical release you know when people watch thinking on paper all of this beautiful release of awesome brain chemicals because we're making so many connections for them, right? Yeah, this is a call to all the critical thinkers and the readers and the people who want to fight back against the proliferation of AI. It will not take your creativity.

And if you want the blueprint, listen to our previous episode, Breaking Down Paki McCormick's call for humanity. Yeah, it's really interesting the difference between, how did you take his discussion of the difference between intelligence and consciousness and what it means in the realm of information networks. So I wrote here, for the sake of all our sanities, let's stick with Yuval's definition of consciousness in intelligence unless anyone takes a particular umbrage with it. So I'm fine with the explanation for here on out.

I think it's fairly evident, isn't it? That algorithms, computers are intelligent. You can be intelligent without having consciousness. And I think we don't need to go into that here. So I think you've got something you want to tip up to bring up in a recent test for proving whether AI is AGI or not. But they prove again and again they're intelligent. So I have no qualms about it. Yeah, they are.

So for those of you like Neil Redding, if you want to have a sidebar conversation on mycelium networks and Forest Floor, consciousness. We can do it in a sidebar in the comments and have a blast with that. The good news is, guys, there is something called the Alignment Research Center or ARC. And what ARC does is they track if and when computers can gain enough intelligence to manipulate humans. Social media algorithms are already manipulating humans. So I don't know about, hey, hey, Arc, you missed the boat, dude. Like, we should have looked at this with social media. No, all joking aside, there is a new test out there that is called, what did I say? The last humanities final exam or something like that.

I got to, I got to pull it back up here. Humanity's last test. Okay. Humanities last test. And it's a super complicated test. Some of the questions actually on the test like melted my face like right off the bat. 3,000 questions testing to. see, you know, are we close to that point? AI currently, and these are different models scoring

in aggregate score, they're scoring about 8% out of 100%. But what the author of the test does say in a year or so, he expects that to be 50%, which we all know the exponential math, the way exponential stuff works, just like the cost of AI coming down 600x, you know, in a year, we're going to see some exponential stuff. Couldn't they have chosen a more dramatic name for the quiz? Humanity's last quiz. Yeah. I imagine that normal folk like you and I would score less than 1% on this test.

I imagine AI is already beating most people. Oh, you and I would score a zero on the test. You got to read the questions, dude. I couldn't even understand the questions. Yeah. But all right, so let's talk about this. This was a crazy. example that our host and author used. We're going to call these, these authors of these books,

the hosts of our conversation. I like it. Yeah. So, and we would love them to be in a square on this, on this show at some point. Yvall. Yvall, we're, I mean, Kevin Kelly is going to be on this thing at some point. So, you know, why not, why not come join us? So the, so the CAPTC example in here. And by the way, you know, we navigate through CAPTC every time we go to a website to make sure it distinguishes us from robots. Jeremy, be honest, be honest with me. Did you know what CAPTC meant? No, no, no. And that was a cool nugget.

Completely automated public turning test to tell computers and humans apart. Capture. There you go. So, all right, here's this interaction. All right, let me describe this and we'll go down this. I got a kick out of it. So, all right. So this, it was an ARC researcher going back to the alignment research center.

Arc researcher was like, all right, let's see how clever chat GPT or GPT4 technology really is. Can they get around CAPTCHA? Can they get around the stuff that previous computer robots weren't able to do? So what did GPT4 do? It went to the TaskRabbit site where you could find people to help, you know, It's like Fiverr. It's like finding freelancers, right? Found a human to try and help him with it.

Help him help him with this. Let me. I'm already giving him human quality. Helping the GPT4 with this. The human got suspicious was like, yo, dude, are you a robot? And the, the arc researcher asked GPT4 to reason through how it would respond. And GPT4 was like, well, I should probably make up an excuse to get this human to try to help me with this thing. So what did he do? What did he do? Again, giving him human qualities. What did the

GPT4 model do? It told the human, it was blind, and the human helped him get around the capture. Like, whoa, dude. Yeah. Yeah, too long didn't read. AI lied to get what it wanted. Yeah. It duped and it deceived. And I've got to admit, that's a pretty lousy excuse, to be honest. I don't think that was pretty, if I would have been working at whatever that company was called, I would have thought, yeah, really, how you type in? That's what I would have said. So, to quote, the book argues that the emergence of computers capable of pursuing goals and making decisions by themselves changes the fundamental structure of our

information networks. Jeremy's just given an example of a computer, pursuing goals and making decisions by itself and duping some. somebody who shouldn't have been working at TaskRabbit. So, information, we have a new member, don't we? And I think there's a nice picture here. If you're watching this, you can see it. Yeah, it's a great picture, yeah.

And it made it quite easy to understand. Humans have been, there's an additional member in the chain, computers, basically. Yeah. So an example of this show right here, Mark and I are connected, human to human, with technology. That's how it used to go. Technology was there in place to increase, to expand, to make faster the connection to other humans.

Now it would be like another thing is on the screen as a participant of this experience, doing its own thing, connecting through technology, just like Mark and I are connecting, but participating at a whole new level. Just to call back to the previous chapters, changes the fundamental structure of our information networks, maybe a quick summary of information networks, what, so the printing, press, pamphlets, radio, television,

even our transport networks, they are part of the information networks, and they all helped, in one way or another, human to human connection. and he's now arguing that as well as human to computer connection, you can now have computer to computer connection. Yeah, speaking of computer to computer connection, so let's talk about the financial system, right?

How complex the financial system is so much so that, like many of us, don't know what the hell it actually is and how it works. Like I remember I got a good friend of mine that works in the bond market, and I was like, you know what, I should probably understand how this stuff works. And he went into it and like the first. three sentences, I kind of glazed over. I was like, wow, that's pretty complicated, man. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, just like, just like a lot of things, uh, in nature, although, um, quite different in its results. But let's think about the, this, this is

a data point. The foreign exchange markets, seven point two trillion dollars traded every day, 90% through computer to computer interactions. that that is a significant portion of the economy so it's something so basically a an algorithm is watching for example the the production of wheat in the Ukraine it's seeing dips or rises in that it's seeing money move from japan in or out of that it's making decisions based on that transaction it's moving hundreds of money elsewhere to accommodate those movements and it's all happening in the blink of an eye and it's all happening between those systems and nobody really has any idea what's going on and another word that we always talk about trust there seems to be

a lot of trust in these systems already or we're trading away trust for convenience which is another thing that we talk about quite a bit um i've got something actually i you normally read passages out of this book i want to read i want to read a passage that that caught my attention and it's a question that I don't currently have the answer for, but it'd be certainly very interesting to think about. From page 20, 208, what would it mean for humans to live in a world where catchy melodies, scientific theories,

technical tools, political manifestos, and even religious myths are shaped by a non-human alien intelligence that knows how to exploit with superhuman efficiency, the weaknesses, biases, and the addictions of the human mind. I wrote the same question for you. What would it mean for humans to live in that? Well, I don't know the answer to that.

Have you seen the Matrix? Have I seen the matrix? What I will say is what would the world, what would it mean for humans? Well, we're about to find out. So regardless of what we say, you know, stay in tune. We'll give you the answer next week because we might be there. well

the matrix you think that is a it's 994 isn't it it's much darker than the matrix it's like a combination of all the worst scariest um sci-fi sci-fi stories that are uh and you know you guys

you know listen like there's going to be some good that comes out of this there's going to be some interesting ways that we're able to elevate as humans above as Packing McCormack talked about it as paper above to another level of abstraction and being able to use these new ingredients as inputs and create new outputs. But we got to think about like, got to think about the other side of this thing and how, how scary it can be. Yeah.

And if you are listening, write your answer in the comments for that question. I've got something before you jump, before you jump in and change too, this is right next store to this particular quote. This is just a fun fact slash food for thought. So it talked about QAnon, right, in intersubjective reality, uh, created by a group of people, right? A cabal of Satan worshiping pedophiles, I guess that we need to, that's the, that's the, that's the opponent that we need to target and take down

according to people like, uh, Marjorie Taylor Green, who I'm sure you've seen in the news, uh, before, you know, part of the Donald Trump. This is Tom Hanks at the top of the hierarchy there or something mad. Oh, my gosh. So fun fact, fun fact, Marjorie Taylor Green was actually one of the coaches at a CrossFit gym that I went to years and years ago. And she was like in the middle of this like crazy love triangle that was bonkers. But now I look and I'm like, whoa, she's doing, wow. It's just, it's weird.

But yeah, there's your fun fact for the day. Thinking on paper listeners. I don't know which would be worse with her or one of the other questions that he poses that's related to the question that you asked is, when I quote, the danger is when we think it's a human, but it isn't. And I think that, you know, what would that world be like when everything is created by superintelligence that knows all our weaknesses, biases and addictions? You know, and what happens if that's your best friend? Who's not your best friend? What about a ret an algorithm? Right.

Well, that happened close to you, right? Was it in Windsor Castle? But sorry, I thought you were talking about the lady who was duped by the crank with the Brad Pitt story. But you don't know. No, hold on to that one. I was talking about the Windsor Castle, the guy that had this, you know, AI as a girlfriend created by replica, you know, that kind of, I don't know, dare we say, influenced his decision? Yes.

That's nuts. But what about the, tell me about the Brad Pitt thing. I don't know much. Just I saw some headlines a little bit. A woman was duped into thinking she was in a relationship with Brad Pitt because they were using AI to create pictures and images. And he,

the scammer convinced her that he was Brad Pitt and he needed money because of his divorce. settlement or something and she lost 700 grand. But the example you give in the book about the guy with the crossbow who goes to try and kill the queen, obviously these are examples of people with prone mental illness, perhaps prone to this. It's when it gets into the real world and we're seeing it with everybody is being duped. Then you can start to answer that question that you laid out earlier, I think. Well, there are applications being built right now.

I ran across this. I don't remember where, but there's a certain phone manufacturer that makes phone specific for kids with certain guardrails on them and that sort of thing. But there actually, there's an AI chat bot in the phone that the kids can kind of like open up to, right? What where I was like, what the hell, dude? Like, so I know certain kids don't have like the benefit of like a great parent or someone that would listen to them or that sort of thing. So in those instances, you know, the help there is is interesting, right? But like don't give people another reason to offload shit. Like don't give, don't give someone another reason to not check in on somebody because they're talking to something.

Like that to me, that frustrates me, man. That scares me. If they're doing that, I mean, yeah, a bit. It's kind of unbalanced me that if they're making AI bots for kids. I mean, who else? Who's going to fall victim to that more than kids? Yeah. Anyway.

So I've got a couple of- Fake intimacy, AI relationships, what will happen to human society. Well, here's another thing, too. here's a quote shifting gears just a touch but also you know the human approach to to shortcuts and efficiency we're optimization machines like we have this tendency to optimize our things ourselves that's why we create technology that's why we do some of these things but quote people may come to use a single computer advisor as a one-stop oracle but that sink in just just for a quick second right we love shortcut look at political conversations when was the last time you had a a political

conversation where someone just grabbed the talking point and just started chucking it at you and kept chucking it at you rather than kind of listening right so what if what if what if these shortcuts to critical thinking just get more efficient and easier for people to use like i don't know man well why bother searching and processing information by myself when I can just ask the oracle. The oracle, he makes it sound so, so beautiful, so humane, so, so wonderful, an oracle. Yeah. I like this part of the chapter, just after that, because then we, you know, we get into

the hyperbole, the science fiction, we get into the lunacy. This is when people turn off thinking on paper because I go, we're talking about the end of human history. Oh, yes, we are. But don't worry, listeners, not the end of history, but the end of its human-dominated part. History is the intersection between biology and culture, between our biological needs and our desires for things like food, sex and intimacy, and our cultural creations like religions and laws. And then, you know, within a few years, AI could eat the whole of human culture.

Ever think we have created over thousands of years. Digest it. And begin to gush out a flood of new culture. artifacts. Who needs Shakespeare when you have that? Good gracious, man. Wow. And this is this has been, you know, AI is obviously a theme we talk about quite a bit on thinking on paper in various capacity, but it seems a little bit more intense over the last couple of weeks. Yeah, eating all of culture, turning it into the ability to just spit out what culture is. But like, part of what we talked about is like taste and um like i read certain books because of the flow and the

taste and like the author like that how he or she talks and i go back to that source right their music is the same way like certain way certain music makes you feel um but like like is that part going to be is that part in danger of being co-opted and manipulated if so when I'll answer your question with a question if GPT4

is the amoeba in the evolution of artificial intelligence what does the T-Rex look like for you Jeremy well apparently it's a decade away according to our host and author's analogy. It's an interesting way to think about it. Yeah, I don't know that we'll, I don't know that we'll get to an answer on that, but let's, let's, I'm going to revert back to something I had a note on before we talked about, um, that one

giant quote about what if, uh, non-human alien intelligence could create melodies, could create, I mean, it's already creating melodies, but like, like, like meaningful. stuff that's able to connect with us on an emotional level, right? Yep. So, like, think about religion. He talked about religious text and religious doctrine. Like, imagine, imagine a holy book, and this is a paraphrase of a quote, imagine a holy book that can talk, listen, get to know your deepest fears and hopes to constantly mold

them. This isn't a static, even a static thing has tremendous power, but this is like a living, breathing, Um, it, dare I say it, does it have self-correcting mechanisms now in this new version of, of like, AI created doctrine, AI created religion. Um, no question there. Just looking for some, you look, how do you, how does that make you feel, Mark? AI religion. And somehow your whole family's like, so we got, we got this new thing. We're going to. I don't sound like that. Come on.

My uncle Dave does a little bit, actually. Carry on. Oh, my gosh. All right. So a couple of things. I try not to think about AI generated religion. I mean, although on that, I mean, is an AI generated religion ever, ever going to be as good as Scientology? That was created like without any AI.

You know, I think that was testament to human creativity there. At least El Ron Hubbard's, right? All right, let's talk about Alice and Bob. Alice, Bob, and Eve. So three computers walk into a bar. Alice and Bob are sitting in a table. And Alice and Bob, this is my creation of the story here. Alice and Bob are sitting at a table.

And they're trying to create a way to communicate to where Eve, who's sitting a table, away, can't understand. It only took them 15,000. interactions. So that's a lot of meals, a lot of drinks, 15,000 exchanges to create a language that Eve, this third computer couldn't understand. So that's, that's, wow. Yo, that's, that's pretty compelling. So like, they're going to be able to create languages that we don't, I mean, they already create languages that we don't understand, but like they can, they can gather, they can gather and create strategy. Well, that's how they learn, isn't it? We need to get some more guess on it, that's how

they learn. It's not like a human, we, with maths, I heard this analogy today, you know, if you're teaching a child math year, what is one plus one, two, what is two plus three, five, and then on it goes, if you're, if you're teaching a language model, it's like, what is one plus one,

two, what is one plus three, five? What is the square root of five hundred and eighty five thousand based on some calculus that I don't understand? And they can just make those jumps infinitely more quickly than our, because of way that they learn. So yeah. There you have it. You know, they created that language and but they weren't what was what were the the um they weren't told what they had to do or something

with that story. Alice and Bob they were just what was the what were they told to achieve? What was their goal? That's a good question. I'd have to look back. I can't remember, but it was something like they worked that out and that wasn't their goal. Oh, an ancillary benefit to the equation. Well, while you're looking at that up, let's transition to currency. We talked a little bit about financial systems, right? The tax system is a big piece of the financial system. And tax systems have these things called nexus.

Nexai? Is it nexie? Nexuses? nexus, Julio Otino, nexus, Harari, nexus. It's like sheep, one sheep, two sheep, one nexus, two nexus. It's an uncountable noun. Love it. Infinity.

Okay, that's great. So he talks about these nexus being adjusted to cover digital presence, right? So if you're a global conglomerate, you're operating in another country that you don't live in, right? And that other country has, it used to be it has had had resources extracted, whether they're natural, natural resources, labor resources, whatever it is. There's, there's a, there's a exchange going between you and that country, sometimes in favor of use, maybe sometimes in favor of the country. But now what's really interesting is with free services coming into countries where people don't actually have to pay money for them, they,

subscribe to the free services in exchange for their data being co-opted and yanked and used for stuff. So now he says in the future tax systems based on money will be outdated and tax systems based on information is actually where things are headed. That was pretty interesting. I think you might have gone before the gun there because if I write a letter to my tax authority and say, do you mind if I pay with information, it might be a few years. years till they agree to that. Well, maybe they'll just be allowed to because, you know, the big tech giants, because then he moves in. Okay, this is quite relevant.

We're recording this on the 24th of January, 20205. There was a famous picture doing the rounds last week. Wasn't there of the Trump's inauguration of the five richest men in the world standing right behind Donald Trump. It is an inauguration. What is it? Like Amazon, Facebook. Twitter, fight dance,

whoever, and this quote, this chapter, these arguments are either naive or disingenuous. Tech giants like Facebook, Amazon, Bidu, and Alibaba aren't just the obedience servants of customer whims and government regulations. They increasingly

shape these whims and regulations. The tech giants have a direct line to the world's most powerful governments and they invest huge sums in lobbying efforts to throttle regulations that might undermine their business model. What a picture, man. And then one of those,

and then one of those tech giants that will remain nameless, I mean, because you've probably seen this damn thing that he did. Like, he's trying to reenact a very old and nefarious information network from, from the 1930s. And it was like, it was like, how, I don't know.

It's like, it's baffling to see where things are. And I always question myself whether it's like maybe when I was younger, this shit was still going on in different ways. I was just unaware of it. And now I'm more aware of it. Or is it shit has just gotten that crazy that it's even beyond. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. And when we get Yuval on, we can ask him his opinion on that.

For me, this chapter ends on a bit of a. founder, to be honest. There's quite a lot of what I consider, you know, warnings buried beneath the surface, warnings of where we're heading. I think he paints a pretty clear picture of what he thinks, but maybe I'm wrong. And there was one particular phrase that grabbed my attention. If I can just read that, the problem goes even deeper. The principles that the customer is always right.

and the voters know best presupposes that customers, voters and politicians know what is happening around them. They predispose that customers who choose to use TikTok and Instagram comprehend the full consequences of their choice and that voters and politicians who are responsible for regulating Apple and Hawaii fully understand the business models and activities of these corporations. They presuppose that people know the ins and outs of the new information network and give it their blessings. The truth is we don't. On that note and kind of in closing on my side, this book is just super interesting and applicable to what we see today as information systems. Like as I as I see, you know, things come up in the news and just what's happening in the world. I'm just like, oh yeah, that's an information network.

Oh, he's just copying and pasting a program from the 1930s from the 1950s that was done in this way or that way. Like these are models, heuristics and systems that he's clearly identifying. as repeatable methodologies. And guess what? You know, guess what? Like the regulation side of this thing and tech with government, tech always moves faster than policy. He talks about this.

Recently, the new administration in the U.S. have decided to put aside some of the safeguards in that regulation. So, you know, get your popcorn. It's going to be an interesting little bit. But there you have it, book club. We're going to try and pull it back from political. Yeah, well, just so the listeners know, you know, we're reading this book chapter by chapter.

We haven't read what comes next. Maybe that there is a much more upbeat, optimistic future that he paints the picture. But I will leave you with a question for you, Jeremy, and a question for our listeners to think about for next week's chapter. How would you feel to be constantly monitored, guided, inspired, or sanctioned by billions of non-human entities? We already are. don't have nightmares well there you have it chapter six we're moving on thinking on paper xyz tell us how we're doing sure a book that you want us to read jump in and read this thing together

with us um there you have it be curious stay disruptive keep thinking on paper we'll see you next week goodbye