Nexus Made Me Lace Up My Shoes — Again

 

 


Nexus Made Me Lace Up My Shoes — Again

I'm deep into the second half of Nexus now. The further I read, the more I find myself thinking.

In my first essay, I ended up lacing up my running shoes. And now, finishing this book, I find myself doing it again.

Strange book. I picked it up to understand AI — but it took me through language and religion, empire and money, democracy and totalitarianism, and somehow brought me back to the same place: myself, and the reality I'm living right now.

· · ·

I was curious about AI.

How much of human work will it replace? How do we live in the age of AI?

So I opened the book.

But Harari wouldn't get to AI. Not yet. Instead, he took me somewhere far away — language and religion, empire and currency, democracy and totalitarianism.

I got impatient.

"If you want to talk about AI, just talk about AI. Why the endless setup?"

But at some point, I understood. The setup was the point.

· · ·

Humans are storytelling animals.

Money is just paper — but we all believe in it, so it becomes real. Nations are just lines on a map — but we all believe in them, so they become real. Religion is a story about God — but it has held countless lives together across millennia.


And those stories were stronger than reality itself.

Sometimes they saved people. Sometimes they killed them.

The Crusades. The Holocaust.

In history books, these get summarized in a sentence: "That's how it was back then." But inside that one sentence is someone's entire lifetime.

· · ·

I entered university in 1994.

The seniors before us — just a few years older — read forbidden books in secret, hiding from military authorities. Marxism. Gorky's Mother. The burning narrative of liberating the working class pulled many of them into giving up their youth for it.


Looking back now, it's deeply ironic.

The weapon they chose to fight military dictatorship was Stalinism — the ideological foundation of another dictatorship entirely.

Why couldn't they see the contradiction?

Because it was knowledge from the shadows.

Knowledge learned in secret never gets challenged or tested. When you only see one side, that becomes your whole world. That's how knowledge from the dark becomes absolute belief.

· · ·

So what about now?

We believed that once the internet arrived, truth would surface. That more information would make the world better.

But history didn't go that way.

The printing press spread the Bible — and spread witch-hunting manuals too. The internet expanded democracy — and expanded misinformation too. Algorithms connected information — and amplified outrage too.

Our seniors had to risk their safety to sneak into the shadows for forbidden books. Now you don't have to go anywhere. Just lie in bed, and the algorithm brings the shadows to you. More precisely. More personally. More addictively.

· · ·

And now AI has started writing the stories.

Until now, stories were made by humans. Clumsy, full of mistakes — but humans made them. Humans decided.

Now humans and AI are making stories together. And before long, AI may be making them alone.

Faster. More precisely. More convincingly.



Our children will learn to see the world through those stories.

At least we were the ones making the decisions.

But what about our kids?

They may grow up delegating more and more choices to algorithms.

What to watch. What to believe. Who to meet. Even what to fear.

Will humans still be the ones deciding — even then?

· · ·

Harari writes:

"Technology merely opens new possibilities. It's up to us which ones we choose."

I don't know where the world is headed. I can't change the currents of power moving through it.

Measured against the scale of the universe, one person's life looks impossibly small. Measured against the sweep of history, today's worries seem like nothing at all.

But the place I actually live isn't the universe. It isn't history. It's right here — this brief, ordinary moment.

· · ·

Tomorrow the world will be noisy again. There will be headlines about AI. Someone will be outraged. Someone else will be spinning a new story.

And I'll be caught in it too — anxious, worried, sometimes unsure what's even real.

But I know at least one thing.

Whatever world comes — there's a home with my wife and kids in it. What I need to protect doesn't change.

So today, I lace up my shoes again. Not to change the world. Not to escape the noise. Just to not waste today.

That's all I can do right now. And maybe that's enough.




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