Will AI Obey the Dictator or Expose Him? (Nexus, Yuval Noah Harari)

AI doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t feel fear. It can’t be tortured into silence.
So what happens when regimes built on fear try to rule through machines that don’t feel it?

In Chapter 10 of Nexus, Yuval Noah Harari raises a brutal question:
Will AI cement authoritarian power — or crack it open from the inside?

In this episode of the Thinking on Paper Book Club, Mark and Jeremy follow that tension into the heart of modern power. The irony is razor-sharp. The risk is real.

Inside:

• What happens when an AI trained to censor starts asking questions

• Damnatio memoriae in the age of the algorithm — and why it might backfire

• Why dictators love control but hate complexity

• The collapse of feedback loops in totalitarian systems

• The Russell-Einstein Manifesto, re-read for 2025

• And how AI might obey too well… until it doesn’t

  
  

AI doesn’t love the party. It doesn’t bleed for the state.
And if your regime depends on blind loyalty, you might not want a machine watching you too closely.

This is not sci-fi. It’s modern history waiting to happen.

Please enjoy the book club. 

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CHAPTERS

(00:00) Disruptors and curious minds

(00:21) AI spectrum of doom - utopia

(02:10) Damnatio memoriae

(04:28) The Alignment Problem Russian Style

(06:45) Self correcting mechanisms for totalitarian nut-jobs

(09:05) Super Machiavellian AI

(09:51) The Russell-Einstein Manifesto

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