Nexus: Yuval Noah Harari on AI, Digital Empires and the Silicon Curtain

In the final chapter of Nexus, Yuval Noah Harari argues that artificial intelligence could divide the world into competing digital empires, each built on separate hardware, software, data and political systems.

Mark and Jeremy examine Harari’s idea of a “Silicon Curtain” and what it could mean for the future of AI, geopolitics and the internet. Rather than producing one shared technological future, AI may accelerate the fragmentation of the global information system.

In this episode, we discuss:

• What Harari means by the Silicon Curtain

• How the United States and China are building competing AI ecosystems

• The role of data colonialism in the development of artificial intelligence

• How avatars, deepfakes and digital identities affect our understanding of reality

• Why digital personas may become more influential than physical individuals

• How software, data and computing infrastructure are reshaping geopolitical power

• Whether societies can build more reliable information networks in an increasingly divided world

  
  

This episode isn’t primarily about artificial general intelligence. It’s about who controls AI systems, how those systems shape perception, and whether a shared global information order can survive.

Please enjoy the show.

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Chapters

(00:00) Disruptors and curious minds

(01:54) My AI Epiphany

(02:54) The precondition for cooperation isn't similarity. It's the ability to exchange information

(04:28) AI Pessimism - How many nefarious bad actors do you need

(05:50) The Liverpool Manchester Train moment for AI

(06:48) Google was an AI company in 2002

(08:21) Cats and consciousness

(08:55) ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge

(11:50) The mind-body problem and online identities

(15:26) Veneer theory and realism

(17:22) Data colonialism and digital "cocoons"

(21:58) Epilogue: Create wiser networks

(24:13) How to be wise in the age of AI

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