In a review of Yuval Noah Harari’s 2024 book, *Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI*, Frank S. Robinson examines Harari’s concerns about how artificial intelligence will shape our future. An AI is trained on vast information to see patterns and can write very well, but it is a simulation of thought, not thinking as humans think. Harari relates that in the nineteenth century, industrial technology generated the resources to rule the world, producing colonialism; now he foresees ‘data colonialism’, with control of data ruling the world, and AI being even more powerful. A guiding metaphor is Goethe’s *The Sorcerer’s Apprentice* (1797), drawing the lesson: “never summon powers you cannot control.” Harari notes humanity has set in motion powerful forces with unintended consequences, exacerbated by large scale cooperation, which gives enormous power often used unwisely—as Germans did in 1933. He thinks it is an information problem: we built “large networks by inventing and spreading fictions, fantasies, and mass delusions,” yielding Nazism and Stalinism. He fears some new AI-built totalitarian regime that prevents exposure of what it is doing. Harari posits that our first information technology was the story, and a story’s power needn’t depend on its truth.