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Philosophy20 min read
The Coming Wave
by Mustafa Suleyman
Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma
Published: October 12, 2023
4.4 (464 ratings)
Table of Contents
Book Summary
This is a comprehensive summary of “The Coming Wave” by Mustafa Suleyman. The book explores technology, power, and the twenty-first century's greatest dilemma.
what’s in it for me? insights into the risks and rewards of the ai revolution.#
Introduction
mustafa suleyman the coming wave
technology, power, and the 21st century's greatest dilemma we're in the early stages of a technological revolution, argues mustafa suleyman.
that's the coming wave referenced in his book's title.
it comprises two technologies set to remake our world – artificial intelligence and genetic engineering.
soon enough we'll be surrounded by ai systems.
in fact, we already are, whether it's alexa, chat gpt, or instant speech-to-text transcription.
in the near future, though, these systems are going to do a lot more heavy lifting than they currently are.
rather than simply writing resumes or putting our favourite songs on, they'll be organising our lives and running key parts of the governments we elect.
the mass rollout of these technologies, suleyman suggests, can go one of two ways.
it can make us richer, healthier, and even happier than ever before.
or, it can plunge us into a dystopia defined by joblessness, violence, terror, and disintegrating states.
the technologies themselves won't decide that.
like all tools, they can be used for good or bad.
robots can help the elderly with their chores, or violently repress demonstrators.
dna synthesisers can cure old diseases, or create new ones.
ultimately, they empower our best and worst selves.
that means we have to decide how we're going to reap the rewards of these unprecedentedly powerful tools, while containing the threats caused by their potential misuse.
the inevitability of “revenge effects”#
the inevitability of revenge effects we're on the cusp of a new dawn for humanity.
the technologies of the future, above all artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, will be unlike anything we've seen before.
that, in a nutshell, is the problem and the promise at the heart of the coming wave.
these technologies, mustafa suleyman argues, will create untold wealth and surplus, and unleash unprecedented disruption.
before we get to that, though, we need some context.
despite the radical newness of such technologies, this is in many ways a familiar problem.
as the history of technology shows, breakthroughs have long come with unintended side effects.
technology is, fundamentally, a set of ever-changing ideas.
new technologies evolve by colliding with other technologies.
the laws governing such evolution are darwinian.
effective combinations survive and become the building blocks for further innovation.
invention thus feeds on itself.
yesterday's breakthrough becomes a sub-component of tomorrow's innovation.
think, for example, of how cell phones swallowed everything from gps to qr codes and facial recognition to become the all-purpose smartphones we carry in our pockets today.
in engineering terms, this is a virtuous feedback loop.
but technology doesn't evolve in a vacuum.
it's part of our dynamic world.
technologies are often not used as intended, and ripple effects are the norm.
thomas edison's phonograph was supposed to help the blind.
he thought the use to which people actually put it, listening to music, a frivolous misuse.
but that misuse spawned an entire industry and changed popular culture forever.
similarly, alfred nobel's explosives were designed for use in mining and railway construction, not on the battlefield.
the outcome was nonetheless a revolution in humans' ability to kill and maim one another.
then there's johannes gutenberg, the german craftsman who designed a device to mass-print profitable vernacular bibles.
in the end, his printing press spurred the scientific revolution and the reformation, undermining the authority of the institution that had dominated political life in europe for centuries, the catholic church.
talk about unintended consequences.
such consequences are sometimes called revenge effects.
once you look for them, you start spotting them everywhere.
take antibiotics, a miracle cure that worked so well that we ended up over-prescribing them and creating new strains of treatment-resistant diseases.
or the exploration of the cosmos.
we got so good at launching satellites and rockets that our ambitions in space are now threatened by the debris and junk orbiting our planet.
unforeseen consequences are hard-wired into successful technologies.
the more pervasive a technology becomes, the more its users reshape and reinterpret it.
rapid advancements often begin with a lone scientist or tinkerer in a garage, but they can quickly become societal quandaries.
facebook and twitter didn't set out to expedite the spread of democracy-poisoning disinformation, but that's exactly what happened once millions of citizens began relying on them as news sources.
historically, societies sometimes attempted to sidestep such quandaries by suppressing the technologies causing them.
pope urban ii, for example, tried to ban the crossbow.
it was too effective, he thought, and unchristian to boot.
dozens of states clamped down on the printing press, eroding its authority.
during the industrial revolution, artisans destroyed new livelihood-threatening machinery.
but resistance was futile.
technologies like crossbows, books and industrial looms persisted and evolved, changing the face of human civilisation.
for suleiman, ground-breaking technologies like ai and genetic engineering will also prove too useful to be suppressed.
but, like earlier breakthroughs, their widespread adoption has the potential to create profound revenge effects.
what these effects will be, and what we can do to contain them while harnessing the benefits of such technologies, is the topic of this chapter.
artificial intelligence and genetic engineering are already revolutionizing our world#
artificial intelligence and genetic engineering are already revolutionising our world.
the transformation of our world is already underway.
in other words, the future is now.
take artificial intelligence.
ai systems can recognise faces and objects with near-unerring accuracy.
instant language translation and speech-to-text transcription work so well we take them for granted.
ai is navigating roads and driving autonomously.
give ai models a few simple prompts and they'll generate novel images and coherent texts and compose original music.
ai is everywhere, too.
it's in our smartphones and on the news.
it's building websites and trading stocks.
the more data such systems are given, the better they get, and there's a lot of data out there for them to collect and analyse.
soon, ai systems will talk, reason and, given the rapid improvement of their sensory systems, look at the world in uncannily human ways.
that these systems will surpass our own cognitive abilities is a question of when, not if.
then there's genetic engineering.
the ability to manipulate dna used to be the preserve of the elite.
you needed steak-sized budgets and scientific geniuses to do it.
but biotech has been democratised.
experiments that once took years can be wrapped up in weeks.
synthesisers capable of printing bespoke strands of dna used to cost fortunes and weigh tonnes.
today, a benchtop synthesiser costs as little as $25,000.
the upshot?
anyone with graduate-level training in biology can manufacture dna from the comfort of their garage.
falling costs and proliferating experimentation promise a health revolution.
treatments for conditions like sickle cell disease are already being developed.
treatments for hiv, cystic fibrosis and even cancer may soon follow.
safe gene therapies, meanwhile, spell a new generation of ultra-hardy, disease-resistant, drought-defying high-yield crops that will guarantee the food supply of an ever-larger and hungrier global population.
the boons of the coming wave, then, are obvious.
they will make economies more productive, life more convenient, and our bodies last longer.
if you want to understand technologies, though, it's not enough to predict positive spillovers.
you also need to anticipate unintended consequences and those revenge effects we mentioned earlier.
we're nowhere near mass adoption of ai or genetic engineering, but threats are already looming on the horizon.
the most obvious threat concerns jobs.
automation always displaces labour.
first, by making the completion of specific tasks more efficient.
then, by making certain roles redundant.
and finally, by cannibalising entire workforces.
that essentially is the story of the north american and european rustbelts that once employed millions of industrial labourers.
economists call this technological unemployment – joblessness caused by the fact that, say, robots are cheaper and more efficient car builders than humans.
in the past, however, the loss of blue-collar jobs in factories, mines, and shipyards was offset by the growth of white-collar jobs in the service industry.
put simply, it gets harder to find work in a factory, but demand for lawyers, designers, call centre workers, receptionists, and social media influencers grows.
those, though, are precisely the kinds of jobs that ai is going to automate.
ai will be a cheaper, more efficient cognitive worker than lots of people who work in data entry and customer service, or write emails, draft summaries, translate documents, and create content for a living.
the days of cognitive manual labour, in short, are numbered.
but it's not clear what kind of jobs, if any, are going to offset the coming wave of technological unemployment.
what happens when once-affluent cities become middle-class rustbelts?
one thing's certain.
mass joblessness and economic instability have not been good for democracies historically.
the coming wave will democratize power – and risk#
the coming wave will democratise power and risk.
power, as dictionaries define it, is the ability to do something, the ability to act in a certain way or to influence others and the course of events.
technology, suleiman argues, is political because it is a form of power.
it allows its owners and users to do things.
as he sees it, the single overriding characteristic of the coming wave is that it's going to democratise access to increasingly powerful technologies.
today, most of us are primarily consumers of content.
ai systems, though, will allow anyone to produce expert-quality video, text and image content.
ai won't just help you find ideas for your best man's speech.
it'll write it for you, for close to no cost and likely better than a professional speechwriter.
or think back to those benchtop synthesizers we mentioned.
anyone with $25,000 to spare or the ability to borrow it, and a talent for self-directed learning, can create novel dna or, more disturbingly, lethal, ultra-transmissible novel pathogens.
these technologies then are going to amplify power.
ai is going to give anyone with a goal – that is, all of us – powerful allies and sophisticated tools to realise our ambitions.
that's a double-edged sword.
those tools make it easier to write persuasive resumes, organise community events or create effective marketing strategies for your business.
but they'll also make it easier for bad actors to design persuasive disinformation campaigns or totalitarian states to create more effective surveillance systems.
having cheaper power at our fingertips is going to enhance every possible motivation, be it religious, cultural, military, commercial, democratic, authoritarian, good or bad.
democratising access also means democratising risk.
this development, unsurprisingly, has the potential to get very messy very fast.
take just one example – cyberattacks.
one of the earliest successful ai systems was called alphago.
its only job was to play the ancient and famously complex chinese board game go.
within a few months it was so good it handily beat world champions.
how did it learn to play the game?
essentially, it played itself again and again and again.
after crunching data from millions of self-played games, it hit upon unexpected strategies – the fruit of analysing the billions of moves that can be made in go.
now imagine an ai-enabled cyberattack on a power grid.
the ai systematically learns about its own vulnerabilities and patches itself in real time.
imagine that it also evolves to exploit systemic weaknesses discovered during the initial attack, and then begins moving through every hospital, office, home and bank connected to that grid.
because it's capable of detecting attempts to shut it down, it learns unexpected moves to evade these attempts.
eventually it's stopped in its tracks, but not before it's taken out life support systems, military installations, transport signalling and financial databases.
in other words, not before it's managed to take out a large chunk of the infrastructure upon which nations depend.
that's just one possible scenario.
there are plenty more.
it doesn't take much imagination, for example, to think what terrorists or a school shooter might do with armed, ai-enabled, facial-recognition-equipped drones.
but the issue here is even larger than the costs measured in dollars and human lives incurred during such attacks.
the real problem is this.
the democratisation of power undercuts the modern state's most important claim to its subjects' allegiance and loyalty – its ability to ensure their safety.
security isn't an optional feature for the state, it's foundational.
how can a state retain trust if it can't keep us safe, or the lights on, if hospitals, schools and power systems falter and there's nothing the government or citizens can do about it?
if the state can't protect us, we will ask ourselves, sooner rather than later, what value allegiance and loyalty still have.
new risks must be met head-on#
new risks must be met head on.
the coming wave's technologies are both valuable and dangerous.
valuable because they enable our best selves.
dangerous because they empower our worst.
ai might help us figure out new ways of mitigating global warming, but bad actors will be more interested in its ability to crash stock markets and take down power grids.
this is unfamiliar terrain.
we can't know how quickly ai systems will self-improve, nor can we know what consequences a lab accident with a piece of biotech that hasn't yet been invented might have.
what we do know is that there's no way of rewinding the clock once fast-evolving self-assembling automatons and new biological agents have been unleashed on the world.
that, though, goes with the territory.
it's what happens when a technological revolution allows anyone to invent and use tools that will affect us all.
we can look back to earlier technological revolutions like the invention of the printing press for guidance, but we're dealing with fundamentally new outputs.
new lifeforms.
new compounds.
even species.
even if we assume that the chances of catastrophe are low, we are essentially operating blind.
chances are, at some point, somewhere, and somehow, something is going to fail.
so what's to be done?
how do we hedge against risks and contain revenge effects without throttling life-enhancing technologies?
ai researchers, ceos, lawyers and policymakers in beijing, brussels and washington all say the same thing.
regulation.
we've been here before, they argue.
just look at cars.
if only it were that simple.
compared to the rollout of ai and genetic engineering, the mass adoption of the automobile proceeded at a snail's pace.
hobby tinkerers are gaining access to dna synthesizers, and tech companies are spending billions on r&d every month.
politicians, meanwhile, are trapped in the 24-hour news cycle, lurching from one short-term crisis to the next.
technology is evolving week by week.
governments are stuck in gridlock.
there are attempts to legislate lagging behind real-world developments by years.
cars also throw up another question.
yes, regulation made roads safer and more ordered.
but we're surrounded by bad outcomes, from sprawl to pollution.
that's before we consider the fact that close to a million and a half people still die every year in traffic accidents.
this isn't to say that regulation is futile.
the point, rather, is that we've decided, as societies and nations, that sprawl, pollution and a certain number of road deaths are an acceptable human cost of mass car use, given its benefits.
put differently, what policymakers often have in mind when they say regulation leaves out something important.
the ways in which societies weigh up the pros and cons of technologies among themselves.
regulation isn't just about passing laws.
it's also about social norms and values, and the balancing of risk and reward.
what's to be done, in other words, doesn't yet have a clear answer.
providing such an answer, however, wasn't why mustafa suleyman wrote the coming wave.
his point is that we urgently need to recognise what's coming.
the future is now.
it's time we talked about these new technologies.
the more these questions are on the public's radar, he concludes, the better.
final summary#
Conclusion
the main takeaway of this chapter to the coming wave by mustafa suleyman is that artificial intelligence and genetic engineering aren't mere futuristic concepts.
they're reshaping our present world.
unlike previous transformative technologies, they hold the potential to either elevate or devastate the coming decades of human history.
the direction our societies take hinges on our capacity to discern the imminent risks and rewards.
ok, that's it for this chapter.
thank you so much for listening.
please leave us a rating or a comment, we do always appreciate your feedback.
and we'll see you in the next chapter.
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