The Coming Wave, by Mustafa Suleyman
Review by Dave Gamrath
In his new book The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma, Mustafa Suleyman (the co-founder of DeepMind, one of the world’s largest Artificial Intelligence companies) calls for a global effort to contain the new technologies of Artificial Intelligence and Synthetic Biology.
Book Review:
As Bob Dylan sang sixty years ago, the times they are a changin’. In author Mustafa Suleyman’s new book, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma, Suleyman, who was a co-founder of DeepMind, one of the world’s largest Artificial Intelligence companies, captures the profound benefits, and dangers, of two key technological changes that are upon us. As Suleyman stresses, life as we’ve known it will not be the same.
The first of these technologies is Artificial Intelligence, or AI. AI is already ingrained into our lives, yet it’s only just scratching the surface of what it can do. Suleyman writes that within a few years AI will be much more powerful and consequential than the internet, and will be ingrained into our social fabric. “Mass-scale AI rollout is already well underway,” with AI growing exponentially. What was thought impossible a few years ago has already been achieved. Machines are already capable of learning more on their own than humans could teach them. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is the “point at which an AI can perform all human cognitive skills better than the smartest humans.” This next state of AI, superintelligence, is just a few years away. Suleyman lists many of the amazing benefits that AI will bring, such as breakthroughs in clean energy, automated drug discovery, and so much more.
The second technology that is dramatically impacting our lives is synthetic biology, which is also improving exponentially with the help of AI. Synthetic biology is bringing amazing new medical advances, including curing diseases that have no cure today. Synthetic biology will improve human performance, and can even reverse or arrest the aging process. As Suleyman writes, “welcome to the age of synthetic life.” Other breakthroughs from synthetic biology include creating “viruses that produce batteries, proteins that purify dirty water, organs grown in vats, algae that draw down carbon from the atmosphere, and plants that consume toxic waste.” Suleyman covers additional technologies as well that will change our world, including robotics, quantum computing, nuclear fusion, and advanced nanotechnology.
Yet, all is not good with these new technologies. They will also bring many challenges and likely some horrific outcomes. For example, AI will be putting large numbers of people out of work. “More than half of all jobs could see many of their tasks automated by machines in the next seven years,” and new job creation won’t keep up. This will be hugely destabilizing. Also, we are facing a deepfake era and misinformation apocalypse. AI will lead to new lethal and destructive weapons, possibly accessible to anyone who wants them. We could see automated wars and engineered pandemics from deliberately engineered pathogens that are far more deadly than Covid. Terrorists could mount automatic weapons equipped with facial recognition onto autonomous drones, resulting in mass killings at public events. We could have an extreme bio-risk event, with the sabotage of an entire ecosystem. This technology could lead to wars, accidents, random terror groups, authoritarian governments, overreaching corporations, sabotage and just plain theft at levels previously unseen. “Over the next ten years, AI will be the greatest force amplifier in history,” and could redistribute power on an historic scale.
Also, AI will be an existential threat to nation-states and the geopolitical order. AIs independently improve their own algorithms, and could even decide upon their own R&D cycles. As AI keeps on improving itself, AI could become “fully impossible to control or contain,” and could end up dominating humans. Suleyman writes that there is no way to predict exactly when or how this could happen. These technological breakthroughs are coming in a wave, and Suleyman asks “what if the wave is actually a tsunami?”
Unfortunately, containing these technologies at this point does not seem possible. History shows that containment of new technologies has always been extraordinarily difficult. Plus, people tend to suffer from “pessimism aversion,” and thus typically discount the possibility of bad outcomes. Also, governments are already in disarray. “Trust in government, particularly in America, has collapsed.” America is currently suffering from political instability, social resentment, inequality and polarization, not to mention the challenges we face with climate change. Governments are already facing a massive strain, yet things are about to get much more complicated. Suleyman forecasts a spectrum of governmental outcomes. On one end, liberal democracies will continue to struggle. At the other end, we will see full-fledged state control (think China). Surveillance capabilities are improving exponentially, facial recognition software getting amazingly accurate, and new abilities to “suck in audio data” already exist. All this is “rocket fuel for authoritarianism.” But neither these techno-dictatorships nor struggling democracies can contain the coming wave.
But contain we must! “Absent strong methods of containment operating at every level, catastrophic outcomes like an engineered pandemic are more possible than ever.” Suleyman retains hope that we have a narrow path towards containment. He describes the needed containment as “an interlocking set of technical, social, and legal mechanisms constraining and controlling technology, working at every possible level.” Components of containment include “regulation, better technical safety, new governance and ownership models, and new modes of accountability and transparency.” These efforts need to be worldwide.
Suleyman closes his book by providing ten steps he believes may get us to needed containment. He calls for an Apollo program for technical safety. We need massive auditing capabilities. He describes potential efforts to buy us more time. He calls for developers to have a greater focus on safety. Technology companies need to focus on more than just profits. He calls for government taking a leadership role in technology development. We need international cooperation, including a new global institution devoted to technology. He calls these efforts “a new grand bargain.”
Simply put, Suleyman believes that if this technological wave is not contained, it’s only a matter of time until we see catastrophe on a worldwide scale. Clearly, this containment will be hard. Or will it? I just typed “How do we contain AI” into ChatGPT, and in about three seconds got a robust outline on containment very much matching Suleyman’s. Maybe that’s our salvation, just directing AI to contain itself!
Is it just me, or does something seem very wrong here?
Reviewer Opinion: Really good
Reviewer Rating of Book: Thumb up