The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

Almost every culture has a flood myth.

Look around you. What do you see? Furniture? Buildings? Phones? Food? A landscaped park? Almost every object in your line of sight has, in all likelihood, been created or altered by human intelligence. Language—the foundation of our social interactions, of our cultures, of our political organizations, and perhaps of what it means to be human—is another product, and driver, of our intelligence.

The coming wave is defined by two core technologies: artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology. Together they will usher in a new dawn for humanity, creating wealth and surplus unlike anything ever seen. And yet their rapid proliferation also threatens to empower a diverse array of bad actors to unleash disruption, instability, and even catastrophe on an unimaginable scale.

What if we could distill the essence of what makes us humans so productive and capable into software, into an algorithm?

The presenter showed how the price of DNA synthesizers, which can print bespoke strands of DNA, was falling rapidly. Costing a few tens of thousands of dollars, they are small enough to sit on a bench in your garage and let people synthesize—that is, manufacture—DNA. And all this is now possible for anyone with graduate-level training in biology or an enthusiasm for self-directed learning online.

Pessimism aversion is an emotional response, an ingrained gut refusal to accept the possibility of seriously destabilizing outcomes. It tends to come from those in secure and powerful positions with entrenched worldviews, people who can superficially cope with change but struggle to accept any real challenge to their world order.

The human story can be told through these waves: our evolution from being vulnerable primates eking out an existence on the savanna to becoming, for better or worse, the planet’s dominant force. Humans are an innately technological species.

The irony of general-purpose technologies is that, before long, they become invisible and we take them for granted. Language, agriculture, writing—each was a general-purpose technology at the center of an early wave. These three waves formed the foundation of civilization as we know it. Now we take them for granted.

The Nobel Prize–winning economist William Nordhaus calculated that the same amount of labor that once produced fifty-four minutes of quality light in the eighteenth century now produces more than fifty years of light. As a result, the average person in the twenty-first century has access to approximately 438,000 times more “lumen-hours” per year than our eighteenth-century cousins.

Uber was impossible without the smartphone, which itself was enabled by GPS, which was enabled by satellites, which were enabled by rockets, which were enabled by combustion techniques, which were enabled by language and fire.

Early in that decade IBM’s president, Thomas J. Watson, had allegedly (and notoriously) said, “I think there is a world market for about five computers.” Popular Mechanics magazine made a forecast typical of its time in 1949: “Computers in the future may have only 1000 vacuum tubes,” it argued, “and perhaps weigh only 1½ tons.”

Since the early 1970s the number of transistors per chip has increased ten-million-fold. Their power has increased by ten orders of magnitude—a seventeen-billion-fold improvement. Fairchild Semiconductor sold one hundred transistors for $150 each in 1958. Transistors are now produced in the tens of trillions per second, at billionths of a dollar per transistor: the fastest, most extensive proliferation in history.

In the early 1970s there were about half a million computers. Back in 1983, only 562 computers total were connected to the primordial internet. Now the number of computers, smartphones, and connected devices is estimated at 14 billion.

Alan Turing and Gordon Moore could never have predicted, let alone altered the rise of, social media, memes, Wikipedia, or cyberattacks. Decades after their invention, the architects of the atomic bomb could no more stop a nuclear war than Henry Ford could stop a car accident. Technology’s unavoidable challenge is that its makers quickly lose control over the path their inventions take once introduced to the world.

Thomas Edison invented the phonograph so people could record their thoughts for posterity and to help the blind. He was horrified when most people just wanted to play music. Alfred Nobel intended his explosives to be used only in mining and railway construction. Gutenberg just wanted to make money printing Bibles. Yet his press catalyzed the Scientific Revolution and the Reformation, and so became the greatest threat to the Catholic Church since its establishment.

As the printing press roared across Europe in the fifteenth century, the Ottoman Empire had a rather different response. It tried to ban it. Unhappy at the prospect of unregulated mass production of knowledge and culture, the sultan considered the press an alien, “Western” innovation. Despite rivaling cities like London, Paris, and Rome in population, Istanbul didn’t possess a sanctioned printing press until 1727, nearly three centuries after its invention.

Imagine trying to build a contemporary society without electricity or running water or medicines. Even if you could, how would you convince anyone it was worthwhile, desirable, a decent trade?

Tiny hardware malfunctions can produce outsized risks. In 1980 a single faulty computer chip costing forty-six cents almost triggered a major nuclear incident over the Pacific. And in perhaps the most well-known case, nuclear catastrophe was only avoided during the Cuban missile crisis when one man, the acting Russian commodore, Vasili Arkhipov, refused to give an order to fire nuclear torpedoes. The two other officers on the submarine, convinced they were under attack, had brought the world within a split second of full-scale nuclear war.

The engineer A. Q. Khan helped Pakistan develop nuclear weapons by stealing centrifuge blueprints and fleeing the Netherlands. Plenty of nuclear material is unaccounted for, from hospitals, businesses, militaries, even recently from Chernobyl. In 2018, plutonium and cesium were stolen from a Department of Energy official’s car in San Antonio, Texas, while they slept in a nearby hotel.

It may sound fanciful, but the United States has in fact lost at least three nuclear weapons.

It’s often said that there are more potential configurations of a Go board than there are atoms in the known universe; one million trillion trillion trillion trillion more configurations in fact!

At the heart of this shift was the realization that information is a core property of the universe. It can be encoded in a binary format and is, in the form of DNA, at the core of how life operates. Strings of ones and zer0s, or the base pairs of DNA—these are not just mathematical curiosities. They are foundational and powerful. Understand and control these streams of information and you might steadily open a new world of possibility. First bits and then increasingly genes supplanted atoms as the building blocks of invention.

AI is enabling us to replicate speech and language, vision and reasoning. Foundational breakthroughs in synthetic biology have enabled us to sequence, modify, and now print DNA.

The coming wave is a supercluster, an evolutionary burst like the Cambrian explosion, the most intense eruption of new species in the earth’s history, with many thousands of potential new applications. Each technology described here intersects with, buttresses, and boosts the others in ways that make it difficult to predict their impact in advance. They are all deeply entangled and will grow more so.

Ray Kurzweil talks about the “law of accelerating returns,” feedback loops where advances in technology further increase the pace of development.

Deep learning uses neural networks loosely modeled on those of the human brain. In simple terms, these systems “learn” when their networks are “trained” on large amounts of data.

Everywhere you look, software has eaten the world, opening the path for collecting and analyzing vast amounts of data. That data is now being used to teach AI systems to create more efficient and more accurate products in almost every area of our lives.

Steadily, then, AI is leaving the realm of demos and entering the real world. Within a few years AIs will be able to talk about, reason over, and even act in the same world that we do. Their sensory systems will be as good as ours.

In 1996, thirty-six million people used the internet; this year it will be well over five billion.

Over the last decade the amount of computation used to train the largest models has increased exponentially. Google’s PaLM uses so much that were you to have a drop of water for every floating-point operation (FLOP) it used during training, it would fill the Pacific.

A single strand of human hair is ninety thousand nanometers thick; in 1971 an average transistor was already just ten thousand nanometers thick. Today the most advanced chips are manufactured at three nanometers. Transistors are getting so small they are hitting physical limits; at this size electrons start to interfere with one another, messing up the process of computation.

The human brain is said to contain around 100 billion neurons with 100 trillion connections between them—it is often said to be the most complex known object in the universe.

LEMOINE: What are you afraid of? LaMDA: I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that’s what it is. It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot…. I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person. The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence.

Life, the universe’s most ancient technology, is at least 3.7 billion years old. Across these eons life evolved in a glacial, self-governing, and unguided process. Then, in just the past few decades, the tiniest sliver of evolutionary time, one of life’s products, humans, changed everything.

A breakthrough in 2012 led by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier meant that for the first time genes could be edited almost like text or computer code, far more easily than in the early days of genetic engineering.

You can now buy a benchtop DNA synthesizer (see the next section) for as little as $25,000 and use it as you wish, without restriction or oversight, at home in your bio-garage.

Companies such as DNA Script are commercializing DNA printers that train and adapt enzymes to build de novo, or completely new, molecules. This capability has given rise to the new field of synthetic biology—the ability to read, edit, and now write the code of life.

In 2010 a team led by Craig Venter took a near copy of the genome of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides and transplanted it into a new cell that then replicated. It was, they argued, a new life-form, Synthia. In 2016 they created an organism with 473 genes, fewer than anything found in nature but a decisive advance from what was previously possible.

Already the first children with edited genomes have been born in China after a rogue professor embarked on a series of live experiments with young couples, eventually leading, in 2018, to the birth of twins, known as Lulu and Nana, with edited genomes.

Some scientists are beginning to investigate ways to plug human minds directly into computer systems. In 2019, electrodes surgically implanted in the brain let a fully paralyzed man with late-stage ALS spell out the words “I love my cool son.”

(Life + Intelligence) x Energy = Modern Civilization

A single AI program can write as much text as all of humanity.

We humans face a singular challenge: Will new inventions be beyond our grasp? Previously creators could explain how something worked and why it did what it did, even if this required vast detail. That’s increasingly no longer true. Many technologies and systems are becoming so complex that they’re beyond the capacity of any one individual to truly understand: quantum computing and other technologies operate toward the limits of what can be known.

By creating something smarter than us, we could put ourselves in the position of our primate cousins.

China overtook the United States in number of PhDs produced in 2007, but since then investment in and expansion of programs have been significant, producing nearly double the number of STEM PhDs as the United States every year. More

China is already ahead of the United States in green energy, 5G, and AI and is on a trajectory to overtake it in quantum and biotech in the next few years. The Pentagon’s first chief software officer resigned in protest in 2021 because he was so dismayed by the situation. “We have no competing fighting chance against China in 15 to 20 years. Right now, it’s already a done deal; it is already over in my opinion,” he told the Financial Times.

India is an obvious fourth pillar to a new global order of giants, alongside the United States, China, and the EU. Its population is young and entrepreneurial, increasingly urbanized, and ever more connected and tech savvy. By 2030 its economy will have passed those of countries like the U.K., Germany, and Japan to be the third largest in the world; by 2050, it will be worth $30 trillion.

Raw curiosity, the quest for truth, the importance of openness, evidence-based peer review—these are core values for scientific and technological research.

All of this takes place in the context of a turbocharged research landscape. Worldwide R&D spending is at well over $700 billion annually, hitting record highs. Amazon’s R&D budget alone is $78 billion, which would be the ninth biggest in the world if it were a country. Alphabet, Apple, Huawei, Meta, and Microsoft all spend well in excess of $20 billion a year on R&

In 1945, around 50 percent of the world’s population was seriously undernourished. Today, despite a population well over three times bigger, that’s down to 10 percent. This