The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

Democracies are built on trust. People need to trust that government officials, militaries, and other elites will not abuse their dominant positions. Everyone relies on the trust that taxes will be paid, rules honored, the interests of the whole put ahead of individuals.

A meta-analysis published in the journal Nature reviewed the results of nearly five hundred studies, concluding there is a clear correlation between growing use of digital media and rising distrust in politics, populist movements, hate, and polarization.

Pause for a moment and imagine a world where robots with the dexterity of human beings that can be “programmed” in plain English are available at the price of a microwave. Can you begin to think of all the uses to which such a valuable technology will be put?

Power is “the ability or capacity to do something or act in a particular way;…to direct or influence the behavior of others or the course of events.” It’s the mechanical or electrical energy that underwrites civilization. The bedrock and central principle of the state.

Today, no matter how wealthy you are, you simply cannot buy a more powerful smartphone than is available to billions of people. This phenomenal achievement of civilization is too often overlooked.

In nature, viruses usually trade off lethality for transmissibility. The more transmissible a virus, the less lethal it often is. But there is no absolute reason this must be so. One

From the Mongols to the Mughals, for more than a thousand years the most powerful force in Asia was a traditional empire. By 1800 that had changed. It was rather a private company, owned by a relatively small number of shareholders, run by a handful of dusty accountants and administrators operating out of a building just five windows wide in a city thousands of miles away.

What happens when many, perhaps the majority, of the tasks required to operate a corporation, or a government department, can be run more efficiently by machines? Who will benefit first from these dynamics, and what will they likely do with this new power?

Around half the world’s billion CCTV cameras are in China. Many have built-in facial recognition and are carefully positioned to gather maximal information, often in quasi-private spaces: residential buildings, hotels, even karaoke lounges.

Fragmentations could occur all over. What if companies themselves start down a journey of becoming states? Or cities decide to break away and gain more autonomy? What if people spend more time, money, and emotional energy in virtual worlds than the real? What happens to traditional hierarchies when tools of awesome power and expertise are as available to street children as to billionaires?

Governance works by consent; it is a collective fiction resting on the belief of everyone concerned.

The canonical thought experiment is that if you set up a sufficiently powerful AI to make paper clips but don’t specify the goal carefully enough, it may eventually turn the world and maybe even the contents of the entire cosmos into paper clips.

Technology has penetrated our civilization so deeply that watching technology means watching everything. Every lab, fab, and factory, every server, every new piece of code, every string of DNA synthesized, every business and university, from every biohacker in a shack in the woods to every vast and anonymous data center.

Modern civilization writes checks only continual technological development can cash. Our entire edifice is premised on the idea of long-term economic growth. And long-term economic growth is ultimately premised on the introduction and diffusion of new technologies. Whether it’s the expectation of consuming more for less or getting ever more public service without paying more tax, or the idea that we can unsustainably degrade the environment while life keeps getting better indefinitely, the bargain—arguably the grand bargain itself—needs technology.

A few years ago, many large language models had a problem. They were, to put it bluntly, racist. Users could quite easily find ways of making them regurgitate racist material, or hold racist opinions they had gleaned in scanning the vast corpus of texts on which they’d been trained. Toxic bias was, it seemed, ingrained in human writing and then amplified by AI.

In AI, the lion’s share of the most advanced GPUs essential to the latest models are designed by one company, the American firm NVIDIA. Most of its chips are manufactured by one company, TSMC, in Taiwan, the most advanced in just a single building, the world’s most sophisticated and expensive factory. TSMC’s machinery to make these chips comes from a single supplier, the Dutch firm ASML, by far Europe’s most valuable and important tech company.

These three companies have a choke hold on cutting-edge chips, a technology so physically constrained that one estimate argues they cost up to $10 billion per kilogram.

Flying is just about the safest mode of transport there is: sitting thirty-five thousand feet in the sky is safer than sitting at home on your couch.

Just a few days after the release of GPT-4, thousands of AI scientists signed an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on researching the most powerful AI models. Referencing the Asilomar principles, they cited reasons familiar to those reading this book: “Recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one—not even their creators—can understand, predict, or reliably control.”

The economist Daron Acemoglu and the political scientist James Robinson share the view that liberal democracies are much less secure than they might look. They see the state as an inherently unstable “shackled Leviathan”: vast and powerful, but held in check by persistent civil societies and norms.

Technology should amplify the best of us, open new pathways for creativity and cooperation, work with the human grain of our lives and most precious relationships. It should make us happier and healthier, the ultimate complement to human endeavor and life well lived—but always on our terms, democratically decided, publicly debated, with benefits widely distributed.