The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

There’s a recurrent problem with making sense of progress in AI. We quickly adapt, even to breakthroughs that astound us initially, and within no time they seem routine, even mundane. We no longer gasp at AlphaGo or GPT-3. What seems like near-magic engineering one day is just another part of the furniture the next. It’s easy to become blasé and many have. In the words of John McCarthy, who coined the term “artificial intelligence”: “As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore.” AI is—as those of us building it like to joke—“what computers can’t do.” Once they can, it’s just software.

The stirrup was an apparently simple innovation. But with it came a social revolution changing hundreds of millions of lives. A system of politics, economics, war, and culture that structured European life for nearly a thousand years rested, in part, on those small metallic triangles. The story of stirrups and feudalism highlights an important truth: new technologies help create new centers of power with new social infrastructures both enabling them and supporting them.