The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

Earlier in the book I described containment as a foundation for controlling and governing technology, spanning technical, cultural, and regulatory aspects. At root, I believe this means having the power to drastically curtail or outright stop technology’s negative impacts, from the local and small scale up to the planetary and existential. Encompassing hard enforcement against misuse of proliferated technologies, it also steers the development, direction, and governance of nascent technologies. Contained technology is technology whose modes of failure are known, managed, and mitigated, a situation where the means to shape and govern technology escalate in parallel with its capabilities. It’s tempting to think of containment in an obvious, literal sense, a kind of magic box in which a given technology can be sealed away. At the outer limit—in the case of rogue malware or pathogens—such drastic steps might be needed. Generally, though, consider containment more as a set of guardrails, a way to keep humanity in the driver’s seat when a technology risks causing more harm than good. Picture those guardrails operating at different levels and with different modes of implementation. In the next chapter we’ll consider what they might look like at a more granular level, from AI alignment research to lab design, international treaties to best practice protocols. For now, the key point is that those guardrails need to be strong enough that, in theory, they could stop a runaway catastr...

Guardrails, Not Boxes: Containment That Scales