The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

AI is everywhere, on the news and in your smartphone, trading stocks and building websites. Many of the world’s largest companies and wealthiest nations barrel forward, developing cutting-edge AI models and genetic engineering techniques, fueled by tens of billions of dollars in investment. Once matured, these emerging technologies will spread rapidly, becoming cheaper, more accessible, and widely diffused throughout society. They will offer extraordinary new medical advances and clean energy breakthroughs, creating not just new businesses but new industries and quality of life improvements in almost every imaginable area. And yet alongside these benefits, AI, synthetic biology, and other advanced forms of technology produce tail risks on a deeply concerning scale. They could present an existential threat to nation-states—risks so profound they might disrupt or even overturn the current geopolitical order. They open pathways to immense AI-empowered cyberattacks, automated wars that could devastate countries, engineered pandemics, and a world subject to unexplainable and yet seemingly omnipotent forces. The likelihood of each may be small, but the possible consequences are huge. Even a slim chance of outcomes like these requires urgent attention. Some countries will react to the possibility of such catastrophic risks with a form of technologically charged authoritarianism to slow the spread of these new powers. This will require huge levels of surveillance along with massiv...

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