The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

Postwar America took its technological supremacy for granted. Sputnik woke it up. In the fall of 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, humanity’s first encroachment on space. About the size of a beach ball, it was still impossibly futuristic. Sputnik was up there for the world to see, or rather hear, its extraterrestrial beeps broadcasting around the planet. Pulling it off was an undeniable feat. This was a crisis for America, a technological Pearl Harbor. Policy reacted. Science and technology, from high schools to advanced laboratories, became national priorities, with new funding and new agencies like NASA and DARPA. Massive resources were plowed into major technology projects, not least the Apollo missions. These spurred many important advances in rocketry, microelectronics, and computer programming. Nascent alliances like NATO were strengthened. Twelve years later, it was the United States, not the USSR, that succeeded in putting a human on the moon. The Soviets almost bankrupted themselves trying to keep up. With Sputnik, Russia had blown past the United States, a historic technical achievement with enormous geopolitical ramifications. But when America needed to step up, it did.

The Beep Heard ’Round the World: Sputnik and America’s Tech Awakening