The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

Technologies can fail in the mundane sense of not working: the engine doesn’t start; the bridge falls down. But they can also fail in a wider sense. If technology damages human lives, or produces societies filled with harm, or renders them ungovernable because we empower a chaotic long tail of bad (or unintentionally dangerous) actors—if, in the aggregate, technology is damaging—then it can be said to have failed in another, deeper sense, failing to live up to its promise. Failure in this sense isn’t intrinsic to technology; it is about the context within which it operates, the governance structures it is subject to, the networks of power and uses to which it is put. That impressive ingenuity giving rise to so much now means we are better at avoiding the first kind of failure. Fewer planes crash, cars are cleaner and safer, computers are more powerful and yet more secure. Our great challenge is that we still haven’t reckoned with the latter mode of failure.

Beyond Breakdowns: Technology’s Social Failure Mode