The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

For most of history simply feeding yourself and your family was the dominant challenge of human life. Farming has always been a hard, uncertain business. But especially prior to the improvements of the twentieth century, it was much, much harder. Any variation in weather conditions—too cold, hot, dry, or wet—could be catastrophic. Almost everything was done by hand, maybe with the help of some oxen if you were lucky. At some times of the year there was little to do; at others, there were weeks of unceasing, backbreaking physical labor. Crops could be ruined by disease or pests, spoil after harvesting, or get stolen by invading armies. Most farmers lived hand to mouth, often working as serfs, giving up much of their scant crop. Even in the most productive parts of the world, yields were low and fragile. Life was tough, lived on the edge of disaster. When Thomas Malthus argued in 1798 that a fast-growing population would quickly exhaust the carrying capacity of agriculture and lead to a collapse, he wasn’t wrong; static yields would and often did follow this rule. What he hadn’t accounted for was the scale of human ingenuity. Assuming favorable weather conditions and using the latest techniques, in the thirteenth century each hectare of wheat in England yielded around half a ton. There it remained for centuries. Slowly the arrival of new techniques and technologies changed all that: from crop rotation to selective breeding, mechanized plows, synthetic fertilizer, pesticides,...

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