The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

The truth is that the curiosity of academic researchers or the will of motivated governments is insufficient to propel new breakthroughs into the hands of billions of consumers. Science has to be converted into useful and desirable products for it to truly spread far and wide. Put simply: most technology is made to earn money. If anything, this is perhaps the most persistent, entrenched, dispersed incentive of all. Profit drives the Chinese entrepreneur to develop moldings for a radically redesigned phone; it pushes the Dutch farmer to find new robotics and greenhouse technologies to grow tomatoes year-round in the cool climate of the North Sea; it leads suave investors on Palo Alto’s Sand Hill Road to invest millions of dollars in untested young entrepreneurs. While the motivations of their individual contributors may vary, Google is building AI, and Amazon is building robots, because as public companies with shareholders to please, they see them as ways to make a profit. And this, the potential for profit, is built on something even more long-lasting and robust: raw demand. People both want and need the fruits of technology. People need food, or refrigeration, or telecoms to live their lives; they might want AC units, or a new kind of shoe design requiring some intricate new manufacturing technique, or some kind of revolutionary new food-coloring method for cupcakes, or any of the innumerable everyday ends to which technology is put to use. Either way, technology helps p...

From Lab to Ledger: Demand Turns Ideas into Industries