The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

Where there is demand, technology always breaks out, finds traction, builds users. Once established, waves are almost impossible to stop. As the Ottomans discovered when it came to printing, resistance tends to be ground down with the passage of time. Technology’s nature is to spread, no matter the barriers. Plenty of technologies come and go. You don’t see too many penny-farthings or Segways, listen to many cassettes or minidiscs. But that doesn’t mean personal mobility and music aren’t ubiquitous; older technologies have just been replaced by new, more efficient forms. We don’t ride on steam trains or write on typewriters, but their ghostly presence lives on in their successors, like Shinkansens and MacBooks. Think of how, as parts of successive waves, fire, then candles and oil lamps, gave way to gas lamps and then to electric lightbulbs, and now LED lights, and the totality of artificial light increased even as the underlying technologies changed. New technologies supersede multiple predecessors. Just as electricity did the work of candles and steam engines alike, so smartphones replaced satnavs, cameras, PDAs, computers, and telephones (and invented entirely new classes of experience: apps). As technologies let you do more, for less, their appeal only grows, along with their adoption.

Resistance Wanes, Replacement Reigns: Why Waves Keep Spreading