The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

Whatever the end point, we are heading to a place where unprecedented powers and abilities are out there, in the hands of already powerful actors who’ll no doubt use them to amplify their reach and further their own agenda. Such concentrations will enable vast, automated megacorporations to transfer value away from human capital—work—and toward raw capital. Put all the inequalities resulting from concentration together, and it adds up to another great acceleration and structural deepening of an existing fracture. Little wonder there is talk of neo- or techno-feudalism—a direct challenge to the social order, this time built on something beyond even stirrups. In sum, returns on intelligence will compound exponentially. A select few artificial intelligences that we used to call organizations will massively benefit from a new concentration of ability—probably the greatest such concentration yet seen. Re-creating the essence of what’s made our species so successful into tools that can be reused and reapplied over and over, in myriad different settings, is a mighty prize, which corporations and bureaucracies of all kinds will pursue, and wield. How these entities are governed, how they will rub against, capture, and reengineer the state, is an open question. That they will challenge it seems certain.

The Lords of Compute: Techno-Feudal Power Consolidates