The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

The more tools you have, the more you can do and the more you can imagine new tools and processes beyond them. As the Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich points out, the wheel arrived surprisingly late in human life. But once invented, it became a building block of everything from chariots and wagons to mills, presses, and flywheels. From the written word to sailing vessels, technology increases interconnectedness, helping to boost its own flow and spread. Each wave hence lays the groundwork for successive waves. Over time, this dynamic accelerated. Beginning around the 1770s in Europe, the first wave of the Industrial Revolution combined steam power, mechanized looms, the factory system, and canals. In the 1840s came the age of railways, telegraphs, and steamships, and a bit later steel and machine tools; together they formed the First Industrial Revolution. Then, just a few decades later, came the Second Industrial Revolution. You’ll be familiar with its greatest hits: the internal combustion engine, chemical engineering, powered flight, and electricity. Flight needed combustion, and mass production of combustion engines demanded steel and machine tools, and so on. Beginning with the Industrial Revolution, immense change became measured in decades rather than centuries or millennia. This isn’t, however, an orderly process. Technological waves don’t arrive with the neat predictability of the tides. Over the long term, waves erratically intersect and intensify. The ten t...

Interlocking Waves: How Tools Beget Tools and Collapse Time