The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

pessimism-aversion trap: the misguided analysis that arises when you are overwhelmed by a fear of confronting potentially dark realities, and the resulting tendency to look the other way.

Pessimism aversion is an emotional response, an ingrained gut refusal to accept the possibility of seriously destabilizing outcomes. It tends to come from those in secure and powerful positions with entrenched worldviews, people who can superficially cope with change but struggle to accept any real challenge to their world order.

Spend time in tech or policy circles, and it quickly becomes obvious that head-in-the-sand is the default ideology.

Humans are an innately technological species. From the very beginning, we are never separate from the waves of technology we create. We evolve together, in symbiosis.

The evolution of Homo sapiens rode these waves. We are not just the creators of our tools. We are, down to the biological, the anatomical level, a product of them.

General-purpose technologies ripple out over societies, across geographies, and throughout history. They open the doors of invention wide, enabling scores of downstream tools and processes.

Billions of hours of raw human life are consumed, shaped, distorted, and enriched by these technologies.

At first it seems impossible and unimaginable. Then it appears inevitable. And each wave grows bigger and stronger still.

Technologies are ideas, and ideas cannot be eliminated.

In the space of around a hundred years, successive waves took humanity from an era of candles and horse carts to one of power stations and space stations. Something similar is going to occur in the next thirty years. In the coming decades, a new wave of technology will force us to confront the most foundational questions our species has ever faced.

For most of history, the challenge of technology lay in creating and unleashing its power. That has now flipped: the challenge of technology today is about containing its unleashed power, ensuring it continues to serve us and our planet.

Technology is hence like a language or chemistry: not a set of independent entities and practices, but a commingling set of parts to combine and recombine.

AI is still in an early phase. It may look smart to claim that AI doesn’t live up to the hype, and it’ll earn you some Twitter followers. Meanwhile, talent and investment pour into AI research nonetheless.

One particularly important dimension is in the ability to take actions. We don’t just care about

AI is far deeper and more powerful than just another technology. The risk isn’t in overhyping it; it’s rather in missing the magnitude of the coming wave.

The bio-revolution is coevolving with advances in AI, and indeed many of the phenomena discussed in this chapter will rely on AI for their realization. Think, then, of two waves crashing together, not a wave but a superwave.

if you wanted to write the crudest possible equation for our world it would be something like this: (Life + Intelligence) x Energy = Modern Civilization

These developments represent a colossal transfer of power away from traditional states and militaries toward anyone with the capacity, and motivation, to deploy these devices.

If you want to contain technology, you might hope it develops at a manageable pace, giving society time and space to understand and adapt to it.

with the rate of change in the coming wave, that looks unlikely.

Over time, technology tends toward generality.

A paradox of the coming wave is that its technologies are largely beyond our ability to comprehend at a granular level yet still within our ability to create and use.

Openness is science and technology’s cardinal ideology. What is known must be shared; what is discovered must be published. Science and technology live and breathe on free debate and the open sharing of information, to the extent that openness has itself grown into a powerful (and amazingly beneficial) incentive.

to a degree that is perhaps underappreciated, publication and sharing aren’t just about the process of falsification in science. They’re also for prestige, for peers, for the pursuit of a mission, for the sake of a job, for likes. All of it both drives and accelerates the process of technological development.

Science and technology research is inherently unpredictable, exceptionally open, and growing fast. Governing or controlling it is therefore immensely difficult.

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.

At root, this is a story of systematically applying science and technology in the name of profit.

The energy scholar Vaclav Smil calls ammonia, cement, plastics, and steel the four pillars of modern civilization: the material base underwriting modern society, each hugely carbon-intensive to produce, with no obvious successors.

Technology is not just a tool to support the bargain we’ve made in the nation-state; it is also a genuine threat to it.

AI, synthetic biology, and the rest are being introduced to dysfunctional societies already rocked back and forth on technological waves of immense power. This is not a world ready for the coming wave. This is a world buckling under the existing strain.

On one trajectory, some liberal democratic states will continue to be eroded from within, becoming a kind of zombie government.

On another, unthinking adoption of some aspects of the coming wave opens pathways to domineering state control, creating supercharged Leviathans whose power goes beyond even history’s most extreme totalitarian governments.

“Infocalypse,” the point at which society can no longer manage a torrent of sketchy material, where the information ecosystem grounding knowledge, trust, and social cohesion, the glue holding society together, falls apart.

ubiquitous, perfect synthetic media means “distorting democratic discourse; manipulating elections; eroding trust in institutions; weakening journalism; exacerbating social divisions; undermining public safety; and inflicting hard-to-repair damage on the reputation of prominent individuals, including elected officials and candidates for office.”

tools will only temporarily augment human intelligence. They will make us smarter and more efficient for a time, and will unlock enormous amounts of economic growth, but they are fundamentally labor replacing.

new technologies help create new centers of power with new social infrastructures both enabling them and supporting them.

Exponential technologies amplify everyone and everything. And that creates seemingly contradictory trends. Power is both concentrated and dispersed. Incumbents are both strengthened and weakened. Nation-states are both more fragile and at greater risk of slipping into abuses of unchecked power.

The question now becomes, what else could be made into a service, collapsed into the existing suite of another mega-business?

In a few decades, I predict most physical products will look like services.

Foods, drugs, home products, indeed almost anything might be 3-D printed, or bio-produced, or made using atomically precise manufacturing close to or at the site of use, governed by sophisticated AIs fluidly working with customers using natural language. You simply buy the execution code and let an AI or robot do the task or create the product.

if AI, biotech, quantum, robotics, and the rest of it are centralized in the hands of a repressive state, the resulting entity would be palpably different from any yet seen.

Imagine a future where small groups—whether in failing states like Lebanon or in off-grid nomad camps in New Mexico—provide AI-empowered services like credit unions, schools, and health care, services at the heart of the community often reliant on scale or the state. Where the chance to set the terms of society at a micro level becomes irresistible: come to our boutique school and avoid critical race theory forever, or boycott the evil financial system and use our DeFi product. Where any grouping of any kind—ideological, religious, cultural, racial—can self-organize a viable society.

The disenfranchised will simply re-enfranchise themselves—on their own terms.

Something more like the pre-nation-state world emerges in this scenario, neo-medieval, smaller, more local, and constitutionally diverse, a complex, unstable patchwork of polities.

within the next decade, we must anticipate radical flux, new concentrations and dispersals of information, wealth, and above all power.

Technology evolves week by week. Drafting and passing legislation takes years.

The central problem for humanity in the twenty-first century is how we can nurture sufficient legitimate political power and wisdom, adequate technical mastery, and robust norms to constrain technologies to ensure they continue to do far more good than harm. How, in other words, we can contain the seemingly uncontainable.

Technology is not a niche; it is a hyper-object dominating human existence.

Our prehistoric brains are generally hopeless at dealing with amorphous threats like these.

Skills, too, are a choke point: the number of people working on all the frontier technologies discussed in this book is probably no more than 150,000.