The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

technology deeply needs critics—at every level but especially on the front lines, building and making, grappling with the tangible everyday reality of creation.

Just as you cannot simply launch a rocket into space without FAA approval, so tomorrow you shouldn’t simply be able to release a state-of-the-art AI. Different licensing regimes could apply according to model size or capability: the bigger and more capable the model, the more stringent the licensing requirements. The more general a model, the more likely it is to pose a serious threat.

we should consider a contemporary version for technologists: ask not just what doing no harm means in an age of globe-spanning algorithms and edited genomes but how that can be enacted daily in what are often morally ambiguous circumstances.

Precautionary principles like this are a good first step. Pause before building, pause before publishing, review everything, sit down and hammer out the second-, third-, nth-order impacts.

technology is just a means to an end, not the end itself.

economist Daron Acemoglu and the political scientist James Robinson share the view that liberal democracies are much less secure than they might look. They see the state as an inherently unstable “shackled Leviathan”: vast and powerful, but held in check by persistent civil societies and norms.

“narrow corridor” that kept them in this precarious balance. On either side of this corridor lie traps. On the one hand, the power of the state breaks that of wider society and completely dominates it, creating despotic Leviathans like China. On the other, the state falls apart, producing absent Leviathans, zombies, where the state has no real control over society, as in places like Somalia or Lebanon. Both have terrible consequences for their populations.

Safe, contained technology is, like liberal democracy, not a final end state; rather, it is an ongoing process, a delicate equilibrium that must be actively maintained, constantly fought for and protected.

The coming wave is going to change the world. Ultimately, human beings may no longer be the primary planetary drivers, as we have become accustomed to being. We are going to live in an epoch when the majority of our daily interactions are not with other people but with AIs.

Indeed, you may spend more time looking at the collective screens in your life than at any given human, spouses and children included.