The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

Almost every foundational technology ever invented, from pickaxes to plows, pottery to photography, phones to planes, and everything in between, follows a single, seemingly immutable law: it gets cheaper and easier to use, and ultimately it proliferates, far and wide.

Engines weren’t just powering vehicles; they were driving history. Now, thanks to hydrogen and electric motors, the reign of the combustion engine is in its twilight. But the era of mass mobility it unleashed is not.

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 thousand years up to 1000 BCE saw seven general-purpose technologies emerge. The two hundred years between 1700 and 1900 marked the arrival of six, from steam engines to electricity. And in the last hundred years alone there were seven. Consider that children who grew up traveling by horse and cart and burning wood for heat in the late nineteenth century spent their final days traveling by airplane and living in houses warmed by the splitting of the atom. Waves—pulsating, emergent, successive, compounding, and cross-pollinating—define an era’s horizon of technological possibility. They are part of us. There is no such thing as a non-technological human being.

While AI and synthetic biology are the coming wave’s central general-purpose technologies, a bundle of technologies with unusually powerful ramifications surrounds them, encompassing quantum computing, robotics, nanotechnology, and the potential for abundant energy, among others. The coming wave will be more difficult to contain than any in history, more fundamental, more far-reaching. Understanding the wave and its contours is critical to assessing what awaits us in the twenty-first century.

Living systems self-assemble and self-heal; they’re energy-harnessing architectures that can replicate, survive, and flourish in a vast range of environments, all at a breathtaking level of sophistication, atomic precision, and information processing. Just as everything from the steam engine to the microprocessor was driven by an intense dialogue between physics and engineering, so the coming decades will be defined by a convergence of biology and engineering. Like AI, synthetic biology is on a sharp trajectory of falling costs and rising capabilities. At the center of this wave sits the realization that DNA is information, a biologically evolved encoding and storage system. Over recent decades we have come to understand enough about this information transmission system that we can now intervene to alter its encoding and direct its course. As a result, food, medicine, materials, manufacturing processes, and consumer goods will all be transformed and reimagined. So will humans themselves.

Welcome to the age of biomachines and biocomputers, where strands of DNA perform calculations and artificial cells are put to work. Where machines come alive. Welcome to the age of synthetic life.

Global challenges are reaching a critical threshold. Rampant inflation. Energy shortages. Stagnant incomes. A breakdown of trust. Waves of populism. None of the old visions from either left or right seem to offer convincing answers, yet better options seem in short supply. It would take a brave, or possibly delusional, person to argue that all is well, that there are not serious forces of populism, anger, and dysfunction raging across societies—all despite the highest living standards the world has ever known.

Technology has already eroded the stable, sovereign borders of nation-states, creating or supporting innately global flows of people, information, ideas, know-how, commodities, finished goods, capital, and wealth. It is, as we have seen, a significant component of geopolitical strategy. It touches on almost every aspect of people’s lives. Even before the coming wave hits, technology is a driver on the world stage, a major factor in the deteriorating health of nation-states around the world. Too fast in its development, too global, too protean and enticing for any simple model of containment, strategically critical, relied upon by billions, modern technology itself is a prime actor, a monumental force nation-states struggle to manage. 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.

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.

The reality is, we have often not controlled or contained technologies in the past. And if we want to do so now, it would take something dramatically new, an all-encompassing program of safety, ethics, regulation, and control that doesn’t even really have a name and doesn’t seem possible in the first place. The dilemma should be a pressing call to action. But over the years it’s become obvious that most people find this a lot to take in. I absolutely get it. It barely seems real on first encounter.

One challenge in even beginning to have this conversation is that technology, in the popular imagination, has become associated with a narrow band of often superfluous applications. “Technology” now mostly means social media platforms and wearable gadgets to measure our steps and heart rate. It’s easy to forget that technology includes the irrigation systems essential to feeding the planet and newborn life-support machines. Technology isn’t just a way to store your selfies; it represents access to the world’s accumulated culture and wisdom. Technology is not a niche; it is a hyper-object dominating human existence.

The fact that technology’s incentives are unstoppable does not mean that those building it bear no responsibility for their creations. On the contrary, they, we, I, do; the responsibility is crystal clear. No one is compelled to experiment with genetic modification or build large language models. Technology’s inevitable spread and development are not a get-out-of-jail-free card, a license to build what you want and see what happens. They are rather a hammering reminder of the need to get things right and the awful consequences of not doing

In a world of entrenched incentives and failing regulation, technology needs critics not just on the outside but at its beating heart.

Laws are only national, corporate mantras transitory, too often cosmetic. They must instead operate at a deeper level whereby the culture of technology is not that just-go-for-it “engineering mindset” but something more wary, more curious about what might happen. A healthy culture is one happy to leave fruit on the tree, say no, delay benefits for however long it takes to be safe, one where technologists remember that technology is just a means to an end, not the end itself.

Put all the elements here together and there is an outline of what will meet and match the coming wave. 1. Technical safety: Concrete technical measures to alleviate possible harms and maintain control. 2. Audits: A means of ensuring the transparency and accountability of technology. 3. Choke points: Levers to slow development and buy time for regulators and defensive technologies. 4. Makers: Ensuring responsible developers build appropriate controls into technology from the start. 5. Businesses: Aligning the incentives of the organizations behind technology with its containment. 6. Government: Supporting governments, allowing them to build technology, regulate technology, and implement mitigation measures. 7. Alliances: Creating a system of international cooperation to harmonize laws and programs. 8. Culture: A culture of sharing learning and failures to quickly disseminate means of addressing them. 9. Movements: All of this needs public input at every level, including to put pressure on each component and make it accountable.

Rather than a corridor, which implies a clear direction of travel, I imagine containment as a narrow and treacherous path, wreathed in fog, a plunging precipice on either side, catastrophe or dystopia just a small slip away; you can’t see far ahead, and as you tread, the path twists and turns, throws up unexpected obstacles.

It’s just not acceptable to create situations where the threat of catastrophic outcomes is ever present. Intelligence, life, raw power—these are not playthings, and should be treated with the respect, care, and control they deserve. Technologists and the general public alike will have to accept greater levels of oversight and regulation than have ever been the case before. Just as most of us wouldn’t want to live in societies without laws and police, most of us wouldn’t want to live in a world of unrestricted technology either.

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. This might sound intriguing or horrifying or absurd, but it is happening. I’m guessing you already spend a sizable portion of your waking hours in front of a screen. Indeed, you may spend more time looking at the collective screens in your life than at any given human, spouses and children included.

So it’s no great leap to see that we will spend more and more time talking to and engaging with these new machines. The type and nature of the artificial and biological intelligences we encounter and interact with will be radically different from now. They will be the ones doing our work for us, finding information, assembling presentations, writing that program, ordering our shopping and this year’s Christmas presents, advising on the best way to approach a problem, or maybe just chatting and playing.

They will be our personal intelligences, our companions and helpers, confidants and colleagues, chiefs of staff, assistants, and translators. They’ll organize our lives and listen to our burning desires and darkest fears. They’ll help run our businesses, treat our ailments, and fight our battles. Many different personality types, capabilities, and forms will crop up over the course of the average day. Our mental, conversational worlds will inextricably include this new...

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