The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

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.