The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

When Thomas Malthus argued in 1798 that a fast-growing population would quickly exhaust the carrying capacity of agriculture and lead to a collapse, he wasn’t wrong; static yields would and often did follow this rule. What he hadn’t accounted for was the scale of human ingenuity. Assuming favorable weather conditions and using the latest techniques, in the thirteenth century each hectare of wheat in England yielded around half a ton. There it remained for centuries. Slowly the arrival of new techniques and technologies changed all that: from crop rotation to selective breeding, mechanized plows, synthetic fertilizer, pesticides, genetic modifications, and now even AI-optimized planting and weeding. In the twenty-first century, yields are now at about eight tons per hectare. The very same small, innocuous patch of ground, the same geography and soil that was reaped in the thirteenth century, can now deliver sixteen times the crop. Corn yields per hectare in the United States have tripled in the last fifty years. The labor required to produce a kilo of grain has fallen 98 percent since the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1945, around 50 percent of the world’s population was seriously undernourished. Today, despite a population well over three times bigger, that’s down to 10 percent. This still represents upwards of 600 million people, an unconscionable number. But at 1945 rates it would be 4 billion, although in truth those people could not have been kept alive. It’s...