The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

big part of what makes humans intelligent is that we look at the past to predict what might happen in the future. In this sense intelligence can be understood as the ability to generate a range of plausible scenarios about how the world

around you may unfold and then base sensible actions on those predictions.

When a large language model ingests a sentence, it constructs what can be thought of as an “attention map.” It first organizes commonly occurring groups of letters or punctuation into “tokens,” something like syllables, but really just chunks of frequently occurring letters making it easier for the model to process the information. It’s worth noting that humans

do this with words of course, but the model doesn’t use our vocabulary.

Soon after, OpenAI released GPT-2. (GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer.) It was, at the time, an enormous model. With 1.5 billion parameters (the number of parameters is a core measure of an AI system’s scale and

complexity), GPT-2 was trained on 8 million pages of web text. But it wasn’t until the summer of 2020, when OpenAI released GPT-3, that people started to truly grasp the magnitude of what was happening. With a whopping 175 billion parameters it was, at the time, the largest neural network ever constructed, more than a hundred times larger than its predecessor of just a year earlier.

in less than ten years the amount of

compute used to train the best AI models has increased by nine orders of magnitude—going from two petaFLOPs to ten billion petaFLOPs. To get a sense of one petaFLOP, imagine a billion people each holding a million calculators, doing a complex multiplication, and hitting “equals” at the same time. I find this extraordinary.

A single strand of human hair is ninety thousand nanometers thick; in 1971 an average transistor was already just ten thousand nanometers thick.

the most advanced chips are manufactured at three nanometers. Transistors are getting so small they are hitting physical limits; at this size electrons start to interfere with one another, messing up the process of computation.

Researchers meanwhile see more and more evidence for “the scaling hypothesis,” which predicts that the main driver of performance is, quite simply, to go big and keep going bigger.

The human brain is said to contain around 100 billion neurons with 100 trillion connections between them—it is often said to be the most complex known object in the universe.

LLMs aren’t just limited to language generation. What started with language has become the burgeoning field of generative AI. They can, simply as a side effect of their training, write music, invent games, play chess, and solve high-level mathematics problems. New tools create extraordinary images from brief word descriptions, images so real and convincing it almost defies belief. A fully open-source model called Stable Diffusion lets anyone produce bespoke and ultrarealistic images, for free, on a laptop. The same will soon be possible for audio clips and even video generation.

Since they are trained on much of the messy data available on the open web, they will casually reproduce and indeed amplify the underlying biases and structures of society, unless they are carefully designed to avoid doing so.

What seems like near-magic engineering one day is just another part of the furniture the next. It’s easy to become blasé and many have. In the words of John McCarthy, who coined the term “artificial intelligence”: “As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore.” AI is—as those of us building it like to joke—“what computers can’t do.” Once they can, it’s just software.

I see obstacles but also a track record of overcoming them.

Debating timelines to AGI is an exercise in reading crystal balls.

While obsessing about this one concept of superintelligence, people overlook the numerous nearer-term milestones being met with growing frequency.

most of global GDP is mediated in some way through screen-based interfaces amenable to an AI.

“artificial capable intelligence” (ACI), the point at which AI can achieve complex goals and tasks with minimal oversight.

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. It’s not just a tool or platform but a transformative meta-technology, the technology behind technology and everything else, itself a maker of tools and platforms, not just a system but a generator of systems of any and all kinds.

Changes that once unfolded blindly and on geological time now careen forward at an exponential pace. Alongside AI, this is the most important transformation of our lifetimes.

what The Economist calls the Carlson curve: the epic collapse in costs for sequencing DNA.

the cost of human genome sequencing fell from $1 billion in 2003 to well under $1,000 by 2022.

That is, the price dropped a millionfold in under twenty years, a thousand times ...

CRISPR gene editing (the acronym stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) is perhaps the best-known example of how we can directly intervene in genetics. A breakthrough in 2012 led by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier meant that for the first time genes could be edited almost like text or computer code, far more easily

than in the early days of genetic engineering.

CRISPR edits DNA sequences with the help of Cas9, an enzyme acting as a pair of finely tuned DNA scissors, cutting parts of a DNA strand for precise genetic editing and modification of anything ranging from a minute bacterium to large m...

to significant interventions in the genome. Impacts can be enormous: editing germ-line cells that form eggs and sperm, for example, means cha...

“Biology is the ultimate distributed manufacturing platform.”

Either way, serious physical self-modifications are going to happen.

Proteins are the building blocks of life. Your muscles and blood,

hormones and hair, indeed, 75 percent of your dry body weight: all proteins. They are everywhere, coming in every conceivable form, doing myriad vital tasks, from the cords holding your bones together, to the hooks on antibodies used to catch unwanted visitors. Understand proteins, and you’ve taken a giant leap forward in understanding—and mastering—biology.

A single AI program can write as much text as all of humanity. A single two-gigabyte image-generation model running on your laptop can compress all the pictures on the open web into a tool that generates images with extraordinary creativity and

precision. A single pathogenic experiment could spark a pandemic, a tiny molecular event with global ramifications. One viable quantum computer could render the world’s entire encryption infrastructure redundant.

You will be able to experiment in small, speedy, malleable domains, creating near-perfect simulations, and then translate them into concrete products. And then do it again, and again, learning, evolving, and improving at rates previously impossible in the expensive, static world of atoms.

In 2020 an AI system sifted through 100 million molecules to create the first machine-learning-derived antibiotic—called halicin (yes, after HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey)—which can potentially help fight tuberculosis.

In World War I, the process of synthesizing ammonia was seen as a way of feeding the world. But it also allowed for the creation of explosives, and helped pave the way for chemical weapons.

more appropriate term for the technologies of the coming wave is “omni-use,” a concept that grasps at the sheer levels of generality, the extreme versatility on display.

In the last two hundred years, economic output is up more than three hundred times. Per capita GDP has risen at least thirteenfold over the same period, and in the very richest parts of the world it has risen a hundredfold. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, almost everyone lived in extreme poverty. Now, globally, this sits at around 9 percent. Exponential improvements in the human condition, once impossible, are routine. At root, this is a story of systematically applying science and technology in the name of profit. This in turn drove huge leaps in output and living standards.

1, I argued that almost everything around you is a product of human intelligence. Here’s a slight correction: much of what we see around us is powered by human intelligence in direct pursuit of monetary gain.

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...

is.

It’s likely that the world is heading for two degrees Celsius of climate warming or more. Every second of every day biospheric boundaries—from freshwater use to biodiversity loss—are breached.

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. Without these materials modern life stops, and without fossil fuels the materials stop. The last thirty years saw 700 billion carbon-spewing tons of concrete sluiced out into our societies. How to replace that? Electric vehicles may not emit carbon when being driven, but they are resource hungry nonetheless: materials for just one EV require extracting around 225 tons of finite raw materials, demand for which is already spiking unsustainably.

At its heart, the nation-state, the central unit of the world’s political order today, offers its citizens a simple and highly persuasive bargain: that not only is centralization of power in the sovereign, territorial state possible but its benefits far outweigh the risks. History suggests that a monopoly over violence—that is, entrusting the state with wide latitude to enforce laws and develop its military powers—is the surest way to enable peace and prosperity. That, moreover, a well-managed country is a key foundation of economic growth, security, and well-being. Over the last five hundred years centralizing power in a singular authority has been essential to keeping the peace, unleashing the creative talents of billions of people to work hard, seek out education, invent, trade, and, in doing so, drive progress. Even as it grows more powerful and entangled with everyday life, the grand bargain of the nation-state, therefore, is that not only can centralized power enable peace and prosperity, but this power can be contained using a series of checks, balances, redistributions, and institutional forms. We often take for granted the delicate balance that has to be struck between extremes to maintain this. On the one hand the most dystopian excesses of centralized power must be avoided, and on the other we must accept regular intervention to maintain order.

Across data from more than one hundred countries, evidence suggests that the lower a country’s social mobility, the more it experiences upheavals like riots, strikes, assassinations, revolutionary campaigns, and civil wars. When people feel stuck, that others are unfairly hogging the rewards, they get angry.

Yet over the last decade a growing consensus suggests these technologies did something else as well: creating the conditions to feed and amplify this underlying political polarization and institutional fragility.

As the historian of technology Langdon Winner puts it, “Technology in its various manifestations is a significant part of the human world. Its structures, processes, and alterations enter into and become part of the structures, processes, and alterations of human consciousness, society, and politics.” In other words, technology is political. This fact is radically under-recognized not only by our leaders but even by those building the technology itself. At times this subtle but omnipresent politicization is nearly invisible. It shouldn’t be. Social media is just the most recent reminder that technology and political organization cannot be divorced. States and technologies are intimately tied together. This has important ramifications for what’s coming.

Modern technology and the state evolved symbiotically, in constant dialogue. Think of how technology facilitated the state’s core working parts, helping construct the edifice of national identity and administration. Writing was invented as an administrative and accounting tool to keep track of debts, inheritances, laws, taxes, contracts, and records of ownership. The clock produced set times, first in limited spaces like monasteries but then in mechanical form across late medieval mercantile cities and eventually across nations, creating common, and ever larger, social units. The printing press helped standardize national languages from a chaos of dialects and thus helped produce a national “imagined community,” the unitary people behind a nation-state. Supplanting more fluid oral traditions, the printed word fixed geography, knowledge, and history in place, promulgating set legal codes and ideologies. Radio and TV turbocharged this process, creating moments of national and even international commonality experienced simultaneously, like FDR’s fireside chats or the World Cup.