The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

At the same time, a jobs recession will crater tax receipts, damaging

public services and calling into question welfare programs just as they are most needed.

Labor market disruptions are, like social media, fragility amplifiers.

They damage and undermine the nation-state.

How they will arrive together, simultaneous stressors intersecting, buttressing, and boosting one another. The full amplification of fragility is missed because it often appears as if these impacts were happening incrementally and in convenient silos. They are not. They stem from a single coherent and interrelated phenomenon manifesting itself in different ways. The reality is much more enmeshed, entwined, emergent, and

chaotic than any sequential presentation can convey. Fragility, amplified. The nation-state, weakened.

The falling costs of power, of doing, aren’t just about rogue bad actors or nimble start-ups, cloistered and limited applications. Instead, power is redistributed and reinforced across the entire sum

and span of society. The fully omni-use nature of the coming wave means it is found at every level, in every sector, every business, or subculture, or group, or bureaucracy, in every corner of our world. It produces trillions of dollars in new economic value while also destroying certain existing sources of wealth. Some individuals are greatly enabled; others stand to lose everything.

At first blush, stirrups may not seem all that revolutionary. They are, after all, fairly rudimentary triangles of metal attached to leather straps and a horse’s saddle. Look a bit closer, and another picture emerges. Before the stirrup, a cavalry’s battlefield impact was surprisingly limited. Well-organized defensive shield walls could generally beat back a horse-led charge. Because riders weren’t fixed to their horses, they were vulnerable. Soldiers armed with long spears and large shields, standing in tightly drilled lines, could dismount

even the heaviest cavalry. As a result, the primary function of your horse was in transporting you to the battlefield.

The stirrup revolutionized all that. It fixed the spear and rider to the charging animal, making them a single unit. The full force of the spear was now the ...

This tiny innovation tipped the balance of power in favor of offense. Soon after the stirrup was introduced

The story of stirrups and feudalism highlights an important truth: new technologies help create new centers of power with new social infrastructures both enabling them and supporting them.

But over the longer term, the implications of power’s plummeting costs are tectonic, techno-political earthquakes shaking the ground upon which the state is built.

Exponential technologies amplify everyone and everything. And that creates seemingly contradictory trends. Power is both concentrated and dispersed. Incumbents are both strengthened and weakened. Nation-states are both more fragile and at greater risk of slipping into abuses of unchecked power.

In the coming decades, historical patterns will play out once again, new centers will form, new infrastructures develop, new forms of governance and social organization emerge.

Television can broadcast the revolution, but it can also help erase it. Technologies can reinforce social structures, hierarchies, and regimes of control as well as upend them.

In the resulting turbulence, without a major shift in focus, many open democratic states face a steady decay of their institutional foundations, a withering of legitimacy and authority. This is a circular dynamic of technology spreading and power shifting, which undermines the foundations,

We are not quite heading for a neocolonial East India Company 2.0. But I do think we have to confront the sheer scale and influence that some boardrooms

have not just over the subtle nudges and choice architectures that shape culture and politics today but, more importantly, over where this could lead in decades to come. They are empires of a sort, and with the coming wave their scale, influence, and capability are set to radically expand.

the most powerful forces in the world are actually groups of individuals coordinating to achieve shared goals. Organizations too are a kind of intelligence. Companies, militaries, bureaucracies, even markets—these are artificial intelligences, aggregating and processing huge amounts of data, organizing themselves around specific goals, building mechanisms to get better and better at achieving

a vast span of services, from very different sectors, across huge parts of the planet, have been collapsed into a single corporation, Google: mapping and location, reviews and business listings, advertising, video streaming, office tools, calendars, email, photo storage,

Call it “Googlization”: a range of services provided for free or at low cost leading to single entities functionally enabling massive sections of the economy and human experience.

“superstar” effect, where leading players take ever more outsized shares of the pie. The world’s top fifty cities have the lion’s share of wealth and corporate power (45 percent of big company HQs; 21 percent of world GDP) despite having only 8 percent of the world’s population. The top 10 percent of global firms take 80 percent of the total profits. Expect the coming wave to

feed into this picture, producing ever-richer and more successful superstars—whether regions, business sectors, companies, or research groups.

big tech platforms either are mainly service businesses or have very large service businesses. Apple has the App Store, despite primarily selling devices, and Amazon, while operating as the world’s biggest retailer of physical goods, also provides e-commerce services to merchants and TV streaming to individuals, and hosts a good chunk of the internet on its cloud offering, Amazon Web Services.

Everywhere you look, technology accelerates this dematerialization, reducing complexity for the end consumer

by providing continuous consumption services rather than tradition...

The question now becomes, what else could be made into a service,

collapsed into the existing suite of another mega-business?

predict most physical products will look like services. Zero marginal cost production and distribution will make it possible. The migration to the cloud will become all-encompassing, and the trend will be spurred by the ascendancy of low-code and no-code software, the rise of bio-manufacturing, and the boom in 3-D printing.

When compared with superstar corporations, governments appear slow, bloated, and out of touch. It’s tempting to dismiss them as headed for the trash can of history. However, another inevitable reaction of nation-states will be to use the tools of the coming wave to tighten their grip on power, taking full advantage to entrench their dominance.

Software installed on your computer monitors productivity down to eye movements.

Almost every detail of life is logged, somewhere, by those with the sophistication to process and act on the data they collect.

The only step left is bringing these disparate databases together into a single, integrated system: a perfect twenty-first-century surveillance apparatus. The preeminent example is, of course, China. That’s hardly news, but what’s become clear is how advanced and ambitious the party’s program already is, let alone where it might end up in twenty or thirty years.

team of leading researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong went on to found SenseTime, one of the world’s largest facial recognition companies, built on a database of more than two billion faces. China is now the leader in facial recognition technologies, with giant companies like Megvii and CloudWalk vying with SenseTime for market share. Chinese police even have sunglasses

Around half the world’s billion CCTV cameras are in China.

A New York Times investigation found the police in Fujian Province alone estimated they held a database of 2.5 billion facial images. They were candid about its purpose: “controlling and managing people.”

Billions of devices and trillions of data points could be operated and monitored at once, in real time, used not just for surveillance but for prediction. Not only will it foresee social outcomes with precision and granularity, but it might also subtly or overtly steer or coerce them, from

In its Lebanese home territory, Hezbollah operates as a Shiite “state within a state.” There’s the sizable and notorious

Contrary to centralization, it might actually spur a kind of “Hezbollahization,” a splintered, tribalized world where

everyone has access to the latest technologies, where everyone can support themselves on their own terms, where it is far more possible for anyone to maintain living standards without the great superstructures of nation-state organization.

Consider that a combination of AI, cheap robotics, and advanced biotech coupled with clean energy sources might, for the first time in modernity, make living “off-grid” nearly equivalent to being plugged-in.

Fields like education and medicine currently rely on huge social and financial infrastructures. It’s quite possible to envisage these being

slimmed and localized: adaptive and intelligent education systems, for example, that take a student through an entire journey of learning, building a bespoke curriculum; AIs able to create all the materials like interactive games perfectly adapted to the child with automated grading systems; and so on.

Imagine a future where small groups—whether in failing states like Lebanon or in off-grid nomad camps in New Mexico—provide AI-empowered services like credit unions, schools, and health care, services at the heart of the community often reliant on scale or the state. Where the chance to set the terms of society at a micro level becomes irresistible: come to our boutique school and avoid critical race theory forever, or boycott the evil financial system and use our DeFi product. Where any grouping of any kind—ideological, religious, cultural, racial—can self-organize a viable society.

Ask yourself what happens to already fraying states if every sect, separatist movement, charitable foundation, and social network, every zealot and xenophobe, every populist conspiracy theory, political party, or even mafia, drug cartel, or terrorist group has their shot at state building. The

disenfranchised will simply re-enfranchise themselves—on their own terms.

Fragmentations could occur all over. What if companies themselves start down a journey of becoming states? Or cities decide to break away and gain more autonomy? What if people spend more time, money, and emotional energy in virtual worlds than the real? What happens to traditional hierarchies when tools of awesome power and expe...

fact that corporate titans spend most of their lives working on software, like Gmail or Excel, accessible to most people on the planet. Extend that, radically, with the democratization of empowerment, when everyone on the planet has ...