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.

The coming wave is defined by two core technologies: artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology.

What if we could distill the essence of what makes us humans so productive and capable into software, into an algorithm? Finding the answer might unlock unimaginably powerful tools to help tackle our most intractable problems.

AI has been climbing the ladder of cognitive abilities for decades, and it now looks set to reach human-level performance across a very wide range of tasks within the next three years.

This is the core dilemma: that, sooner or later, a powerful generation of technology leads humanity toward either catastrophic or dystopian outcomes. I believe this is the great meta-problem of the twenty-first century.

In the words of John McCarthy, who coined the term “artificial intelligence”: “As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore.”