The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

the drift of mega-businesses is toward not participating in the market but being the market, not making the product but operating the service.

The question now becomes, what else could be made into a service, collapsed into the existing suite of another mega-business?

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.

An unbridgeable “intelligence gap” becomes plausible.

Such concentrations will enable vast, automated megacorporations to transfer value away from human capital—work—and toward raw capital.

or techno-feudalism—a direct challenge to the social order,

In sum, returns on intelligence will compound exponentially. A select few artificial intelligences that we used to call organizations will massively benefit from a new concentration of ability—probably the greatest such concentration yet seen.

But the consequences of greater concentrations of power don’t end with corporations.

In the twentieth century, totalitarian regimes wanted planned economies, obedient populations, and controlled information ecosystems. They wanted complete hegemony. Every aspect of life was managed.

multifarious,

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.

Chinese research into AI concentrates on areas of surveillance like object tracking, scene understanding, and voice or action recognition.

Centralized services like WeChat bundle everything from private messaging to shopping and banking in one easily traceable place.

“Sharp Eyes” facial recognition program

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 with built-in facial recognition technology capable of t...

Around half the world’s billion CCTV cameras are in China. Many have built-in facial recognition and are carefully positioned to gather maximal information, often in quasi-private spaces: r...

They were candid about its purpose: “controlling and managing people.”

The Ministry of Public Security is clear on the next priority: stitch these scattered databases and services into a coherent whole, from license plates to DNA, WeChat accounts to credit cards. This AI-enabled system could spot emerging threats to the CCP like dissenters and protests in real time, allowing for a seamless, crushing government response to anything it perceived as undesirable. Nowhere does this come together with more horrifying potential than in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region.

Authorities have built an iris-scan database that has the capacity to hold up to thirty million samples—more than the region’s population.

In smart warehouses every micromovement of every worker is tracked down to body temperature and loo breaks.

And just as in China, it is harvested, processed, operationalized, and sold.

panopticon”

Not only will it foresee social outcomes with precision and granularity, but it might also subtly or overtly steer or coerce them,

AI, biotech, quantum, robotics, and the rest of it are centralized in the hands of a repressive state, the resulting entity would be palpably different from any yet seen.

So what is Hezbollah? State or non-state? Extremist group or conventional territory-based power? It is instead a strange “hybrid” entity functioning both within and outside state institutions.

The coming wave, however, could make a range of small, state-like entities a lot more plausible.

DeFi

Fragmentations could occur all over.

unfettered

I expect inequality’s newest frontier to lie in biology.

blinkered

Governance works by consent;

polities.

internecine

Hyper-libertarian technologists like the PayPal founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel celebrate a vision of the state withering away, seeing this as liberation for an overmighty species of business leaders or “sovereign individuals,” as they call themselves.

colossal

inexorable

made. World War I killed around 1 percent of the global population; World War II, 3 percent. Or take the violence unleashed by Genghis Khan and the Mongol army across China and central Asia in the thirteenth century, which took the lives of up to 10 percent of the world’s population. With the advent of the atomic bomb, humanity now possesses enough lethal force to kill everyone on the planet several times over. Catastrophic events that once took place over years and decades could happen in minutes, at the push of a button.

Security—at the price of freedom. Or humanity might step away from the technological frontier altogether.

the omicron variant of COVID infected a quarter of Americans within a hundred days of first being identified.

instigate

should something like an AGI be created, humanity would no longer control its own destiny. For the first time, we would be toppled as the dominant species in the known universe. However clever the designers, however robust the safety mechanisms, accounting for all eventualities, guaranteeing safety, is impossible.

Over the next ten years, AI will be the greatest force amplifier in history. This is why it could enable a redistribution of power on a historic scale.

as a technology premised on learning, it can keep adapting, probing, producing novel strategies and ideas potentially far removed from anything before considered, even by other AIs.

what might a hack, developed by another AI, look like?

there’s no rewinding the clock. After a certain point, even curiosity and tinkering might be dangerous.

true safety requires maintaining those standards across every single instance: a mammoth expectation given how fast and widely these are already diffusing.

This is what happens when anyone is free to invent or use tools that affect us all.