The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

From curiosity to crisis, fortune to fear, at its heart technology emerges to fill human needs. If people have powerful reasons to build and use it, it will get built and used.

Innovation is power.

In the fall of 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, humanity’s first encroachment on space.

This was a crisis for America, a technological Pearl Harbor. Policy reacted.

AlphaGo was quickly labeled China’s Sputnik moment for AI.

In China, Go wasn’t just a game. It represented a wider nexus of history, emotion, and strategic calculation.

It had endured a “century of humiliation,” as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) calls it. One that, the party believes, must never happen again.

In the words of Xi Jinping, speaking to the Twentieth CCP Congress in 2022, “to meet strategic needs” the country “must adhere to science and technology as the number-one productive force, talent as the number-one resource, [and] innovation as the number-one driving force.”

Today, China has an explicit national strategy to be the world leader in AI by 2030.

Universities like Tsinghua and Peking are competitive with Western institutions like Stanford, MIT, and Oxford.

China has a growing and impressive share of the most highly cited papers in AI. In terms of volume of AI research, Chinese institutions have published a whopping four and a half times more AI papers than U.S. counterparts since 2010, and comfortably more than the United States, the U.K., India, and Germany combined.

From cleantech to bioscience, China surges across the spectrum of fundamental technologies, investing at an epic scale, a burgeoning IP behemoth with “Chinese characteristics.”

China overtook the United States in number of PhDs produced in 2007, but since then investment in and expansion of programs have been significant, producing nearly double the num...

China’s R&D spending was just 12 percent of America’s. By 2020, it was 90 percent.

Xi Jinping has explicitly called for a “robot revolution”: China installs as many robots as the rest of the world combined.

In 2014, China filed the same number of quantum technology patents as the United States; by 2018 it had filed twice as many.

In 2016, China sent the world’s first “quantum satellite,” Micius, into space, part of a new, supposedly secure communications infrastructure. But Micius was only the start in China’s quest for an unhackable quantum internet. A year later the Chinese built a two-thousand-kilometer quantum link between Shanghai and Beijing for transmitting secure financial and military information. They’re investing more than $10 billion in creating the National Laboratory for Quantum Information Sciences in Hefei, the world’s biggest such facility.

Hefei scientists even claimed to have built a quantum computer 1014 times faster than Google’s breakthrough Sycamore.

we have started a worldwide quantum space race,”

the United States is losing its strategic lead.

China is already ahead of the United States in green energy, 5G, and AI and is on a trajectory to overtake it in quantum and biotech in the next few years.

The Pentagon’s first chief software officer resigned in protest in 2021 because he was so dismayed by the situation. “We have no competing fighting chance against China in 15 to 20 years. Right now, it’s already a done deal; it is already over in my opinion,” he told the Financial Times.

in 2013, Xi Jinping made a speech with lasting consequences for China—and for the rest of the world. “Advanced technology is the sharp weapon of the modern state,” he declared. “Our technology still generally lags that of developed countries and we...

predicated

A government could—in theory—rein in research incentives, clamp down on private business, curtail ego-driven initiatives. But it cannot wave away hard-edged competition from its geopolitical rivals. Choosing to limit technological development when perceived adversaries pile forward is, in the logic of an arms race, choosing to lose.

this new technological wave might completely rebalance global power.”

Countries have different strengths, from bioscience and AI (like the U.K.) to robotics (Germany, Japan, and South Korea) to cybersecurity (Israel).

India is an obvious fourth pillar to a new global order of giants, alongside the United States, China, and the EU.

Through its Atmanirbhar Bharat (Self-Reliant India) program, India’s government is working to ensure the world’s most populous country achieves ownership of core technology systems competitive with the United States and China.

Prepare for an Indian wave.

ICBM

LLMs,

conjuring

technology is an orchestra with no conductor.

“open technological innovation.” A global system of developing knowledge and technology is now so sprawling and open that it’s almost impossible to steer, govern, or, if need be, shut down. The ability to understand, create, build on, and adapt technology is highly distributed as a result.

opportunities to publish were a key factor when leading researchers decided where to work.

while not everything would be immediately made public, openness was considered a strategic advantage in attracting the best scientists.

arXiv, hosts more than two million papers. Dozens of more specialized preprint services, like bioRxiv in the life sciences, fuel the process.

Worldwide R&D spending is at well over $700 billion annually, hitting record highs. Amazon’s R&D budget alone is $78 billion, which would be the ninth biggest in the world if it were a country.

The future is remarkably open-source, published on arXiv, documented on GitHub.

the imperative of openness and the sheer mass of easily available research material mean this is an inherently deep-rooted and widely distributed set of incentives and foundations for future research that no one can fully govern.

Francisco Mojica,

brackish

Marvin Minsky.

Geoffrey Hinton

Yann ...

companies like NVIDIA invested so much into making better hardware, and that this then adapted so well to machine learning.

If you were looking to monitor and direct AI research in the past, you would likely have got it wrong, blocking or boosting work that eventually proved irrelevant, entirely missing the most important breakthroughs quietly brewing on the sidelines. Science and technology research is inherently unpredictable, exceptionally open, and growing fast. Governing or controlling it is therefore immensely difficult.

Today’s world is optimized for curiosity, sharing, and research at a pace never seen before.

In 1830, the first passenger railway opened between Liverpool and Manchester. Building this marvel of engineering had required an act of Parliament.