The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

boggy

The railway’s opening was attended by dignitaries including the prime minister and Liverpool’s MP, William Huskisson. During the celebration the crowd stood on the tracks to welcome the new marvel as it approached. So unfamiliar was this striking machine that people failed to appreciate the speed of the...

At their peak, railway stocks accounted for more than two-thirds of total stock market value. Within a year the crash had started. The market eventually bottomed out in 1850, 66 percent lower than its peak. Easy profit, not for the first or last time, had made people greedy and foolish. Thousands lost everything. Nonetheless, a new era had arrived with the boom.

In the 1830s a journey between London and Edinburgh took days in an uncomfortable stagecoach. By the 1850s it took a single train under twelve hours. Connection to the rest of the country meant towns, cities, and regions boomed. Tourism, trade, and family life were transformed. Among many other impacts, it created the need for a standardized national time to make sense of the timetables. And it was all done thanks to a relentless thirst for profit.

Carlota Perez

“frenzy phase” as being part of every major technology rollout for at least the last two hundred years, from the original telephone cables to contemporary high-bandwidth internet. The boom never lasts, but the raw speculative drive produces lasting change, a new technological substrate.

Science has to be converted into useful and desirable products for it to truly spread far and wide. Put simply: most technology is made to earn money.

suave

In the last two hundred years, economic output is up more than three hundred times.

systematically applying science and technology in the name of profit.

drove huge leaps in output and living standards.

much of what we see around us is powered by human intelligence in direct pursuit of monetary gain.

Little is ultimately more valuable than intelligence. Intelligence is the wellspring and the director, architect, and facilitator of the world economy. The more we expand the range and nature of intelligences on offer, the more growth should be possible.

Thomas Malthus

hadn’t accounted for was the scale of human ingenuity.

in the thirteenth century each hectare of wheat in England yielded around half a ton. There it remained for centuries.

In the twenty-first century, yields are now at about eight tons per hectare.

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.

The energy scholar Vaclav Smil calls ammonia, cement, plastics, and steel the four pillars of modern civilization:

Silicone?

A school of naive techno-solutionism sees technology as the answer to all of the world’s problems. Alone, it’s not. How it is created, used, owned, and managed all make a difference.

Scientists and technologists are all too human. They crave status, success, and a legacy.

AI scientists and engineers are among the best-paid people in the world,

lodestars

J. Robert Oppenheimer was a highly principled man. But above all else he was a curiosity-driven problem solver. Consider these words, in their own way as chilling as his famous Bhagavad Gita quotation (on seeing the first nuclear test, he recalled some lines from Hindu scripture: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”):

antithetical

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.

a well-managed country is a key foundation of economic growth, security, and well-being.

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, i...

Given that nation-states are charged with managing and regulating the impact of technology in the best interests of their populations, how prepared are they for what’s to come?

profound consequences of these technologies for the nation-state and for the liberal democratic nation-state

Cracks are already forming. The political order that fostered rising wealth, better living standards, growing education, science, and technology, a world tending toward peace, is now under immense strain, destabilized in part by the very forces it helped engender.

I’ve always passionately believed in the power of the state to improve lives.

Working with public servants—people stretched thin and bone-tired, but forever in demand and doing heroic work for those who need it—was enough to show me what a disaster it would be if the state failed. However, my experience with local government, UN negotiations, and nonprofits also gave me invaluable firsthand knowledge of their limitations. They are often chronically mismanaged, bloated, and slow to act.

no one could agree on the science, or the reality of what was happening

Priorities were scattered.

no consensus on what would be effective, affordable, ...

As soon as proposals were voiced, someone spoke up to poke holes in them. Every suggestion was a problem.

morass

Our institutions for addressing massive global problems were not fit for purpose.

Unlike the United States, the U.K. has no written constitution protecting people’s fundamental rights.

the reality of London politics was very different. In practice everything devolved into excuses, blame shifting, media spinning. Even when there was clear legal responsibility, departments or councils wouldn’t respond, would fudge, dodge, and delay. Stasis in the face of real challenges was endemic.

Facebook was growing at unprecedented speed. Somehow, even as everything from local government to the UN seemed to operate at a glacial pace, this small start-up had grown to more than 100 million monthly users in just a few years.

It was very clear to me that some organizations were still capable of highly effective action at scale and they were operating in new spaces, like online platforms.

The idea that technology alone can solve social and political problems is a dangerous delusion. But the idea that they can be solved w...

Technology is not just a tool to support the bargain we’ve made in the nation-state; it is also a genuine threat to it.

For most people in developed countries, life is marked by an ease and abundance that would have seemed unbelievable in bygone eras. And yet, under the surface, there’s a nagging feeling that something isn’t quite right.

mired

long-term and growing pressures like declining public trust, rising inequality, and a warming climate.

many nations are beset by a slew of major challenges battering their effectiveness, making them weaker, more divided, and more prone to slow and faulty decision-making. The coming wave will land in a combustible, incompetent, overwrought environment.