The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

Democracies are built on trust. People need to trust that government officials, militaries, and other elites will not abuse their dominant positions.

Without trust, from the ballot box to the tax return, from the local council to the judiciary, societies are in trouble.

Distrust extends to nongovernment institutions, with growing levels of distrust in the media, the scientific establishment, and the idea of expertise in general.

Between 1980 and 2021 the share of national income earned by the top 1 percent has almost doubled and now sits just under 50 percent. Wealth is ever more concentrated in a tiny clique. Government policy, a shrinking working-age population, stalling educational levels, and decelerating long-term growth have all contributed to decisively more unequal societies.

These are especially worrying trends when you consider persistent relationships between social immobility, widening inequality, and political violence.

the lower a country’s social mobility, the more it experiences upheavals like riots, strikes, assassinations, revolutionary campaigns, and civil wars. When people feel stuck, that others are unfairly hogging the rewards, they get angry.

Those countries leaning into nationalism are, in part, experiencing a turning away from the bright twentieth-century promise that greater interconnectedness would accelerate the spread of wealth and democracy.

the entire postwar security and economic order is facing unprecedented strain.

Global challenges are reaching a critical threshold. Rampant inflation. Energy shortages. Stagnant incomes. A breakdown of trust. Waves of populism.

bolstering

Social media thrives on heightened emotions and, quite often, outrage.

technology is political.

promulgating

upended

managing the coming wave requires confident, agile, coherent states, accountable to the people, filled with expertise, balancing interests and incentives, capable of reacting fast and decisively with legislative action and, crucially, close international coordination.

deluge

On the morning of May 12, 2017, Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) ground to a halt.

The NHS had been hit by a ransomware attack. It was called WannaCry,

Marcus Hutchins

WannaCry was built using technology created by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). An elite NSA unit called the Office of Tailored Access Operations had developed a cyberattack exploit called EternalBlue.

The hackers who stole the technology, a group known as the Shadow Brokers, put EternalBlue up for sale. From there it soon ended up in the hands of North Korean hackers, probably the state-sponsored Bureau 121 cyber unit. They then launched it on the world.

fragility amplifiers, system shocks, emergencies 2.0, will greatly exacerbate existing challenges, shaking the state’s foundation, upsetting our already precarious social balance.

Power is “the ability or capacity to do something or act in a particular way;…to direct or influence the behavior of others or the course of events.”

Technology is ultimately political because technology is a form of power.

Instead of just consuming content, anyone can produce expert-quality video, image, and text content.

Wherever power is today, it will be amplified.

Today, no matter how wealthy you are, you simply cannot buy a more powerful smartphone than is available to billions of people.

In the next decade, access to ACIs will follow the same trend. Those same billions will soon have broadly equal access to the best lawyer, doctor, strategist, designer, coach, executive assistant, negotiator, and so on. Everyone will have a world-class team on their side and in their corner.

Democratizing access necessarily means democratizing risk.

In November 2020, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was the head scientist and linchpin

one of the most high-profile and well-guarded people in Iran was killed in under a minute. The explosion was merely a failed attempt to hide the evidence.

harbinger

imagine robots equipped with facial recognition, DNA sequencing, and automatic weapons. Future robots may not take the form of scampering dogs. Miniaturized even further, they will be the size of a bird or a bee, armed with a small firearm or a vial of anthrax. They might soon be accessible to anyone who wants them.

In May 2021, for example, an AI drone swarm in Gaza was used to find, identify, and attack Hamas militants.

In addition to easier access, AI-enhanced weapons will improve themselves in real time.

Researchers at Meta created a program called CICERO. It became an expert at playing the complex board game Diplomacy, a game in which planning long, complex strategies built around deception and backstabbing is integral.

With lethal autonomous weapons the costs, in both material and above all human terms, of going to war, of attacking, are lower than ever. At the same time, all this introduces greater levels of deniability and ambiguity, degrading the logic of deterrence.

When non-state and bad actors are empowered in this way, one of the core propositions of the state is undermined: the semblance of a security umbrella for citizens is deeply damaged. Provisions of safety and security are fundamental underpinnings of the nation-state system,

How does a state maintain the confidence of its citizens, uphold that grand bargain, if it fails to offer the basic promise of security?

If the state can’t protect you and your family, what’s the point of compliance and belonging?

Throughout history technology has produced a delicate dance of offensive and defensive advantage, the pendulum swinging between the two but a balance roughly holding:

Now powerful, asymmetric, omni-use technologies are certain to reach the hands of those who want to damage the state.

Maintaining a decisive, indefinite strategic advantage across such a broad spectrum of general-use technologies is simply not possible. Eventually, the balance might be restored, but not before a wave of immensely destabilizing force is unleashed.

the means to generate near-perfect deepfakes—whether text, images, video, or audio—became as easy as writing a query into Google.

world of deepfakes indistinguishable from conventional media is here. These fakes will be so good our rational minds will find it hard to accept they aren’t real.

Sermons from the radical preacher Anwar al-Awlaki inspired the Boston Marathon bombers, the attackers of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, and the shooter who killed forty-nine people at an Orlando nightclub. Yet al-Awlaki died in 2011,

disinformation as surgical strike.

In the 1980s, the Soviet Union funded disinformation campaigns suggesting that the AIDS virus was the result of a U.S. bioweapons program. Years later, some communities were still dealing with the mistrust and fallout.

Russian agents created no fewer than eighty thousand pieces of organic content that reached 126 million Americans on their platforms during the 2016 election.

astroturfing