The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

Pause for a moment and imagine a world where robots with the dexterity of human beings that can be “programmed” in plain English are available at the price of a microwave.

Cheap, omnipresent robots like those sketched above are, alongside a host of other transformative technologies we saw in part 2, utterly inevitable over a twenty-year horizon, and possibly much sooner.

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.” It’s the mechanical or electrical energy that underwrites civilization. The bedrock and central principle of the state. Power in one form or another shapes everything. And it, too, is about to be transformed.

This will be the greatest, most rapid accelerant of wealth and prosperity in human history. It will also be one of the most chaotic. If everyone has access to more capability, that clearly also includes those who wish to cause harm.

Democratizing access necessarily means democratizing risk.

A 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.

Individual citizens won’t have time or the tools to verify a fraction of the content coming their way. Fakes will easily pass sophisticated checks, let alone a two-second smell test.

Much of the coming chaos will not be accidental. It will come as existing disinformation campaigns are turbocharged, expanded, and devolved out to a wide group of motivated actors.

Put simply, gain-of-function experiments deliberately engineer pathogens to be more lethal or infectious, or both.

It’s about what goes wrong when powerful tools proliferate, what mistakes get made, what “revenge effects” unfurl, what random, unforeseen mess results from technology’s collision with reality. Off the drawing board, away from the theory, that central problem of uncontained technology holds even with the best of intentions.

Gain-of-function research and lab leaks are just two particularly sharp examples of how the coming wave will introduce a plethora of revenge effects and inadvertent failure modes.

what if new job-displacing systems scale the ladder of human cognitive ability itself, leaving nowhere new for labor to turn?

In the face of an abundance of ultra-low-cost equivalents, the days of this kind of “cognitive manual labor” are numbered.

The Private Sector Job Quality Index, a measure of how many jobs provide above-average income, has plunged since 1990; it suggests that well-paying jobs as a proportion of the total have already started to fall.

Whichever side of the jobs debate you fall on, it’s hard to deny that the ramifications will be hugely destabilizing for hundreds of millions who will, at the very least, need to re-skill and transition to new types of work.

new technologies help create new centers of power with new social infrastructures both enabling them and supporting them.

Exponential technologies amplify everyone and everything. And that creates seemingly contradictory trends. Power is both concentrated and dispersed.

In the coming decades, historical patterns will play out once again, new centers will form, new infrastructures develop, new forms of governance and social organization emerge.

Technologies can reinforce social structures, hierarchies, and regimes of control as well as upend them.

Technology has already created modern empires, of a sort. The coming wave rapidly accelerates this trend, putting immense power and riches into the hands of those who create and control it.

Those companies with the cash, expertise, and distribution to take advantage of the coming wave, to greatly augment their intelligence and simultaneously extend their reach, will see colossal gains.

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.

Little wonder there is talk of neo- or techno-feudalism—a direct challenge to the social order, this time built on something beyond even stirrups.

However, another inevitable reaction of nation-states will be to use the tools of the coming wave to tighten their grip on power, taking full advantage to entrench their dominance.

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: residential buildings, hotels, even karaoke lounges.

The coming wave, however, could make a range of small, state-like entities a lot more plausible. Contrary to centralization, it might actually spur a kind of “Hezbollahization,” a splintered, tribalized world where everyone has access to the latest technologies, where everyone can support themselves on their own terms, where it is far more possible for anyone to maintain living standards without the great superstructures of nation-state organization.

When anyone has access to the bleeding edge, it’s not just nation-states that can mount formidable physical and virtual defenses.

Exponential capabilities are given to anyone who wants them.

any grouping of any kind—ideological, religious, cultural, racial—can self-organize a viable society.

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.

This is a world where billionaires and latter-day prophets can build and run microstates; where non-state actors from corporations to communes to algorithms begin to overshadow the state from above but also from below.

Understanding the future means handling multiple conflicting trajectories at once. The coming wave launches immense centralizing and decentralizing riptides at the same time. Both will be in play at once.

within the next decade, we must anticipate radical flux, new concentrations and dispersals of information, wealth, and above all power.

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.

AI is both valuable and dangerous precisely because it’s an extension of our best and worst selves.

Cults, lunatics, suicidal states on their last legs, all have motive and now means. As a report on the implications of Aum Shinrikyo succinctly puts it, “We are playing Russian roulette.”

Steadily, many nations will convince themselves that the only way of truly ensuring this is to install the kind of blanket surveillance we saw in the last chapter: total control, backed by hard power.

Trading off liberty and security is an ancient dilemma.

Every wave of technology has introduced the high possibility of systemic disruptions to the social order.

Might it be time, however improbable, to have a moratorium on technology itself?

Civilizations that collapse are not the exception; they are the rule.

Modern civilization writes checks only continual technological development can cash.

Unpalatable as it is to some, it’s worth repeating: solving problems like climate change, or maintaining rising living and health-care standards, or improving education and opportunity is not going to happen without delivering new technologies as part of the package.

Demand for lithium, cobalt, and graphite is set to rise 500 percent by 2030.