The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

The new wave of autonomy heralds a world where constant intervention and oversight are increasingly unnecessary. What’s more, with every interaction we are teaching machines to be successfully autonomous. In this paradigm, there is no need for a human to laboriously define the manner in which a task should take place. Instead, we just specify a high-level goal and rely on a machine to figure out the optimal way of getting there. Keeping humans “in the loop,” as the saying goes, is desirable, but optional. Nobody told AlphaGo that move 37 was a good idea. It discovered this insight largely on its own. It was precisely this feature that struck me so forcibly watching DQN play Breakout. Given some clearly specified objective, systems now exist that can find their own strategies to be effective. AlphaGo and DQN were not in themselves autonomous. But they hint at what a self-improving system might look like. Nobody hand codes GPT-4 to write like Jane Austen, or produce an original haiku, or generate marketing copy for a website selling bicycles. These features are emergent effects of a wider architecture whose outputs are never decided in advance by its designers. This is the first step on the ladder toward greater and greater autonomy. Internal research on GPT-4 concluded that it was “probably” not capable of acting autonomously or self-replicating, but within days of launch users had found ways of getting the system to ask for its own documentation and to write scripts for co...