The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

These waves of technology and innovation are at the center of this book. More important, they are at the center of human history. Understand these complex, chaotic, and accumulating waves, and the challenge of containment becomes clear. Understand their history and we can start to sketch their future. So, what is a wave? Put simply, a wave is a set of technologies coming together around the same time, powered by one or several new general-purpose technologies with profound societal implications. By “general-purpose technologies,” I mean those that enable seismic advances in what human beings can do. Society unfolds in concert with these leaps. We see it over and over; a new piece of technology, like the internal combustion engine, proliferates and transforms everything around it.