The Coming Wave Quotes

“The coming wave is defined by two core technologies: artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

“The irony of general-purpose technologies is that, before long, they become invisible and we take them for granted. Language, agriculture, writing—each was a general-purpose technology at the center of an early wave. These three waves formed the foundation of civilization as we know it. Now we take them for granted.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

“Within the next couple of years, whatever your job, you will be able to consult an on-demand expert, ask it about your latest ad campaign or product design, quiz it on the specifics of a legal dilemma, isolate the most effective elements of a pitch, solve a thorny logistical question, get a second opinion on a diagnosis, keep probing and testing, getting ever more detailed answers grounded in the very cutting edge of knowledge, delivered with exceptional nuance. All of the world’s knowledge, best practices, precedent, and computational power will be available, tailored to you, to your specific needs and circumstances, instantaneously and effortlessly. It is a leap in cognitive potential at least as great as the introduction of the internet. And that is before you even get into the implications of something like ACI and the Modern Turing Test.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

“In the words of John McCarthy, who coined the term “artificial intelligence”: “As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore.” AI is—as those of us building it like to joke—“what computers can’t do.” Once they can, it’s just software.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

“Consider that children who grew up traveling by horse and cart and burning wood for heat in the late nineteenth century spent their final days traveling by airplane and living in houses warmed by the splitting of the atom.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

“Invention is a cumulative, compounding process. It feeds on itself.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

“Social media created a few giants and a million tribes.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

“in less than ten years the amount of compute used to train the best AI models has increased by nine orders of magnitude—”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

“the introduction of the printing press in the fifteenth century caused a 340-fold decrease in the price of a book, further driving adoption and yet more demand.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

“Technology is a set of evolving ideas. New technologies evolve by colliding and combining with other technologies.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave

“Early in the COVID-19 pandemic a blizzard of disinformation had deadly consequences. A Carnegie Mellon study analyzed more than 200 million tweets discussing COVID-19 at the height of the first lockdown. Eighty-two percent of influential users advocating for “reopening America” were bots. This was a targeted “propaganda machine,” most likely Russian, designed to intensify the worst public health crisis in a century.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

“What on paper looks flawless can behave differently out in the wild, especially when copied and further adapted downstream. What people actually do with your invention, however well intentioned, can never be guaranteed. Thomas Edison invented the phonograph so people could record their thoughts for posterity and to help the blind. He was horrified when most people just wanted to play music. Alfred Nobel intended his explosives to be used only in mining and railway construction. Gutenberg just wanted to make money printing Bibles. Yet his press catalyzed the Scientific Revolution and the Reformation, and so became the greatest threat to the Catholic Church since its establishment.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

“The only coherent approach to technology is to see both sides at the same time.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

“Think about the impact of the new wave of AI systems. Large language models enable you to have a useful conversation with an AI about any topic in fluent, natural language. Within the next couple of years, whatever your job, you will be able to consult an on-demand expert, ask it about your latest ad campaign or product design, quiz it on the specifics of a legal dilemma, isolate the most effective elements of a pitch, solve a thorny logistical question, get a second opinion on a diagnosis, keep probing and testing, getting ever more detailed answers grounded in the very cutting edge of knowledge, delivered with exceptional nuance. All of the world’s knowledge, best practices, precedent, and computational power will be available, tailored to you, to your specific needs and circumstances, instantaneously and effortlessly. It is a leap in cognitive potential at least as great as the introduction of the internet.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

“the combined revenues of companies in Fortune’s Global 500 are already at 44 percent of world GDP.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

“The idea that technology alone can solve social and political problems is a dangerous delusion. But the idea that they can be solved without technology is also wrongheaded.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

“pessimism-aversion trap: the misguided analysis that arises when you are overwhelmed by a fear of confronting potentially dark realities, and the resulting tendency to look the other way.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

“Technology is central to how the future will unfold—that’s undoubtedly true—but technology is not the point of the future, or what’s really at stake. We are.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

“Adapted technologies are contained technologies. The most urgent task is not to ride or vainly stop the wave but to sculpt it.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

“In AI, the lion’s share of the most advanced GPUs essential to the latest models are designed by one company, the American firm NVIDIA. Most of its chips are manufactured by one company, TSMC, in Taiwan, the most advanced in just a single building, the world’s most sophisticated and expensive factory. TSMC’s machinery to make these chips comes from a single supplier, the Dutch firm ASML, by far Europe’s most valuable and important tech company.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

“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.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

“Democracies are built on trust. People need to trust that government officials, militaries, and other elites will not abuse their dominant positions. Everyone relies on the trust that taxes will be paid, rules honored, the interests of the whole put ahead of individuals.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

“In 1945, around 50 percent of the world’s population was seriously undernourished. Today, despite a population well over three times bigger, that’s down to 10 percent. This”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

“el reto de la tecnología consistía en la creación y la liberación de su poder. Ahora es al revés: el reto radica en la contención del poder desatado y en garantizar que siga prestándonos servicio tanto a nosotros como al planeta.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, La ola que viene: Tecnología, poder y el gran dilema del siglo XXI

“Now imagine if, instead of accidentally leaving open a loophole, the hackers behind WannaCry had designed the program to systematically learn about its own vulnerabilities and repeatedly patch them. Imagine if, as it attacked, the program evolved to exploit further weaknesses. Imagine that it then started moving through every hospital, every office, every home, constantly mutating, learning. It could hit life-support systems, military infrastructure, transport signaling, the energy grid, financial databases. As it spread, imagine the program learning to detect and stop further attempts to shut it down. A weapon like this is on the”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

“AI has been climbing the ladder of cognitive abilities for decades, and it now looks set to reach human-level performance across a very wide range of tasks within the next three years.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

“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. It shows how AIs could help us plan and collaborate, but also hints at how they could develop psychological tricks to gain trust and influence, reading and manipulating our emotions and behaviors with a frightening level of depth, a skill useful in, say, winning at Diplomacy or electioneering and building a political movement. The space for possible attacks against key state functions grows even as the same premise that makes AI so powerful and exciting—its ability to learn”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

“Over time, then, the implications of these technologies will push humanity to navigate a path between the poles of catastrophe and dystopia. This is the essential dilemma of our age.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

“From the written word to sailing vessels, technology increases interconnectedness, helping to boost its own flow and spread. Each wave hence lays the groundwork for successive waves.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

“Throughout history, population size and innovation levels are linked. New tools and techniques give rise to larger populations. Bigger and more connected populations are more potent crucibles for tinkering, experimentation, and serendipitous discovery, a more powerful “collective brain” for making new things. Large populations give rise to greater levels of specialization, new classes of people like artisans and scholars whose livelihood isn’t tied to the land. More people whose lives do not revolve around subsistence means more possible inventors, and more possible reasons for having inventions, and those inventions mean more people in turn.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future