The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman

THE COMING WAVE by Mustafa Suleyman, subtitled “Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma,” is about the potential impact of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and biotechnology. Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, illustrates the point beautifully in the prologue which notes, “we are faced with a choice – a choice between a future of unparalleled possibility and a future of unimaginable peril.” He argues for containment, admitting that it is extremely difficult, but necessary and suggests biomedical ethics and regulations as a possible model. He also encourages readers to look at “choke points” (e.g., chip production) as another means of control or restraint. Think about changes we have seen in the last few years: Suleyman says, “Today, AI systems can almost perfectly recognize faces and objects. We take speech-to-text transcription and instant language translation for granted. … 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.” That is a very specific prediction from an experienced and well-regarded expert. THE COMING WAVE is a disturbing read, but one which merits much discussion and has received praise from Daniel Kahneman (“essential reading”), Bill Gates (“an excellent guide”), and Eric Schmidt (“utterly unmissable”). More information is available through interviews on Axios and on Have a Nice Future from Wired magazine.