The Coming Wave: the ground-breaking book from the ultimate AI insider – Suleyman Mustafa (2023)

This stark and urgent warning about the unprecedented risks that a wave of rapidly developing technologies poses to global order comes from Mustafa Suleyman, cofounder of the pioneering AI company DeepMind. We are about to cross a critical threshold in the history of our species, and soon we will live surrounded by AIs capable of carrying out complex tasks, operating businesses, producing unlimited digital content, running essential government services and maintaining infrastructure. The coming world will also bring DNA printers, quantum computers, engineered pathogens, autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy, representing a dramatic leap in human capability. Suleyman argues that the coming decade will be defined by this wave of powerful, rapidly proliferating technologies. Driven by overwhelming strategic and commercial incentives, they may help address global challenges and create vast wealth, but they may also cause upheaval on an unimaginable scale. He examines how these forces threaten the grand bargain of the nation state and confront us with an existential dilemma: unchecked openness may bring unprecedented harm, while excessive control may lead to pervasive surveillance. The essential challenge of our age, he argues, is the “containment problem”: maintaining control over powerful technologies while there is still time to act.