The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman
30 popular highlights from this book
Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma:
“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.”
“The coming wave is defined by two core technologies: artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“in less than ten years the amount of compute used to train the best AI models has increased by nine orders of magnitude—”
“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.”
“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.”
“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”
“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.”
“Invention is a cumulative, compounding process. It feeds on itself.”
“Tiny hardware malfunctions can produce outsized risks. In 1980 a single faulty computer chip costing forty-six cents almost triggered a major nuclear incident over the Pacific. And in perhaps the most well-known case, nuclear catastrophe was only avoided during the Cuban missile crisis when one man, the acting Russian commodore, Vasili Arkhipov, refused to give an order to fire nuclear torpedoes. The two other officers on the submarine, convinced they were under attack, had brought the world within a split second of full-scale nuclear war.”
“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.”
“Uber was impossible without the smartphone, which itself was enabled by GPS, which was enabled by satellites, which were enabled by rockets, which were enabled by combustion techniques, which were enabled by language and fire.”
“In 1900, 2 percent of fossil fuel production was devoted to producing electricity, by 1950 it was above 10 percent, and in 2000 it reached more than 30 percent. In 1900 global electricity generation stood at 8 terawatt-hours; fifty years later it was at 600, powering a transformed economy. The Nobel Prize–winning economist William Nordhaus calculated that the same amount of labor that once produced fifty-four minutes of quality light in the eighteenth century now produces more than fifty years of light.”
“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”
“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.”
“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.”
“The only coherent approach to technology is to see both sides at the same time.”
“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.”
“Unlike with rockets, satellites, and the internet, the frontier of this wave is found in corporations, not in government organizations or academic labs.”
“the combined revenues of companies in Fortune’s Global 500 are already at 44 percent of world GDP.”
“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.”
“A school of naive techno-solutionism sees technology as the answer to all of the world’s problems. Alone, it’s not. How it is created, used, owned, and managed all make a difference.”
“PwC forecasts AI will add $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030. McKinsey forecasts a $4 trillion boost from biotech over the same period.”
“A single pathogenic experiment could spark a pandemic, a tiny molecular event with global ramifications. One viable quantum computer could render the world’s entire encryption infrastructure redundant.”
“Do we want to edit our genomes so that some of us can have children with immunity to certain diseases, or with more intelligence, or with the potential to live longer? Are we committed to holding on to our place at the top of the evolutionary pyramid, or will we allow the emergence of AI systems that are smarter and more capable than we can ever be?”
“The coming wave of technologies threatens to fail faster and on a wider scale than anything witnessed before. This situation needs worldwide, popular attention. It needs answers, answers that no one yet has. Containment is not, on the face of it, possible. And yet for all our sakes, containment must be possible.”
“the physical instantiations of AI, a step change in what it is possible to do.”
