Beyond seemingly intelligent conversations with ChatGPT, Artificial Intelligence technologies are poised to create a generational shift in not just digital technology but everything from the future of work and the fate of democracies. Containing this transformation — quickly — is at the heart of Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave: AI, Power and the Twenty-First Century’s Greatest Dilemma, written with Michael Bhaskar.
The coming ‘wave’ of AI and biotech advances, Suleyman asserts, will wash over everything: replacing workers, overwhelming national governments, and transforming business. And as the internet democratised access to information, this wave will democratise power: power to sow chaos in the form of deepfakes, engineer viral pathogens (and thus pandemics) from accessibly priced equipment, and wage cyber warfare with ease by crafting computer viruses that adapt on the go to prevent detection and elimination.
Suleyman’s most pressing emphasis is on the speed with which these changes will happen. Just as computer chips’ capacities have increased millionfold in a matter of decades, he argues that AI capabilities that should worry us are already here, and the time to regulate the industry’s excesses is limited. Suleyman founded DeepMind, the startup now folded into the tech giant Google, and subsequently founded his own startup.
Rapid changes
The Coming Wave is no doubt informed by the inside experience of AI royalty. The book is nominally about advances in biotech, or synthetic biology, but focuses for the most part on the rapidly growing capabilities — and falling costs — of the kinds of AI that dominate the headlines.
A startling takeaway from the book’s argument is that it does not at all rely on AI technologies becoming general-purpose or sentient: all that needs to happen, in Suleyman’s telling, is for these technologies to become better at what they are doing, and more accessible. And that, he points out, is already happening rapidly.
The solution, then, is containment. But Suleyman’s policy prescriptions are a tall order. He acknowledges the difficulties in getting containment done in a short period of time, and some of the specific 10-step program he has outlined illustrate the challenges: global governments across ideological and geopolitical divides collaborating on minimum standards; critics being involved in crafting AI programs; large corporations paying substantial taxes on their wealth as more and more human intellectual capital is replaced by AIs; and public-driven movements that speed up these processes.
Some of the policy prescriptions already have some groundwork going on for them — Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar pointed to international forums like the Global Partnership on AI and the Global AI Summit (held in the U.K. recently), and referred to The Coming Wave, saying that issues around AI need to be deliberated urgently, and not “remain at this level of abstraction for too long”.
Even if Suleyman turns out to be wrong about some of his predictions, The Coming Wave makes for a captivating — and at 300 pages, a quick biopsy on AI’s rapid evolution, and its current state.
Several prescriptions
While relying on governments to move rapidly on an issue that hasn’t entirely captured the public’s imagination may seem a bit too optimistic, some of Suleyman’s other prescriptions appear promising: squeezing ‘chokepoints’ in the supply of technology and materials that make advanced AI technology possible, and buying as much time as possible to arrive at an outcome where countries are in a position to control their place in the new world that AI appears poised to usher in.
The book steers clear of the techno-optimism that has guided much of Big Tech in the past decades, but remains wedded to the idea that human enterprise is inevitable; breakthroughs that are technically possible will be achieved, and humanity will be forced to adapt.
The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma; Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskar, The Bodley Head/PRH, ₹799.
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