The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

"The Coming Wave is in that category of books I mentioned about technological progress and its consequences. It sets the advances in automation and in synthetic biology (e.g., gene splicing and DNA printing) and in quantum computing —these current waves of technology—in the context of what happened with past waves, including the Industrial Revolution , and the Luddites, who, bizarrely, crop up in three of this year’s longlisted books. (One of the longlisted books that didn’t make the shortlist – Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion against Big Tech , by Brian Merchant – is actually about the Luddites). In the context of the history of technological advances, it’s asking, ‘What can we expect?’ It poses the question: ‘Can we contain the bad consequences of fast-moving technological advance and if so how?’ The main author, Mustafa Suleyman, who worked with Michael Bhaskar on the book, is a co-founder of DeepMind, which is now owned by Google. Google and DeepMind are at the heart of some of the technologies mentioned here that are being developed. In the book, he points out that he started out thinking he was going to write a very optimistic book, as a techno optimist himself, and became more pessimistic. It ends with the anguished idea that we’re trying to contain the uncontainable. Suleyman thinks containment is the way to approach this. It can’t be regulated away: there isn’t enough that any individual regulator can do. But he lays out some ways in which he thinks that the potentially lethal consequences of some of these advances might be contained and channelled. He makes a lot out of the positive aspects as well, all the amazing things that you can do by combining AI, quantum computing, and synthetic biology, in terms of preserving and extending life, and making life better. But the overall impression I got from the book is that it’s a warning. We’ve got to work now to think about ways in which we can at least impose some guardrails that prevent this becoming a disaster for humanity. And that, as I say, is slightly echoed in some of the other books that made it to the longlist this year. There are various ways in which he thinks we could get this wrong. In AI, there’s the possibility that you end up with self-generating solutions that turn out not to be beneficial for wider humanity, a race to the bottom between AI-fuelled machines or the risk of weaponisation – it could be literal weaponisation – of these tools to go after somebody else or another state. Part of his warning is that accidents happen when humans are involved in doing this stuff. We do not necessarily get things right all the time, which brings us back to our books on failure. What he’s suggesting is that you need to have some context around this, involving regulators and governments and some of the private sector actors working together to prevent those things happening, or, at least, to have a game plan for if they do. I didn’t come out of this book whistling a happy tune, but it’s a contribution to the way in which that worst-case scenario can be mitigated or even avoided."

"Like Stainforth’s book, The Coming Wave is about the future. It reminds us that we’re very uncertain about how this will be. That’s the human condition, that’s what makes human life interesting, that we don’t know whether tomorrow is going to be like today, and we’re not sure exactly how it’s going to work. We always have to act in a world of uncertainty. What The Coming Wave does is tell you that if you think the future is uncertain, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The book describes what AI and synthetic biology are bringing. We actually live on the cusp—or are already in the middle of—a much greater revolution in technology and technical change than humans have ever seen. It’s very bracing and challenging. The book argues that synthetic biology and genetics mean that even what it is to be human is not actually going to be that clear. We can now manipulate the stuff of life. Add AI to this, and just think it through. I don’t recall if The Coming Wave deals with this, but Elon Musk’s company has now got to the point of inserting a chip in the brain and controlling that from a computer. This is just a slight insight into what’s potentially coming. If you add quantum computing on top of AI, our capacity to handle data, to understand stuff—it’s an enormous opportunity. It’s not clear how it’s going to work out. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The added piece that comes from The Coming Wave is the recognition that almost all scientific progress is two-edged. The analogy is the case of nuclear, where it may be possible to have energy one day that’s too cheap to measure. Fusion offers that possibility going forward. But it also has the capacity to destroy the world in a couple of minutes. When Putin speculates about battlefield nuclear weapons, I’m reminded that, in the language of The Coming Wave , we don’t have a way of containing these technologies. We just don’t know how to do it. It’s true that we haven’t had a nuclear war, or a nuclear engagement since Hiroshima, but my view is that’s probably luck. So, you have these challenges going forward, and it’s a two-edged sword. They need to be addressed. This is the world in which we have to think through our environmental problems. It’s not the world that most environmentalists think about, in which it’s all about existing technologies. That’s why I like this book, even though it’s got a lot of hype in it (as you would expect). Stainforth’s book is very carefully referenced and grounded. We need both. We need an imagination of the future of the world and, also, a recognition of the uncertainty we confront. He’s been at the forefront of this. He was at DeepMind, but he’s now taken up a new role as the CEO of Microsoft AI. He’s an entrepreneur and he writes like an entrepreneur. Sometimes that’s really infuriating, and sometimes it’s just bracingly good. We academics tend to turn our noses up at people who write like that; I think we should take them a bit more seriously."