We are approaching a critical threshold in the history of our species.
Everything is about to change.
Soon we will live surrounded by AIs. They will carry out complex tasks -
operating businesses, producing unlimited digital content, running core
government services, and maintaining infrastructure. This will be a world of DNA
printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous
weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy. It represents nothing less than
a step change in human capability.
We are not prepared.
As co-founder of the pioneering AI company DeepMind, Mustafa Suleyman has
been at the centre of this revolution, one poised to become the single greatest
accelerant of progress in history. The coming decade, he argues, will be defined
by this wave of powerful, fast-proliferating new technologies. Driven by
overwhelming political and commercial incentives, these tools will help address
our global challenges and create vast wealth - but also upheaval on a once
unimaginable scale.
In The Coming Wave, Suleyman shows how these forces threaten the grand
bargain of the nation-state, the foundation of global order. As our fragile
governments sleepwalk into disaster, we face an existential dilemma:
unprecedented harms arising from unchecked openness on one side, the threat
of overbearing surveillance on the other. Can we forge a narrow path between
catastrophe and dystopia?
This groundbreaking book from the ultimate AI insider establishes 'the
containment problem' - the task of maintaining control over powerful
technologies - as the essential challenge of our age.