Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave

 

- This is an extraordinarily good book. It delves deep into AI, its revolutionary promise, but also the huge dangers and challenges it presents to society. 

- Suleyman, an AI expert and founding father, has written a powerful, must read treatise on an invention that will radically change all human lives and communities in the very near future. The book is full of detail and for that reason not an easy read at times, yet it is absolutely enthralling. 

- The first few chapters present a comprehensive historical picture about previous technological revolutions - agricultural, transport, electricity, digitalisation - and how thoroughly our lives, economies and societies changed. Suleyman's premise is that the AI wave will be far more rapid and profound.  

- The back cover blurb says it all:

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 organise our lives, operate our businesses and run core government services. We will live in 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.

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 harm arising from unchecked openness on one side, the threat of over-bearing 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.