The Coming Wave

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Overview

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma (2023) is a book by Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and later of Inflection AI, written with Michael Bhaskar. It argues that a new wave of general-purpose technologies, chiefly artificial intelligence and synthetic biology, will spread rapidly and give ordinary actors enormous power. This creates what Suleyman calls the containment problem: how to keep such technologies under control when states are weakening and incentives push toward release. He argues for a narrow path between catastrophe and authoritarian control. The book matters because it comes from an industry insider who is both builder and warner.

Context

Earlier technological waves, such as steam, electricity and computing, spread widely and reshaped economies. Suleyman places AI and biotechnology in that line but argues this wave is faster and more dangerous. He wrote after the 2022 release of powerful generative AI tools, at a time when governments were beginning to discuss regulation.