Why I'm Reading "The Coming Wave" by Mustafa Suleyman, on the challenge of AI
Suleyman's book is an insider's warning that we must move quickly to contain and manage these emerging technologies
The third book I'm reading this year for the Substack newsletter is The Coming Wave: Technology, Power and the 21st Century's Greatest Dilemma, by Mustafa Suleyman. It was released Sept. 5, 2023. This is the first post, explaining why I’m reading it. The second post, on why the coming wave is so, so big, is here. The third post, on the threat that the coming wave poses to the nation-state, our basic building block of civilization for the last several hundred years, is here. The fourth post, my final one, covers Suleyman's proposed solutions and can be read here.
In April, I will be going through John Inazu's forthcoming book Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect.
In February, I went through Nick Troiano’s The Primary Solution.
In January, I went through Michael Wear’s The Spirit of Our Politics.
The book of the month schedule is here.
The Coming Wave is about artificial intelligence, but one thing I've learned so far is that AI is only one of a few developing technology that forms the coming wave that Suleyman refers to. The full list of innovations that make up the wave is:
AI
advanced biotechnology
quantum computing
robotics
And then a little further down the road
advanced nanotechnology
This book is extremely sobering. There have been moments when I've been reading this book during a kid's birthday party at a massive indoor sports complex, with kids sports going on all around me, and after reading for an hour I've got up and walked around in a daze.
Suleyman is the co-founder and CEO of Inflection AI. They run the AI chatbot, PI. This is a free chatbot for now, but Axios' daily AI newsletter, AI+, reported today that Inflection's plan is to start charging for subscriptions in the future.
Before Inflection, Suleyman co-founded DeepMind in 2010. DeepMind was a London-based company that was acquired by Google in 2014 for more than $500 million, and then became Google DeepMind in 2023. This absorption of DeepMind fully into Google in 2023 represented a rejection by Alphabet, the parent company, of efforts by Suleyman and his two co-founders to set up "a legal structure used by nonprofit groups, reasoning that the powerful artificial intelligence they were researching shouldn’t be controlled by a single corporate entity, according to people familiar with those plans."
Suleyman has always been more of a social impact and policy guy than a technologist or scientist. He was born to a Syrian-born taxi driver father and English nurse mother, and into his mid-20's he was doing consulting on social good work.
Here's an exchange I had with PI, Inflection's chatbot, about how Suleyman got into AI:
Jon: How did he get into AI?
PI: Mustafa's journey into AI was a bit of a happy accident. He was actually on his way to study for a master's degree in public policy when he bumped into an old childhood friend, Demis Hassabis, on a train. Demis had just sold his AI startup, DeepMind, and was looking for someone to help grow the company.
Jon: So he's less of a technologist and more of a policy wonk.
PI: That's a fair assessment. While Mustafa Suleyman is undoubtedly knowledgeable about AI technology, his background and expertise lie more in policy and social impact. He's always been passionate about using technology to make the world a better place, and his role at DeepMind and now at Inflection AI reflects that. He's more of a bridge-builder between the tech world and the world of policy and ethics.
All that background does a good job of explaining what this book is about. It's not intended to help someone invest in AI or to build AI products. It's more of an insider's warning that if we don't contain the coming wave of AI and its adjacent technologies, we could end up letting loose "a more intelligent entity" than humankind that "could ... dominate us" (115).
"There is a strong case that by definition a superintelligence would be fully impossible to control or contain" (115).
The emphasis of Suleyman's argument is that the world must focus on containing these technologies. Stopping them is impossible, he argues, and we do in fact need many of these technologies to meet the challenges of our day.
It might even be too late to constrain them, he says. But he is emphatic that we have to try.
"We're on the cusp of the most important transformation of our lifetimes" (16)… "AI has been climbing the ladder of cognitive abilities for decades, and it now looks set to reach human level performance across a very wide range of tasks within the next three years" (9).
Before we get to the threat of a superintelligence, Suleyman also writes of the ways AI could be misused by humans.
"The coming wave is defined by two core technologies: artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology. Together they will usher in a new dawn for humanity, creating wealth and surplus unlike anything every seen. And yet their rapid proliferation also threatens to empower a diverse array of bad actors to unleash disruption, instability, and even catastrophe on an unimaginable scale. This wave creates an immense challenge that will define the twenty-first century: our future both depends on these technologies and is imperiled by them" (7).
But Suleyman is alarmed that in tech and policy circles, not enough people are taking these risks seriously. I think we've seen that change a decent amount since this book came out in the fall of 2023, but he was warning then that "head-in-the-sand is the default ideology" among too many (15).
In the next few weeks, I'll go through a bit more of the threats as Suleyman sees them, and then his recommendations for how we can try to contain and constrain these new technologies.
"We urgently need watertight answers for how the coming wave can be controlled and contained, how the safeguards and affordances of the democratic nation-state can be maintained, but right now no one has such a plan" (16).
Not too long after this book was released, the European Union released its first provisional agreement on regulating AI. I'll look at that framework as well in the coming weeks.
2024 Book List
Here's an updated list of the books I am doing on Border Stalkers in 2024:
January: The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life, by Michael Wear (author interview is here, along with links to all my posts on the book)
February: The Primary Solution: Rescuing Our Democracy from the Fringes, by Nick Troiano (author interview is here, along with links to all my posts on the book)
March: The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma, by Mustafa Suleyman
April: Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect, by John Inazu (author interview confirmed)
May: At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68, by Taylor Branch
June - American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation―and Could Again, by Yuval Levin (author interview confirmed)
July - Why Not Moderation: Letters to Young Radicals by Aurelian Craiutu (author interview confirmed)
August - Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, by Neil Postman (interview with Major Garrett of CBS News)
September - The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy, by Matthew D. Taylor (author interview confirmed)
October - Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America, by Gary Wills
November - TBD
December - TBD
I am always amazed at the seriousness of the books you read. While I enjoy these types of books, reading them can be exhausting and I need some time to digest each one before I move to the next. Do you ever read something less heavy (possibly fiction) for enjoyment. If so and to steal a line from Ezra Klein, what three (fiction) books would you recommend?