The Coming Wave
Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma
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4.2 • 79 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An urgent warning of the unprecedented risks that AI and other fast-developing technologies pose to global order, and how we might contain them while we have the chance—from a co-founder of the pioneering artificial intelligence company DeepMind and current CEO of Microsoft AI
“A fascinating, well-written, and important book.”—Yuval Noah Harari
“Essential reading.”—Daniel Kahneman
“My favorite book on AI.”—Bill Gates, GatesNotes
A Best Book of the Year: CNN, Economist, Bloomberg, Politico Playbook, Financial Times, The Guardian, CEO Magazine, Semafor • Winner of the Inc. Non-Obvious Book Award • Finalist for the Porchlight Business Book Award and the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award
We are approaching a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change.
Soon you will live surrounded by AIs. They will organize your life, operate your business, and run core government services. You will live in a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy.
None of us are prepared.
As co-founder of the pioneering AI company DeepMind, part of Google, Mustafa Suleyman has been at the center of this revolution. The coming decade, he argues, will be defined by this wave of powerful, fast-proliferating new technologies.
In The Coming Wave, Suleyman shows how these forces will create immense prosperity but also threaten the nation-state, the foundation of global order. As our fragile governments sleepwalk into disaster, we face an existential dilemma: unprecedented harms on one side, the threat of overbearing surveillance on the other.
How do we ensure the flourishing of humankind? How do we maintain control? How do we navigate the narrow path to a successful future?
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"An emerging cluster of related technologies centered on AI and synthetic biology... will both empower humankind and present unprecedented new risks," according to this shrewd debut. Suleyman, cofounder of the artificial intelligence companies DeepMind and Inflection AI, chronicles the technological advances that led to today's AI boom with anecdotes from his career, describing DeepMind's 2012 work on an algorithm capable of teaching itself simple computer games and the company's 2018 breakthrough developing a program capable of predicting unknown protein structures. According to Suleyman, four features distinguish these new technologies: the high speed at which they're developing, the broad variety of uses for them, their ability to function relatively autonomously, and their capacity to affect "entire societies" (he mentions the possibility that "a single system could control autonomous vehicles throughout a territory"). Regulation is the key to dodging dystopia, he contends, outlining 10 steps for keeping AI under human control, including ensuring that all AI have a "bulletproof off switch" and requiring government-issued licenses to produce "the most sophisticated AI systems." Suleyman's account of DeepMind's achievements can come across as self-serving, but anecdotes about other companies working on technologies capable of, for instance, interfacing directly with the human brain, underscore the mind-bending possibilities. It's a sober take on navigating the perils of AI.
Customer Reviews
Mind Blowing
The authors describe IA and its implications to our world that is both scary and exciting. Very well written and organized so you get great insight into what’s at stake, the difficulty of getting it right and the ramifications of failing.
good content but too long
too much filler. could be half the length.