The Coming Wave
Description:
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
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 organise 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 centre 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.
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.
About the authors:
Michael Bhaskar
Michael Bhaskar is a writer, publisher, researcher and entrepreneur. He is Co-Founder of Canelo, a new kind of publishing company and Europe’s fastest growing independent publisher. Between 2017 and 2019 he was a consultant Writer in Residence at DeepMind, the world’s leading AI research lab.
He has written and talked extensively about the future of media and technology around the world. He has been featured in and written for The Guardian, The FT, and Wired and on BBC 2, the BBC World Service, BBC Radio 4 and NPR amongst others. Michael has been a British Council Young Creative Entrepreneur, a Frankfurt Book Fair Fellow and a Visiting Researcher at Oxford Brookes University.
His latest book is Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking. He has written a prize-winning monograph, The Content Machine, and Curation: The Power of Selection in a World of Excess. He is also the lead author of the Literature in the 21st Century report, co-editor of the recently published Oxford Handbook of Publishing. His books have been translated into nine languages, and he can be found on Twitter as @michaelbhaskar.
Mustafa Suleyman
Mustafa Suleyman is the co-founder and CEO of Inflection AI. Previously he co-founded DeepMind, one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence companies. After a decade at DeepMind, Suleyman became vice president of AI product management and AI policy at Google. When he was an undergraduate at Oxford, Suleyman dropped out to help start a non-profit telephone counseling service. He lives in Palo Alto, California.
