Book review: The coming wave: technology, power, and the twenty-first century’s greatest dilemma

Abstract

Suleyman is the Co-Founder of the world’s leading AI companies including Inflection AI, and DeepMind, acquired by Google. He was behind the AI programs AlphaZero and AlphaGo Zero. It is therefore not surprising that Suleyman and Bhaskar (2023) has received attention from a wide array of prominent thinkers, academics, entrepreneurs, authors, and leaders like Yuval Noah Harari, Nouriel Roubini, Andrew McAfee, Daniel Kahneman, Jeffrey D. Sachs, Al Gore, and Bill Gates. What follows is a summary of the main themes raised by this book and how the ideas critically engage with economists studying automation, and with thinkers like Acemoglu and Restrepo (2019), Susskind(2020), Acemoglu (2021) and Qureshi and Woo (2022). Suleyman and Bhaskar (2023) argue that the coming technological wave is based on AI and synthetic biology, which will become cheaper and widely accessible (p.7, p.9). They also express concern of the risks of “AI-powered cyberattacks, automated wars, engineered pandemics”, and the ‘existential threat to nation states’ (p.10). The response to such catastrophic outcomes could be authoritarian surveillance (dystopia) or bans and boycotts of technology (stagnation), both of which are unacceptable (p.10, p.206). The authors argue that we need to focus not just on the positive spillovers of technology but also on its ‘unintended consequences’ (p.36). Thus, they argue for containment, i.e., the capacity to control, limit, or shut down technology; and to change the research direction, or ‘deny access to harmful actors’ (pp.36–37). Overall, they argue that technology should be ‘democratically decided’ and its benefits ‘widely distributed’ (p.285).