Summary of The Coming Wave By Mustafa Suleyman: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

By Willie M. Joseph

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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of The Coming Wave By Mustafa Suleyman: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

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Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, warns of the unprecedented risks AI and other technologies pose to global order. He argues that the coming decade will be defined by a wave of powerful, fast-proliferating new technologies. Suleyman highlights how these forces will create immense prosperity but also threaten the nation-state, the foundation of global order. He questions whether we can forge a narrow path between catastrophe and dystopia, establishing "the containment problem" as the essential challenge of our age.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: Sep 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223543343

Willie M. Joseph

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GLOSSARY OF KEY TERMS

AI, AGI, and ACI are emerging technologies with transformative applications that both empower and present unprecedented risks. The coming wave, centered on AI and synthetic biology, presents challenges in containment, with technology's predisposition to diffuse widely and have unpredictable impacts. The challenge of containment is exacerbated by unique characteristics such as asymmetry, hyperevolution, omni-use, and autonomy. The grand bargain and narrow path are key factors in balancing openness and closure. The future of technology will be shaped by optimism bias, synthetic biology, technology, and waves, with the potential for both positive and negative outcomes.

PROLOGUE

The coming wave of technology, including advanced AI and biotechnology, presents a transformative opportunity for humanity. These technologies have the potential to unlock the secrets of the universe, cure diseases, and create new forms of art and culture. However, they also have the potential dangers of creating systems beyond our control and causing unintended consequences for individuals and ecosystems. The fate of humanity hangs in the balance, and decisions made in the coming years and decades will determine whether we rise to the challenge of these technologies or fall victim to their dangers. In this uncertain moment, it is certain that the age of advanced technology is upon us, and we must be ready to face its challenges head-on, including AI.

CONTAINMENT IS NOT POSSIBLE

THE WAVE

The concept of a flood myth has permeated ancient Hindu texts, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and Plato's writings. These floods have been transformative, shaping continents, irrigating crops, and nurturing civilization growth. The rise and spread of technologies has also taken the form of worldchanging waves, driven by human ingenuity and the pursuit of improvement.

Human intelligence has been the driving force behind the evolution of ideas and creation, with the rise of AI and synthetic biology. These technologies will usher in a new dawn for humanity, creating wealth and surplus unlike anything ever seen. However, their rapid proliferation also threatens to empower a diverse array of bad actors to unleash disruption, instability, and catastrophe on an unimaginable scale.

The twenty-first century will be shaped by this wave of technology, which is defining the power of intelligence and life. 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 ever seen. However, their rapid proliferation also threatens to empower a diverse array of bad actors to unleash disruption, instability, and catastrophe on an unimaginable scale.

The implications of this wave on humanity and the future of the twenty-first century are immense, as it depends on these technologies and is imperiled by them. Containing this wave is not possible, and the implications of these questions will affect everyone alive and every generation that follows us.

The author's question is whether distilling the essence of human intelligence into software or algorithms could unlock unimaginably powerful tools to tackle our most intractable problems, such as climate change, aging populations, and sustainable food.

DeepMind, founded in 2010, aimed to replicate human intelligence by creating a system that could outperform all human cognitive abilities. This goal was based on the massively parallel processing of supercomputers and the explosion of vast new sources of data from the open web. The pace of progress in AI has been breathtaking, with new models and products coming out every week, sometimes every day. AI systems can now recognize faces and objects, navigate roads and traffic, generate novel images and compose text with extraordinary levels of detail and coherence, produce synthetic voices with uncanny realism, and compose music of stunning beauty.

AI has become a powerful tool for extraordinary good, but it also presents immense dangers and ethical dilemmas. The technological ecosystem is underway, with AI feeding a powerful, emerging generation of genetic technologies and robotics. Further progress in one area accelerates the others in a chaotic and cross-catalyzing process beyond anyone's direct control.

As the technology has progressed, concerns have grown about the potential for a tsunami of AI, synthetic biology, and other advanced forms of technology. These technologies could present an existential threat to nation-states, disrupting or overturning the current geopolitical order, opening pathways to immense AI-empowered cyberattacks, automated wars, engineered pandemics, and a world subject to unexplainable and seemingly omnipotent forces.

Some countries may react to these catastrophic risks with technologically charged authoritarianism, requiring massive levels of surveillance and intrusions into private lives. Keeping a tight rein on technology could become part of a drift to everything and everyone being watched constantly, leading to a dystopian global surveillance system.

Attempting to ban the development of new technologies is also a risk, as technologically stagnant societies are historically unstable and prone to collapse, losing the capacity to solve problems and progress.

The core dilemma of the twenty-first century is that a powerful generation of technology will lead humanity towards either catastrophic or dystopian outcomes. This is the great metaproblem of the twenty-first century. The current discourse around technology ethics and safety is inadequate, and there is rarely anything about containing technology. The author argues that there is an interlocking set of technical, social, and legal mechanisms constraining and controlling technology working at every possible level.

The author created a slide deck about AI's potential long-term economic and social impacts, arguing that AI introduced a host of threats requiring proactive responses. They argued that AI systems would replace intellectual manual labor in much the same way as robots replace physical labor. They suggested that there was little precedent for the new forms of concentrated power that were coming.

A few years later, a seminar on technology risks at a well-known university presented a harrowing vision: someone could soon create novel pathogens far more transmissible and lethal than anything found in nature. These synthetic pathogens could evade known countermeasures, spread asymptomatically, or have built-in resistance to treatments. The collective response in the seminar was more than just dismissive. People

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[Gordon · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I had just finished listening to The Coming Wave, and I wanted to summarize it for myself. But I checked Everand first and found Willie Joseph's summary. What a great help and time saver. Thanks