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The Coming Wave: The instant Sunday Times bestseller from the ultimate AI insider Paperback – 26 September 2023

by Mustafa Suleyman (Author)
4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 1,842 ratings
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Cofounder of the pioneering AI company DeepMind sounds the alarm on the unprecedented risks to global order posed by a wave of fast-developing technologies like artificial intelligence and genetic engineering

A stark and urgent warning on the unprecedented risks that a wave of fast-developing technologies poses to global order, and how we might contain them while we have the chance-from a cofounder of the pioneering AI company DeepMind

We are about to cross a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change.

Soon we will live surrounded by AIs. They will carry out complex tasks-operating businesses, producing unlimited digital content, running core government services and maintaining infrastructure. This will be a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy. It represents nothing less than a step change in human capability.

We are not prepared.

As cofounder of the pioneering AI company DeepMind, Mustafa Suleyman has been at the center of this revolution, one poised to become the single greatest accelerant of progress in history. The coming decade, he argues, will be defined by this wave of powerful, fast-proliferating new technologies. Driven by overwhelming strategic and commercial incentives, these tools will help address our global challenges and create vast wealth-but also upheaval on a once unimaginable scale.

In The Coming Wave, Suleyman shows how these forces threaten the grand bargain of the nation state, the foundation of global order. As our fragile governments sleepwalk into disaster, we face an existential dilemma- unprecedented harms arising from unchecked openness on one side, the threat of overbearing surveillance on the other. Can we forge a narrow path between catastrophe and dystopia?

In this groundbreaking book from the ultimate AI insider, Suleyman establishes "the
containment problem"-the task of maintaining control over powerful
technologies-as the essential challenge of our age.
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  1. Print length
    320 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    JONATHAN CAPE & BH - TRADE
  4. Publication date
    26 September 2023
  5. Dimensions
    23.4 x 15.3 x 1.93 cm
  6. ISBN-10
    1847927491
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1847927491
  8. See all details
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Product description

Review

Heartfelt and candid … a serious exploration of what the future might hold for us all ― Observer

Thoughtful and persuasive ― Sunday Times, *Books of the Year*

Confused by the current furore about AI? This book is a good place to start… The Coming Wave is a sweeping account of the latest advances in AI and synthetic biology ― Financial Times, *Books of the Year*

A cogent look at the technology’s potential to transform the economy and society, along with the risks of misuse and surveillance ― Economist, *Books of the Year*

The rise of AI has led to a rise in books about AI, among the most insightful of which is The Coming Wave ― Prospect, *Books of the Year 2023*

About the Author

Mustafa Suleyman is the co-founder and CEO of Inflection AI. Previously he co-founded DeepMind, one of the world's leading AI 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.

He tweets @MustafaSuleymn and can be found online at www.inflection.ai.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ JONATHAN CAPE & BH - TRADE (26 September 2023)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1847927491
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1847927491
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 23.4 x 15.3 x 1.93 cm
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 1,842 ratings

About the authors

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
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  1. Michael Bhaskar

    Michael Bhaskar

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    Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

    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.

    See more on the author's page
  2. Mustafa Suleyman

    Mustafa Suleyman

    Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
    Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

    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.

    See more on the author's page
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Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
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Top reviews from Australia

HC
5.0 out of 5 stars Fore warned is fore armed.
Reviewed in Australia on 18 February 2024
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A great book to stimulate your thinking about the future. What is already here and what is just around the corner. Don't say you haven't been warned. Take action now to protect your future income and lifestyle.
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Ian B.
5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding seminal document
Reviewed in Australia on 21 January 2024
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This is an amazingly competent and complete expose of everything AI. Initially it is an easy read, and you don't need to read all of it to learn much about the significance of the AI revolution, but it is also a very dense, very thoughtful, absolutely expert documentation of the entire subject. It leaves me searching for words to explain its quality and impact. Certainly it's a must read. Certainly is rich and mentally taxing, but it is also very important, perhaps pointing to the saving of the human race from its own creation. I feel that this book will have a forever future in academia as an indispensable reference. Its reference notes are fantastic, and it even has a thorough index. An amazing work, the author and collaborators are to be congratulated.
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Mia Mellamocca
5.0 out of 5 stars The Coming Wave
Reviewed in Australia on 11 February 2024
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I love any book about our future paths and changes to society and ways of living! This is one such book!
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Patricia Ferguson
5.0 out of 5 stars Scary
Reviewed in Australia on 4 January 2024
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Well written and informative
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Kindle Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Significant work on AI risks
Reviewed in Australia on 4 November 2023
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I don't know if Mustapha's view on likely negative futures is correct. He worked on AI, so he is an expert. He is worth listening to. I will listen to those with other opinions as well. I'm not sure anyone really knows what will happen and how good or bad it will be. I guess we'll find out in a few years.
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Top reviews from other countries

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Alexandre
5.0 out of 5 stars Uma jornada de compreensão geopolítica, econômica e social dos impactos das novas tecnologias
Reviewed in Brazil on 15 March 2024
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Os autores se esmeraram em proporcionar ao leitor uma análise realmente multifacetada do que realmente está por trás de tecnologias convergentes, onde, sem dúvida alguma a IA tem uma espécie de papel central, como indutor de ouras como as biotecnologias e computação quântica. Apesar do cenário meticulosamente construído de forma aterradora em dados momentos, considero essencial conhecer a grande sobreposição de ondas tecnoeconômicas (ao estilo Carlota Perez) que estão por erodir ainda mais, as fronteiras das nações, privacidade e democratização do acesso a tecnologias com potencial tão profundo. Não é um livro de tecnicalidades. Vale a pena, apesar de soar um pouco repetitivo no argumento global do livro e de poder ser percebido como um continuum do livro do fórum econômico mundial que toca no mesmo diapasão.
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Great book
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book
Reviewed in Mexico on 8 November 2023
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An actualist book about futher technology
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G. C. Carter
5.0 out of 5 stars Predicts the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology technology on society
Reviewed in the United States on 17 October 2023
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The 2023 book entitled: “The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and … “ by Suleyman and Bhaskar is a fascinating story of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and biotechnology and how it has and will continue to sweep over humanity in a wave that will improve our lives and change our society in several ways. Of interest to readers will be historical factual stories of past waves of technology and how they have improved live on earth. For those interested in the technical details of AI and biotechnology there is a great deal of informative discussion in an understandable form. Also, there is easy to understand, albeit, somewhat speculative view of what downsides this new wave of technology might portend if not appropriately contained. The book is worth purchasing and reading especially for those interested in the power of technology.
The editors include the following “advance praise” for the book: “The Coming Wave is a fascinating, well-written, and important book. It explores the existential dangers that AI and biotechnology pose to humankind, and offers practical solutions for how we can contain the threat. The coming technological wave promises to provide humanity with godlike powers of creation, but if we fail to manage it wisely, it may destroy us.”—Yuval Noah Harari, New York Times bestselling author of Sapiens.
The authors (Suleyman and Bhaskar) write: “Artificial intelligence (AI) is the science of teaching machines to learn humanlike capabilities... THE COMING WAVE [is about an] emerging cluster of related technologies centered on AI and synthetic biology whose transformative applications will both empower humankind and present unprecedented risks… 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… it appears that containing this wave—is not… possible.”
The authors write: “I [Suleyman] co-founded a company called DeepMind with two friends… in… 2010. This was our goal… replicate the very thing that makes us unique as a species, our intelligence… DeepMind became one of the world’s leading AI companies, achieving a string of breakthroughs… Today, AI systems can almost perfectly recognize faces and objects. We take speech-to-text transcription and instant language translation for granted… AI systems can produce synthetic voices with uncanny realism and compose music of stunning beauty… 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...”
The authors write: “a short time before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, I attended a seminar on technology risks at a well-known university… One… presenter showed how the price of DNA synthesizers, which can print bespoke strands of DNA, was falling rapidly. Costing a few tens of thousands of dollars, they are small enough to sit on a bench in your garage and let people… manufacture—DNA. And all this is now possible for anyone with graduate-level training… the presenter painted a harrowing vision: Someone could soon create novel… pathogens far more transmissible and lethal than anything found in nature… This was not science fiction… a single person today likely “has the capacity to kill a billion people.” All it takes is motivation... I stayed silent, frankly shaken… This widespread emotional reaction I was observing is something I have come to call the pessimism-aversion trap: the misguided analysis that arises when you are overwhelmed by a fear of confronting potentially dark realities, and the resulting tendency to look the other way…”
The authors write: “History is full of false prophets and doomsayers proven wrong. Why should this time be different?... Many of those whom I accuse of being stuck in the pessimism-aversion trap fully embrace the growing critiques of technology… We’ll manage, we always do, they say…
Technologies can and should enrich our lives; historically, it bears repeating, the inventors and entrepreneurs behind them have been powerful drivers of progress, improving living standards for billions of us. But without containment… the benefits it could bring, is inconsequential… Scores of state and non-state actors will race ahead to develop them regardless of efforts to regulate and control what’s coming, taking risks that affect everyone, whether we like it or not.”
The authors write: “For most of lived history, proliferation of new technology was rare. Most humans were born, lived, and died surrounded by the same set of tools and technologies… Once a technology gets traction, once a wave starts building, the historical pattern we saw with cars is clear. When Gutenberg invented the printing press around 1440, there was only a single example in Europe: his original in Mainz, Germany. But just fifty years later a thousand presses spread across the Continent”
The authors write: “Civilization’s appetite for useful and cheaper technologies is boundless. This will not change… Computing transformed society faster than anyone predicted and proliferated faster than any invention in human history… Gordon Moore [conjectured]… every twenty-four months, the number of transistors on a chip would double… Since the early 1970s the number of transistors per chip has increased ten-million-fold. Their… power has increased by ten orders of magnitude—a seventeen-billion-fold improvement… It took smartphones a few years to go from niche product to utterly essential item for two-thirds of the planet.”
The authors write: “AI became real for me... It happened in DeepMind’s first office… one day in 2012… We had watched as the algorithm taught itself something new. I was stunned… But the public response was pretty muted. AI was still a fringe discussion, a research area on the margins. And yet within a few short years, all that would change as this new generation of AI techniques exploded onto the world stage… Despite its simple rules, Go’s complexity is staggering. It is exponentially more complex than chess… [The old chess game] approach is hopeless in a game with as many branching outcomes as Go… AlphaGo initially learned by watching 150,000 games played by human experts… the key next step was creating lots of copies of AlphaGo and getting it to play against… itself over and over… Our AI had uncovered ideas that hadn’t occurred to the most brilliant players in thousands of years... with just a day’s training, AlphaZero was capable of learning more about the game than the entirety of human experience could teach it… Our team had, in full view of the public, emerged from what researchers had called “the AI winter,” when research funding dried up and the field was shunned. AI was back, and finally starting to deliver.”
The authors write: “It’s easy to grow weary of the breathless press releases, the self-congratulatory product demos… AI is at the center of this coming wave. And yet, since the term “artificial intelligence” first entered the lexicon in 1955, it… took nearly half a century, finally arriving in 2012 in the form of a system called AlexNet. AlexNet was powered by the resurgence of an old technique that has now become fundamental to AI, one that has supercharged the field and was integral to us at DeepMind: deep learning… A technique called backpropagation then adjusts the weights to improve the neural network; when an error is spotted, adjustments propagate back through the network to help correct it in the future… This, in a nutshell, is deep learning. And this remarkable technique, long derided in the field, cracked computer vision and took the AI world by storm. AlexNet was built by… Geoffrey Hinton [et al.]… Thanks to deep learning, computer vision is now everywhere… we sold DeepMind to Google, and the tech giant soon switched to a strategy of “AI first” across all its products… Starting in the 2010s, the buzz… around AI was back, stronger than ever… Our WaveNet project was a powerful text-to-speech system able to generate synthetic voices in more than a hundred languages across the Google product ecosystem… AI is… far from done.”
The authors write: “in November 2022, the… company OpenAI released ChatGPT. Within a week it had more than a million users
… Ask [ChatGPT] a question and it replies instantaneously in fluent prose… in 2017 a small group of researchers at Google… laid the foundation for what has been… a revolution in the field of large language models (LLMs)—including ChatGPT… LLMs take advantage of the fact that language data comes in a sequential order… OpenAI released GPT-2. (GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer.)… when OpenAI released GPT-3, that people started to truly grasp the magnitude of what was happening. With a whopping 175 billion parameters it was, at the time, the largest neural network ever constructed, more than a hundred times larger than its predecessor of just a year earlier… When GPT-4 launched in March 2023, results were again impressive… request start-up business plans and the output is akin to having a roomful of executives on call. Moreover, it can ace standardized tests… [and]… identify weaknesses in contracts, and suggest compounds for novel drugs, even offering ways of modifying them… ”
The authors write: “a key ingredient of the LLM revolution is that for the first time very large models could be trained directly on raw, messy, real-world data, without the need for carefully curated and human-labeled data sets… Today’s LLMs are trained on trillions of words. Imagine digesting Wikipedia wholesale, consuming all the subtitles and comments on YouTube, reading millions of legal contracts, tens of millions of emails, and hundreds of thousands of books. This kind of… consumption of information is not just difficult to comprehend; it’s truly alien.”
The authors write: “LLMs aren’t just limited to language generation.
In 2022, OpenAI and Microsoft unveiled a new tool called Copilot, which quickly became ubiquitous among coders. One analysis suggests it makes engineers 55 percent faster at completing coding tasks, almost like having a second brain on hand… It took LLMs just a few years to change AI. But it quickly became apparent that these models sometimes produce troubling and actively harmful content like racist screeds or rambling conspiracy theories… The potential for harm, abuse, and misinformation is real.
Researchers all over the world are racing to develop a suite of new fine-tuning and control techniques… much more is still needed.”
The authors write: “… less well known is what The Economist calls the Carlson curve: the epic collapse in costs for sequencing DNA… the cost of human genome sequencing fell from $ 1 billion in 2003 to well under $ 1,000 by 2022. That is, the price dropped a millionfold in under twenty years… Genome sequencing is now a booming business… But the power of biotech… now enables us to edit it, and write it, too… Impacts can be enormous: editing germ-line cells that form eggs and sperm, for example, means changes will echo down through generations… Experiments that once took years are tackled by grad students in weeks… You can now buy a benchtop DNA synthesizer… for as little as $ 25,000 and use it as you wish, without restriction… at home in your bio-garage.”
The authors write: “Simply knowing the DNA sequence isn’t enough to know how a protein works. Instead, you need to understand how it folds. Its shape, formed by this knotted folding, is core to its function: collagen in our tendons has a rope-like structure, while enzymes have pockets to hold the molecules they act on… in advance, there was no… knowing how this would happen… In 1993, they… set up a… Critical Assessment for Structure Prediction (CASP) [competition] —to see who could crack the protein folding problem… in 2018… a rank outsider entrant arrived at the competition, with zero track record, and beat ninety-eight established teams. The winning team was DeepMind’s. Called AlphaFold, the project… provides a perfect example of how both AI and biotech are advancing… One headline said it all: “One of the Biggest Problems in Biology Has Finally Been Solved,” wrote Scientific American… For half a century protein folding had been one of science’s grand challenges, and then, all of a sudden, it was ticked off the list.”
The authors write: “Soon after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, 2022, residents of the city of Kyiv… dismounted near the column’s head and launched jerry-rigged drones equipped with small explosives… The Ukrainian resistance… demonstrated how they can undermine a conventional military calculus... A thousand-strong group of nonmilitary elite programmers and computer scientists banded together in an organization called Delta to bring advanced AI and robotics capabilities to the army… Delta’s ability to create machine learning systems to spot camouflaged targets and help guide munitions was critical… Drones provide us with a glimpse of what’s in store for the future of warfare… It won’t just be… soldiers... It will be anyone who wants to.”
The authors write: “In 2020 an AI system sifted through 100
million molecules to create the first machine-learning-derived antibiotic… To date eighteen clinical assets have been derived with the help of AI tools… What if, instead of looking for cures, you looked for killers? They ran a test, asking their molecule-generating AI to find poisons. In six hours it identified more than forty thousand molecules with toxicity comparable to the most dangerous chemical weapons, like Novichok… Most technologies have military and civilian applications… the more powerful the technology, the more concern there should be…”
The authors write: “Modern research works against containment. So too do the necessity and desire to make a profit… Investment in AI technologies alone has hit $ 100 billion a year… big numbers do actually matter…technologies… will reduce the cost of tactical drones to a few thousand dollars, putting them within reach of everyone… A legal AI might be able to parse this against multiple legal systems, figure out every possible infraction, and then hit that company with multiple crippling lawsuits around the world at the same time.”
The authors write: “Containment is about the ability… to control technology… “what might containment, even in theory, look like?... the answer… Deft regulation, balancing the need to make progress alongside sensible safety constraints… We’ve done it before, so the argument goes; look at cars, planes, and medicines… [In] CHAPTER 14 [the authors provide] TEN STEPS TOWARD CONTAINMENT”
52 people found this helpful
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Peter
5.0 out of 5 stars A wake-up call to the coming world
Reviewed in Canada on 7 September 2023
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Mustafa Suleyman tackles the questions swirling around powerful new technologies like AI head on. It’s a compelling read (I couldn't put it down after I started). While it makes big claims it is always thorough about building the case and marshaling the evidence (there are nearly 30 pages of notes and references). The writing is rooted in his personal experience as an AI entrepreneur, and is both a wake-up call to the coming world and an in-depth analysis of what is happening right now. Highly recommended.
4 people found this helpful
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Stephan Conradi
5.0 out of 5 stars contenido muy interesante
Reviewed in Spain on 26 March 2024
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El tema es muy actual. Muy pocas cosas van a influir la vida diaria como las temas del libro. Muy recommendable!
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