Excerpts: “The foundation of our present political order–and the most important actor in the containment of technologies–is the nation-state. Already rocked by crises, it will be further weakened by a series of shocks amplified by the wave: the potential for new forms of violence, a flood of misformation, disappearing jobs, and the prospect of catastrophic accidents” (p. 17).

“In the space of around a hundred years, successive waves took humanity from an era of candles and horse carts to one of power stations and space stations” (p. 47).

“While AI and synthetic biology are the coming wave’s central general-purpose technologies, a bundle of technologies with unusually powerful ramifications surrounds them, encompassing quantum computing, robotics, nanotechnology, and the potential for abundant energy, among others” (p. 56).

“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 vast, almost instantaneous consumption of information is not just difficult to comprehend; it’s truly alien” (p. 65).

“AI is far deeper and more powerful than just another technology. The risk isn’t in overhyping it; it’s rather in missing the magnitude of the coming wave. It’s not just a tool or platform but a transformative meta-technology, the technology behind technology and everything else, itself a maker of tools and platforms, not just a system but a generator of systems of any and all kinds. Step back and consider what’s happening on the scale of a decade or a century. We really are at turning point in the history of humanity” (p. 78).

“A paradox of the coming wave is that its technologies are largely beyond our ability to comprehend at a granular level yet still within our ability to create and use. In AI, the neural networks moving toward autonomy are, at present, not explainable” (p. 114).

“At the beginning of the nineteenth century, almost everyone lived in extreme poverty. Now, globally, this sits at around 9 percent” (p. 133).

“The energy scholar Vaclav Smil calls ammonia cement, plastics, and steel the four pillars of modern civilization: the material base underwriting modern society, each hugely carbon-intensive to produce, with no obvious successors. Without these materials modern life stops, and without fossil fuels the materials stop” (p. 138).

“Altruism and curiosity, arrogance and competition, the desire to win the race, make your name, save your people, help the world, whatever it may be: these are what propel the wave on, and these cannot be expunged or circumvented” (p. 141).

“Across data from more than one hundred countries, evidence suggests that the lower a country’s social mobility the more it experiences upheavals like riots, strikes, assassinations, revolutionary campaigns, and civil wars. When people feel stuck, that others are unfairly hogging the rewards, they get angry” (p. 154).

“AI, synthetic biology, and the rest are being introduced to dysfunctional societies already rocked back and forth on technological waves of immense power. This is not a world ready for the coming wave. This is a world buckling under the existing strain” (p. 155-156).

“Cue an ‘Infocalypse,’ the point at which society can no longer manage a torrent of sketchy material, where the information ecosystem grounding knowledge, trust, and social cohesion, the glue holding society together, falls apart” (p. 172-173).

“Companies already control the largest clusters of AI processors, the best models, the most advanced quantum computers, and the overwhelming majority of robotics capacity and IP. Unlike with rockets, satellite, and the internet, the frontier of this wave is found in corporations, not in government organizations or academic labs” (p. 187-188).

“A new phase of history is here. With zombie governments failing to contain technology, the next Aum Shinrikyo, the next industrial accident, the next mad dictator’s war, the next tiny lab leak, will have an impact that is difficult to contemplate” (p 214).

“What level of societal control is appropriate to stopping an engineered pandemic? What level of interference in other countries is appropriate toward the same end? The consequences for liberty, sovereignty, and privacy have never been so potentially painful” (p. 216).

Suleyman, Mustfa. (2023). The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century’s Greatest Dilemma. New York: Crown Publishing Group.