Author(s): Mustafa Suleyman

Technology | Society

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 engineeringA 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 DeepMindWe 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 "thecontainment problem"-the task of maintaining control over powerfultechnologies-as the essential challenge of our age.

Review: Heartfelt and candid ... a serious exploration of what the future might hold for us all * Observer *
Deeply rewarding and consistently astonishing * Stephen Fry *
A fascinating, well-written and important book * Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens *
Rich with interesting facts, arresting arguments, and compelling observations, it is essential reading * Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking Fast and Slow *
An extraordinary and necessary book ... one leaves energised and thrilled to be alive right now * Alain de Botton, author and philosopher *

Author Biography: 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.