“The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma” by Mustafa Suleyman is a monumental work that offers something few other books on artificial intelligence can: the perspective of the ultimate insider. As a co-founder of DeepMind, Suleyman was “in the room” when the deep learning revolution began, and this memoir-meets-manifesto provides a gripping firsthand account of the history that brought us to this precipice.
For those fascinated by the backstory of AI, Suleyman offers an invaluable vantage point. He recounts the early days of DeepMind with a sense of awe and urgency, describing how a small team of visionaries set out to “solve intelligence” long before the world paid attention. But unlike other tech memoirs that stop at self-congratulation, Suleyman expands the narrative scope to include a second, equally transformative force: synthetic biology. He argues that these two technologies—AI and biotech—are crashing over us simultaneously, forming a “coming wave” that will redistribute power on a global scale.
The book is anchored by a profound and terrifying concept: the containment problem. Suleyman asks a defining question of our time: How do we control technologies that are designed to be autonomous, cheap, and omni-capable? Rather than succumbing to doomerism, he offers a pragmatic, if difficult, roadmap for the future.
The Coming Wave is not just a history lesson; it is a survival guide. It balances the thrill of scientific discovery with a mature, ethical reckoning of its consequences. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand not just where this technology came from, but the precise, narrow path we must walk to ensure it serves humanity rather than overwhelming it.
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