17 Reasons to Embrace -- and Fear -- The Coming Wave
AI and synthetic biology walk into a bar together. What/who walks out?
I just read The Coming Wave. Have you read The Coming Wave?
For anyone not yet swept up in the excitement (see what I did there), it’s the new book by tech entrepreneur Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of the A.I. lab DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014.
And, well, it’s a pretty shocking set of observations.
Like a lot of the leading innovators in the A.I. space, Suleyman sees reasons to be hopeful. Yet he’s equally aware of the potential perils, and the picture he paints of both possibilities is equal parts exciting -- and terrifying.
I thought about synthesizing all of those insights into a column of my own. Then I realized it may simply be more powerful to share with you the excerpts that made me stand up and take notice.
So, here you go. Seventeen reasons to fear -- and embrace -- the coming wave.
The entirety of the human world now depends on either living systems or our intelligence. And yet both are now in an unprecedented moment of exponential innovation and upheaval, and unparalleled augmentation that will leave little unchanged. Starting to crash around us is a new wave of technology. This wave is unleashing the power to engineer these two universal foundations: a wave of nothing less than intelligence and life.
This is the core dilemma: that, sooner or later, a powerful generation of technology leads humanity towards either catastrophic or dystopian outcomes. I believe this is the great meta-problem of the twenty-first century.
For most of history, the challenge of technology lay in creating and unleashing its power. That has now flipped: the challenge of technology today is about containing its unleashed power, ensuring it continues to serve us and our planet.
The coming wave is a supercluster, an evolutionary burst like the Cambrian explosion, the most intense eruption of new species in the earth’s history.
Within a few years A.I.s will be able to talk about, reason over, and even act in the same world as we do. Their sensory systems will be as good as ours. A.I. will become inextricably part of the social fabric.
A single strand of human hair is ninety thousand nanometers thick. Today the most advanced chips are manufactured at three nanometers.
A.I. is far deeper and more powerful than just another modern 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 a turning point in the history of humanity.
A decade ago, scientists might have produced under a hundred pieces of DNA simultaneously. Now they can print millions at once, combined with a tenfold fall in price. Serious physical self-modifications are going to happen.
What if we could grow what we wanted locally? What if our supply chain was just biology?
What happens when a human mind has instantaneous access to computation and information on the scale of the internet and the cloud?
What if rather than being manipulated en masse, atoms could be manipulated individually? Nanomachines would work at speeds far beyond anything at our scale, delivering extraordinary outputs: an atomic-scale nanomotor, for example, could rotate forty-eight billion times a minute. Scaled up, it could power a Tesla with material equivalent in volume to about twelve grains of sand.
Pause for a moment and imagine a world where robots with the dexterity of human beings that can be “programmed” in plain English are available at the price of a microwave.
Today, no matter how wealthy you are, you simply cannot buy a more powerful smartphone than is available to billions of people. But democratizing access also means democratizing risk.
The nation-state will be subject to massive centrifugal and centripetal forces, centralization and fragmentation. This recipe for turbulence will create epic new concentrations and dispersals of power, splintering the state from above and below. It will ultimately cast doubt on the viability of some nations altogether.
The coming wave could make a range of small, state-like entities a lot more plausible. Contrary to centralization, it might actually spur a kind of “Hezbollah-ization,” a splintered, tribalized world where everyone has access to the latest technologies, where everyone can support themselves on their own terms, where it is far more possible for anyone to maintain living standards without the great superstructures of nation-state organization.
This heralds a colossal redistribution of power away from existing centers. Where any grouping of any kind -- ideological, religious, cultural, racial -- can self-organize into a viable society.
Massively omni-use general purpose technologies will change both society and what it means to be human. This might sound hyperbolic. But within the next decade, we must anticipate radical flux, new concentrations and dispersals of information, wealth, and, above all, power.
Hang on to your hats . . .