The Coming Wave
Soon you will live surrounded by AIs. They will organise your life, operate your business, and run core government services. You will live in a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy. None of us are prepared. As co-founder of the pioneering AI company DeepMind, part of Google, Mustafa Suleyman has been at the centre of this revolution. The coming decade, he argues, will be defined by this wave of powerful, fast-proliferating new technologies. In The Coming Wave, Suleyman shows how these forces will create immense prosperity but also threaten the nation-state, the foundation of global order. As our fragile governments sleepwalk into disaster, we face an existential dilemma: unprecedented harms on one side and the threat of overbearing surveillance on the other. Can we forge a narrow path between catastrophe and dystopia?
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6mentions
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2023–2026years
17% recommend83% neutral
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What Hacker News says
- Classics
- Deep Learning by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville
- The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie
- Designing Machine Learning Systems by Chip Huyen
- The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingo
Fresh look (books published in 2023)
- The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI by Fei-Fei Li
- The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar
- Understanding Deep Learning by Simon J. D. Prince
History of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
- The Turing Guide by Jack Copeland, Jonathan Bowen, Mark Sprevak, Robin Wilson
- The Quest for Artificial Intelligence: A History of Ideas and Achievements by Nils. J Nilsson
- Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence by Pamela McCorduck
AI and Future Studies
- The Year in Tech, 2023: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review (HBR Insights Series) by Harvard Business Review, Beena Ammanath, Andrew Ng, Michael Luca, and Bhaskar Ghosh
- AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan
- The Age of AI: And Our Human Future by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher
AI ethics collection
- AI: Its nature and future by Margaret Boden
- AI Ethics by Mark Coeckelbergh
- The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises Mejias
- Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Kate Crawford
Lastly, a fire-side list of books written completely using AI
- Aum Golly: Poems on Humanity by an Artificial Intelligence by Jukka Aalho
- Aum Golly 2: Illustrated Poems on Humanity by Artificial Intelligence by Jukka Aalho
- 1 the Road by Ross Goodwin
- The Inner Life of an AI: A Memoir by ChatGPT by Forrest Xiao
- Bob The Robot: Exploring the Universe - A Cozy Bedtime Story Produced by Artificial Intelligence by Olle Green
- (Fun!) 50 Ways AI Would End The World: Written by AI by Rob Knott
Find links and descriptions at https://www.turingpost.com/p/books2023
- It is pretty much what Suleyman describes in The Coming Wave as one of the measures we need to take to contain the risks of AI.
What Dario does not mention is that concentration in a few states or companies also poses a risk.
- Mustafa Suleyman says AGI is when a (single) machine can perform every cognitive task better than the best humans. That is significantly different from OpenAIs definition (...when we make enough $$$$$, it's AGI).
Suleyman's book "The Coming Wave" talks about Artificial Capable Intelligence (ACI) - between today's LLMs (== "AI" now) and AGI. AI systems capable of handling a lot of complex tasks across various domains, yet not being fully general. Suleyman argues that ACI is here (2025) and will have huge implications for society. These systems could manage businesses, generate digital content, and even operate core government services -- as is happening on a small scale today.
He also opines that these ACIs give us plenty of frontier to be mined for amazing solutions. I agree, what we have already has not been tapped-out.
His definition, to me, is early ASI. If a program is better than the best humans, then we ask it how to improve itself. That's what ASI is.
The clearest thinker alive today on how to get to AGI is, I think, Yann LeCun. He said, paraphrasing: If you want to build an AGI, do NOT work on LLMs!
Good advice; and go (re-?) read Minsky's "Society of Mind".
- Interesting critical review at:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/90590134-the-coming-wave
>...
>Given that The coming wave assumes that technology comes in waves and these waves are driven by the insiders, the solution it proposes is containment—governments should determine (via regulation) who gets to develop the technology, and what uses they should put the technology to. The assumption seems to be that governments can control access to natural choke points in the technology. One figure the book offers is how around 80% of the sand used in semiconductors comes from a single mine—control the mine and you control much of that aspect of the industry. This is not true though. Nuclear containment, for example, relies more on peer pressure between nation states, than regulation per se. It’s quite possible to build a reactor or bomb in your backyard. The more you scale up these efforts, the more it’s likely that the international community will notice and press you to stop. Squeezing on one of these choke points it more likely to move the activity somewhere else, then enable you to control it.
>...
>At its heart this is a book by and insider arguing that someone is going to develop this world-changing technology, and it should be them.
- I don't see any books on there critical of big tech, in fact it seems rather the opposite??
The Geek Way. By Andrew McAfee. Little, Brown; 336 pages; $30. Pan Macmillan; £22
A technology-and-business guru at mit explains how the mindset that inspires Silicon Valley could be usefully applied in life and in other fields of business, with a focus on teamwork, producing prototypes quickly and avoiding bureaucracy through individual accountability.
Scaling People. By Claire Hughes Johnson. Stripe Press; 480 pages; $30 and £21.99
Good books about the nuts and bolts of management are vanishingly rare. A former executive at Google and Stripe offers a practical guide to everything from giving feedback and delegating to running a meeting and building teams.
The Coming Wave. By Mustafa Suleyman, with Michael Bhaskar. Crown; 352 pages; $32.50. Bodley Head; $32.50
A cogent look at the potential of ai to transform the economy and society, along with the risks of misuse and surveillance. By a co-founder of DeepMind, a leading ai company, and board member of The Economist’s parent company.
- It's from the section of the publication that is entitled: "Books interview/Artificial intelligence (AI)" (the book is The Coming Wave: "This is one aspect of the sunlit uplands of AI; the shadow side is largely what preoccupies Suleyman in his new book, written with the researcher Michael Bhaskar and ominously titled The Coming Wave."). Which based on your review seems to be a coming wave of literal tedium.
