The Coming Wave

A.I., Power and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma

By: Mustafa Suleyman, Michael Bhaskar

Narrated by: Mustafa Suleyman

Length: 11 hrs and 48 mins

Publisher's summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

**A Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller, Sept 2023**

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE FT BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023**

AI. SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY. QUANTUM COMPUTING. Everything is about to change. This is the only book you need to understand this new world.

From the ultimate AI insider, Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, part of Google.

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?

This ground-breaking book from the ultimate AI insider establishes 'the containment problem' - the task of maintaining control over powerful technologies - as the essential challenge of our age.

©2023 Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

'Fascinating, well-written, and important' Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens

'Deeply rewarding and consistently astonishing' Stephen Fry

'An excellent guide for navigating unprecedented times' Bill Gates

An important call to action for our future world

Mustafa Suleyman is uncovering the depths of the revolution that technology brings to our doorstep and offers some important lessons. This is Yuval Noah Harari wanna be book, with practical implications.

Valiant start to a paradigm shift

There aren’t too many books that encapsulate the urgent issues facing human kind, relating to the rise of LLMs and all but inevitable reality of Artificial General Intelligence, followed by Super Intelligence.

The decades long AI winter where hardly any progress occurred, while science fiction has raced ahead with imagination, has only hampered the urgency to understand the coming wave. Too soon for neglect, the enormous impact on our species will be mind boggling. While some would compare the AI to the revolution of the internet, others take a further step and compare it to the Industrial Revolution, but no one can fully comprehend this technology has the potential to be more disruptive than farming. This is where we are and only a handful of people really know what’s going on.

The author is one such expert, and for that reason this book should be a must read for everyone. Although an optimist, and who wouldn’t be, with literally all possibilities open for improving all aspects of life, he highlights the coming changes and its forceable impacts on society, unintended consequences and possible but unlikely remedies to avoid catastrophe. Obviously what we don’t know is what will really matter, and unfortunately for that reason there is not much to write about. The unknown unknowns, are all but certain and carry inevitable dangers, possibly existential.

The book is easy to follow, but dare I say might just be outdated. Since this book, ChatGPT4 has evolved into something that even the creators are struggling to get their heads around. Apparently AGI has been achieved internally and the only clue we have is the near breakdown of potentially the most powerful company in the world for reasons too secret and dangerous to disclose to the public. Keyword Q* is all we have to go with.

crítico e necessário

análise crítica e uma visão privilegiada das possíveis evoluções da onda de novas tecnologias que já estão nos impactando

The coming futures

It's an interesting proposal on the risk we should look after in the inevitable process we are about to face

Very relevant topic.

Authoritative, Comprehensive coverage. From a man who knows what he is talking about. Must listen/ read

Surprisingly insightful

99.9% of us have no idea how AI and synthetic biology are developing right under our noses. The implications are profound and inescapable. This book is critical reading for everyone who wants to get an idea of some scenarios that awaits humanity

Timely

Interesting to hear the perspectives of one of the key players in the field.