The Coming Wave

The Containment Problem

Revenge Effects

Alan Turing and Gordon Moore could never have predicted, let alone altered the rise of, social media, memes, Wikipedia, or cyberattacks. Decades after their invention, the architects of the atomic bomb could no more stop a nuclear war than Henry Ford could stop a car accident. Technology s unavoidable challenge is that its makers quickly lose control over the path their inventions take once introduced to the world.

Technology exists in a complex, dynamic system (the real world), where second-, third-, and nth-order consequences ripple out unpredictably. What on paper looks flawless can behave differently out in the wild, especially when copied and further adapted downstream. What people actually do with your invention, however well intentioned, can never be guaranteed. Thomas Edison invented the phonograph so people could record their thoughts for posterity and to help the blind. He was horrified when most people just wanted to play music. Alfred Nobel intended his explosives to be used only in mining and railway construction.

Gutenberg just wanted to make money printing Bibles. Yet his press catalyzed the Scientific Revolution and the Reformation, and so became the greatest threat to the Catholic Church since its establishment. Fridge makers didn t aim to create a hole in the ozone layer with chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), just as the creators of the internal combustion and jet engines had no thought of melting the ice caps. In fact early enthusiasts for automobiles argued for their environmental benefits: engines would rid the streets of mountains of horse dung that spread dirt and disease across urban areas. They had no conception of global warming.

Understanding technology is, in part, about trying to understand its unintended consequences, to predict not just positive spillovers but revenge effects. Quite simply, any technology is capable of going wrong, often in ways that directly

Mustafa Suleyman is the CEO of Microsoft AI. Previously he co-founded and was the CEO of Inflection AI, and he also co-founded DeepMind, one of the world's leading AI companies.  

Michael Bhaskar is a writer and publisher, author of The Content Machine, Curation and Human Frontiers.

A heartfelt and candid exploration of what the future may hold for us . . . Eloquently articulated. Reading [The Coming Wave], what came to mind was Gramsci s famous adage that what we need is pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. To his great credit, [Mustafa] Suleyman has both. The Guardian

[A] sweeping look at the future of artificial intelligence and other transformative technologies . . . [Mustafa] Suleyman is intimately familiar with the technologies, companies and personalities at the heart of the A.I. revolution. The New York Times

Dazzling . . . You have by now read a great deal of both hype and doom-mongering on the subject [of AI]. But Suleyman s is the book you cannot afford not to read. . . . Brilliant. Niall Ferguson, Bloomberg

Brilliant . . . confronts what may be the most crucial question of our century: How can we ensure that the breathtaking, fast-paced technological revolutions ahead create the world we want? Eric Lander, founding director, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

An erudite, clear-eyed guide both to the history of radical technological change and to the deep political challenges that lie ahead. Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize winning historian

Extraordinary . . . utterly unmissable. Eric Schmidt, former CEO, Google

Calm, pragmatic, and deeply ethical . . . enthralling reading. Angela Kane, former UN under-secretary-general

Sharp, compassionate, and uncompromising. Qi Lu, former COO, Baidu; former EVP, Microsoft Bing

Truly remarkable, ambitious, and impossible to ignore . . . a persuasively argued tour de force. Nouriel Roubini, professor emeritus, New York University

A practical and optimistic road map. Stuart Russell, professor of computer science, University of California, Berkeley

A panoramic survey and a clarion call to action . . . Everyone should read it.