The Coming Wave - book review

The Bonnie Lea Book Club met to discuss Mustafa Suleiman’s book The Coming Wave.  We began our discussion with a question on why did we choose this book on tech’s breakout, and why now? Our group has covered the topic earlier in Machine, Platform Crowd, The Age of AI, and God, Human Animal Machine. But this really IS different. Most of us agreed that Suleyman’s bona fides make him an ideal author, today.  Suleyman is the co-founder of Inflection AI, co-founder of Deep Mind, VP of AI policy at Google, and since the book’s release, recently became CEO of Microsoft AI.  As a pioneer in the field with established experience and deep understanding, he’s an authority who understands and chronicles the stakes riding on the ‘coming wave’. And, his writing is excellent: clear, well presented, and fast paced.

The wave metaphor was framed in historical perspectives, first comparing it to the mile high wave of water following the Yucatán asteroid strike millions of years ago. That was an image! It gets your attention. This was followed by the most consequential examples of technological inflection points for humanity, including fire, the wheel, the printing press, the flying shuttle, steam power, and computers. (As a sidebar, I had been reading Ken Follett’s most recent Pillars of the Earth novel describing effects of the flying shuttle on a late 18th century English village, at the same time as Suleyman referred to this disrupter in his book.  That disruption to late 18th century England happened over decades; this wave - this pace of change - is traveling faster than humanity may be able to absorb.)

There is well founded optimism for ways that artificial intelligence and synthetic biology (perhaps soon - synthetic intelligence and artificial biology) will improve the lives, health, and free time for mankind. We hear of new medical breakthroughs weekly.  Productivity is already running off the charts in some fields; energy costs will drop while capturing externalities such as carbon release, and food costs will come down. While technology has and will profoundly improve our lives, and by so many different metrics, there remains a high possibility today of going sharply net negative.  This is the paradox.

In spite of all the leaps, Suleyman cautions against ‘pessimism aversion’ common among top developers, coupled with the democratization and commoditization of these incredibly powerful tools. Where Google commoditized knowledge, this wave commoditizes intelligence. Cults, lunatics and suicidal states faced high barriers to entry for massive attacks on others in the past; nuclear non-proliferation was one successful effort to limit accessibility when engineering expertise and intellectual capital were scarce.  Today, the tools of destruction include DNA splicing kits, better weapons, anonymous delivery, and no longer subject to any established rules of humanity.   Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese group intent on the Apocalypse (which made headlines releasing sarin gas in Tokyo’s subway decades ago) still operates today.  New destructive tools will be available to every authoritarian regime, idea driven psychopath, and drug addled loser Intent on destroying their own world, taking the rest of us with it.  Containment and regulations are our best defense against this inexorably building wave.  For those, we need time.

Containment

Many of us cited our own efforts toward containment by businesses we are familiar with. (While our group runs the spectrum of political perspectives, all of us have been involved in business careers, across many industries.) Doug cited that use of AI agents in energy distribution is extensive in client data analysis and other applications; his own use however is limited to those pre-vetted by the company.  Rob L spoke of multiple layers of security and compliance already common in finance, now coupled with exuberance over economic opportunities.  Rob R, in software services, talked about speed on the one hand, and reliance by many businesses on old - and vulnerable? - legacy systems on the other.  Chuck commented that airlines’ maximum focus on safety may be an industrial outlier that other businesses could learn from in this initiative. Bill, our writer, validated easy availability of productivity improvements right at our fingertips.  Suleyman’s perspective is that containment has never succeeded in the past in the face of lower cost and broader access. That said, steps taken to silo information, conduct peer audits, share failures openly and to air-gap new models, are all critical steps to containing runaway agents smarter than we. 

Another consequence of incredible productivity gains will be the effect on so many jobs.  Goldman Sachs recently estimated that there will be 33 million jobs lost over the next 10 years, many in knowledge-based positions, but also in areas already in development, including drivers, which make up the top job in every state in the country.  When robots replace the drivers and AI agents replace sales or knowledge based service organizations, disruption will be seismic. 

Regulation

We all agreed that governments are not up to the task of drafting thoughtful, well informed, effective regulation, quickly.  All these are required, yet the politicization of everything has rendered government consistently poor at all these requirements. Even an industry-based forum organized by Suleyman failed to launch  over one member’s board membership at a conservative think tank. Governments face their own crises, including declining trust and polarized politics; government workers are under-skilled and unprepared for the fast moving complex challenges ahead.

But a groundswell of cultural waves may offer some hope. Among top developers a new sense of responsibility and caution is emerging.  In the political theater, the Senate discussed whether Tik-Tok should remain under China’s control; and the Chips Act will limit China’s development of advanced nanochips required by the wave.  And yet in a move reflective of underlying economic incentives, “Nvidia recently retroactively tweaked its most advanced chips to evade the sanctions“ (to continue to ship high value chips to China).  So much for industrial leadership.

Taxes will probably have to change to reflect new sources of production, and thus revenue. Today the marginal tax on labor is well over 40% for productive workers, but less than 10% on capital. The latter works 24/7 and is more productive and ruthless than labor in many tasks already; and that trend is accelerating.  Should tax policy reflect that in a world where innovation is so important to improved standards of living, that slowing innovation might be necessary, or even a good thing?  Our society is dependent on economic growth and increased productivity, which are in turn predicated on the introduction and diffusion of new technologies. The crisis of the decline of working age populations demands new technologies to maintain living standards. China has one of the lowest birth rates in the world; its future is unsustainable without new technology. Ours is not far behind.  Standstill also spells disaster.

The most disturbing effect I found is neither bio-apocalyptic nor job related, but broader to society's functioning, specifically the increasingly narrow path of the modern democratic nation-state. Here within the nation-state we operate under a recognized social contract where the government retains a monopoly on violence, and the governed cede that knowingly for protection of property, for physical safety and other existential risks addressed by laws within borders. This contract is in jeopardy when foreign criminals hold our companies hostage through ransomware, AI agents penetrate our financial accounts, and digital deep fakes impact elections.   Alternatives emerge on two sides of this narrow path:  One is an increasingly intrusive surveillance state, well on its way in China, Venezuela, and other autocratic regimes. On the other side of this is chaos, as we see in Somalia, Libya, Haiti and other failed states. Suleiman mentions that his father was from Syria, warning that failed states are more savage and incomprehensibly brutal than we in a functioning state can imagine.  While today’s younger generations seem more inured to ubiquitous surveillance, extrapolating its rise and breadth leads somewhere dark for the rest of us. Can we stay on this increasingly knife edged path as the Wave crashes over us? 

An additional thought: LLMs (Large Language Models) have already hacked humanity's operating system: we communicate with words. Clever humans train on millions of words across a lifetime. LLMs train on trillions of words, from hundreds of languages and disparate cultures, orders of magnitude higher than any human.  Ideas are framed, articulated and justified with words we know. A skeptic of ideas, especially those ideas cooked up independently of personal experiences, I wonder if LLMs’ facility with words risks a world run by Demons.

The book closes with Ten Steps Toward Containment which I won’t reveal here (read the book - or just ask Groq, Chat-GPT, Gemini or any other LaMDA) but this revealed some weakness in this book's solutions.  Suleyman seems to convey an irrational optimism alongside a more well informed pessimism.  Contradictions to his earlier ‘realities” may undercut his arguments.  He advocates clearly for better leadership, more collaboration, and a clarion call to gain time.   Read this still relevant (April 2024) book for what you might do to endure The Coming Wave. Because Nothing is going to stop it.