What is it with wave metaphors? Technological determinists – people who believe that technology drives history – love them. Think of Alvin Toffler, who saw the history of civilisation as a succession of three such waves (agricultural, industrial and post-industrial). The idea is of immense power, unstoppable, moving inexorably towards us as we cower before its immensity, much as the dinosaurs must have done when they saw the mile-high tsunami heading in their direction.
Mustafa Suleyman says he is not a determinist, but at times he sounds awfully like one. “At its heart,” he writes at one point, “technology emerges to fill human needs. If people have powerful reasons to build and use it, it will get built and used. Yet in most discussions of technology people still get stuck on what it is, forgetting why it was created in the first place. This is not about some innate techno-determinism. This is about what it means to be human.”
The oncoming wave in his title is “defined by two core technologies: artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology”, and it’s the conjunction of the two that makes it intriguing and original. Together, he thinks, these two “will usher in a new dawn for humanity, creating wealth and surplus unlike anything ever seen. And yet their rapid proliferation also threatens to empower a diverse array of bad actors to unleash disruption, instability, and even catastrophe on an unimaginable scale.” Our future, apparently, “both depends on these technologies and is imperilled by them”.
Once you get past this hyperbolic prologue, the book settles down into a serious exploration of what the future might hold for us all. Suleyman’s credentials for the task are good: he was co-founder of DeepMind, arguably the smartest AI company around, but he has also worked in the charitable sector, in British local government, and at Google – where he worked on the company’s large language models (LLMs) and the thankless task of trying to persuade the search behemoth to take ethics seriously. Although he hasn’t worked in molecular biology, his account of DNA sequencing, gene editing and the design and manufacture of new genetic products seems well-informed and supports his case that AI and computational biology are the twin challenges that will soon confront societies.
Translated into terms of technological waves, Suleyman’s evolutionary sequence looks like this: humans first used technology to operate on the physical world – the world of atoms; then they worked on bits, the units of information; and now they are working on creating new forms of biological life. Or, to put it more crudely: first we invented mechanical muscles; now we are messing with our brains; and soon we will be doing this with our biology. However you portray it, though, the reality is that we are in the process of creating monsters that we have no idea how to manage.
The most refreshing feature of the book is the way it candidly addresses questions that are generally not discussed in polite society. They are all questions to which, at the moment, we have no answers, so any discussion of them would inevitably be depressing. So we avoid them. This “pessimism aversion” is Suleyman’s bete noire; he regards it as a luxury we can no longer afford as technological progress becomes exponential. We need to get real about the future that might loom if we do not get our (human and democratic) act together.
He’s right. So what’s needed? The conventional answer is regulation, which Suleyman rightly regards as woefully inadequate for the scale of the challenge. Regulation is the last refuge of an exhausted mind: something that kind-of worked in the past, and so will hopefully work again – in an entirely transformed context. Instead, he proposes “containment”, a term with echoes of the cold war and George Kennan’s strategy for keeping Soviet power under control in the postwar era – requiring long-term, patient, firm and vigilant restriction of the adversary’s expansionist tendencies.
“Containing technology,” Suleyman writes, “needs to be a much more fundamental programme, a balance of power not between competing actors but between humans and our tools. It’s a necessary prerequisite for the survival of our species over the next century. Containment encompasses regulation, better technical safety, new governance and ownership models, new modes of accountability and transparency, all as necessary (but not sufficient) precursors to safer technology. It’s an overarching lock uniting cutting-edge engineering, ethical values, and government regulation.”
There is good news and bad news here. What is welcome is the way the book addresses the problem we have with modern technology at the right level – which is many notches above our current uncoordinated, scattergun approach.
The bad news is that Suleyman’s solution is effectively a utopian dream. He knows this, which is why there is an anguished undertone in the final chapters of the book. On the one hand, containment is essential if Homo technologicus is to make it through to the next century (climate crisis permitting). On the other hand, it looks like an impossible dream: “how to contain the seemingly uncontainable”.
Still, to his credit, he sticks to his guns to the end, winding up with a 10-step plan for containment, all of which makes sense and is eloquently articulated. Reading it, 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, Suleyman has both.
The Coming Wave: AI, Power and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman is published by Bodley Head (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
