Ali's Reviews > The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

The Coming Wave is Homo Technologicus written in the tone of Harari’s Homo Deus and Toffler’s Third Wave. Suleyman’s selective reading of the past industrial and technological shifts is a bit problematic as progress in technology happens in tiny increments not in tsunamic waves. Maybe Suleyman means the following economic and social effects as the coming wave but even then his pessimistic speculation doesn’t help the cause.

In foreseeing proliferation of AI in the next decade, Suleyman calls governments for action (regulation) to contain AI. This approach is also problematic as nations states are not very effective in regulating any technology, it is mostly the platform owners that do the containment as evidenced in case of social media in pandemic or financial crisis, where there is little incentive until it reaches a state of disaster. Suleyman himself resigned from Google shortly after selling his startup (as cofounder of DeepMind) to the tech conglomerate mainly complaining about bureaucracy. Chapter 14 towards the end offers ten steps for containment but concludes later that containment is virtually impossible. Not sure I should read this cynically as a sales pitch for another startup offering consultancy to nation states or just assume maybe some parts were written by an LLM having hallucinations :)

All in all, I think AI is only mirroring our own flaws (as seen in racism and sexism of some chatbots) so it is not the technology we need to contain, but the people, through proper training and critical thinking.