The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman
View on GoodreadsDeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman's argument that AI and synthetic biology are converging revolutions whose containment is the central technical-political challenge of the century — and that nothing in current institutional architecture is up to it.
Core ideas
- The "containment problem": every general-purpose technology in history has eventually proliferated and democratized; AI plus synthetic biology will follow the same curve, but the destructive ceiling is qualitatively different from previous waves.
- The pessimism-aversion-traps argument: humans are bad at confronting low-probability high-consequence risks, and the AI/biotech doom scenarios get dismissed by the same cognitive moves that always misread tail risk.
- The containment program — international coordination, technical safeguards, distributed power, audit and accountability infrastructure — is sketched but not fully worked out; Suleyman is more confident about the problem than the solution.
Published2023
Pages332
ISBN9780593593950
ReadJun 2025
