Hello and Welcome. This page is a collection of 23 quotes from The Coming Wave book by Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar that I liked and saved while reading this book. I hope you will like these quotes too.
By the way, I am Deepak Kundu, an avid book reader, quotes collector and blogger.
Quotes on Technology
- Technologically stagnant societies are historically unstable and prone to collapse. Eventually, they lose the capacity to solve problems, to progress.
- This is the core dilemma: that, sooner or later, a powerful generation of technology leads humanity toward either catastrophic or dystopian outcomes. I believe this is the great meta-problem of the twenty-first century.
- Technology has a clear, inevitable trajectory: mass diffusion in great roiling waves. This is true from the earliest flint and bone tools to the latest AI models. As science produces new discoveries, people apply these insights to make cheaper food, better goods, and more efficient transport. Over time demand for the best new products and services grows, driving competition to produce cheaper versions bursting with yet more features. This in turn drives yet more demand for the technologies that create them, and they also become easier and cheaper to use. Costs continue to fall. Capabilities rise. Experiment, repeat, use. Grow, improve, adapt. This is the inescapable evolutionary nature of technology.
- 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.
- For most of history, the challenge of technology lay in creating and unleashing its power. That has now flipped: the challenge of technology today is about containing its unleashed power, ensuring it continues to serve us and our planet.
- Technology is now an indispensable mega-system infusing every aspect of daily life, society, and the economy. No one can do without it. Entrenched incentives are in place for more of it, radically more. No one is in full control of what it does or where it goes next. This is not some far-out philosophical concept or extreme determinist scenario or wild-eyed California technocentrism. It is a basic description of the world we all inhabit, indeed the world we have inhabited for quite some time. In this sense it feels like technology is, to use an unforgiving image, one big slime mold slowly rolling toward an inevitable future, with billions of tiny contributions being made by each individual academic or entrepreneur without any coordination or ability to resist. Powerful attractors pull it on. Where blocks appear, gaps open elsewhere, and the whole rolls forward.
- The idea that technology alone can solve social and political problems is a dangerous delusion. But the idea that they can be solved without technology is also wrongheaded.
- For all its harms, downsides, and unintended consequences, technology’s contribution to date has been overwhelmingly net positive. After all, even technology’s harshest critics are generally happy to use a kettle, take an aspirin, watch TV, and ride on the subway. For every gun there is a dose of lifesaving penicillin; for every scrap of misinformation, a truth is quickly uncovered. And yet somehow, from von Neumann and his peers on, I and many others are anxious about the long-term trajectory. My profound worry is that technology is demonstrating the real possibility to sharply move net negative, that we don’t have answers to arrest this shift, and that we’re locked in with no way out.
- Technology is central to how the future will unfold – that’s undoubtedly true – but technology is not the point of the future, or what’s really at stake. We are.
- Technology should amplify the best of us, open new pathways for creativity and cooperation, work with the human grain of our lives and most precious relationships. It should make us happier and healthier, the ultimate complement to human endeavor and life well lived – but always on our terms, democratically decided, publicly debated, with benefits widely distributed.
Quotes on Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- The future of AI is, at least in one sense, fairly easy to predict. Over the next five years, vast resources will continue to be invested. Some of the smartest people on the planet are working on these problems. Orders of magnitude more computation will train the top models. All of this will lead to more dramatic leaps forward, including breakthroughs toward AI that can imagine, reason, plan, and exhibit common sense. It won’t be long before AI can transfer what it “knows” from one domain to another, seamlessly, as humans do.
- AI is far deeper and more powerful than just another technology. The risk isn’t in overhyping it; it’s rather in missing the magnitude of the coming wave. It’s not just a tool or platform but a transformative meta-technology, the technology behind technology and everything else, itself a maker of tools and platforms, not just a system but a generator of systems of any and all kinds. Step back and consider what’s happening on the scale of a decade or a century. We really are at a turning point in the history of humanity.
- If AI is indeed the new electricity, then like electricity it will be an on-demand utility that permeates and powers almost every aspect of daily life, society, the economy: a general-purpose technology embedded everywhere. Containing something like this is always going to be much harder than containing a constrained, single-task technology, stuck in a tiny niche with few dependencies.
Other Quotes
- Humanity’s quest to improve – ourselves, our lot, our abilities, and our influence over our environment – has powered a relentless evolution of ideas and creation. Invention is an unfolding, sprawling, emergent process driven by self-organizing and highly competitive inventors, academics, entrepreneurs, and leaders, each surging forward with their own motivations. This ecosystem of invention defaults to expansion. It is the inherent nature of technology.
- Humans are an innately technological species. From the very beginning, we are never separate from the waves of technology we create. We evolve together, in symbiosis.
- As the power of our tools grows exponentially and as access to them rapidly increases, so do the potential harms, an unfolding labyrinth of consequences that no one can fully predict or forestall. One day someone is writing equations on a blackboard or fiddling with a prototype in the garage, work seemingly irrelevant to the wider world. Within decades, it has produced existential questions for humanity.
- New technologies supersede multiple predecessors. Just as electricity did the work of candles and steam engines alike, so smartphones replaced satnavs, cameras, PDAs, computers, and telephones (and invented entirely new classes of experience: apps). As technologies let you do more, for less, their appeal only grows, along with their adoption.
- Welcome to the age of biomachines and biocomputers, where strands of DNA perform calculations and artificial cells are put to work. Where machines come alive. Welcome to the age of synthetic life.
- Emerging technologies have always created new threats, redistributed power, and removed barriers to entry. Cannons meant a small force could destroy castles and level armies. A few colonial soldiers with advanced weapons could massacre thousands of indigenous people. The printing press meant a single workshop might produce thousands of pamphlets – spreading ideas with an ease that medieval monks copying books by hand could scarcely fathom. Steam power enabled single factories to do the work of entire towns. The internet took this capacity to a new peak: a single tweet or image might travel the world in minutes or seconds; a single algorithm could help a small start-up to grow into a vast, globe-spanning corporation.
- Democracies are built on trust. People need to trust that government officials, militaries, and other elites will not abuse their dominant positions. Everyone relies on the trust that taxes will be paid, rules honored, the interests of the whole put ahead of individuals. Without trust, from the ballot box to the tax return, from the local council to the judiciary, societies are in trouble.
- Technology has already created modern empires, of a sort. The coming wave rapidly accelerates this trend, putting immense power and riches into the hands of those who create and control it. New, private interests will step into spaces vacated by overstretched and strained governments. This process won’t, like the East India Company, come enforced at the barrel of a musket, but it will, exactly like the East India Company, create private companies with the scale, reach, and power of governments. Those companies with the cash, expertise, and distribution to take advantage of the coming wave, to greatly augment their intelligence and simultaneously extend their reach, will see colossal gains.
- In the twenty-first century it doesn’t make sense to have cabinet positions addressing matters like the economy, education, security, and defense without a similarly empowered and democratically accountable position in technology. The secretary or minister for emerging technology is still a governmental rarity. It shouldn’t be; every country should have one in the era of the coming wave.
- The world of tomorrow will be a place where factories grow their outputs locally, almost like farms in previous eras. Drones and robots will be ubiquitous. The human genome will be an elastic thing, and so, necessarily, will be the very idea of the human itself. Life spans will be much longer than our own. Many will disappear almost entirely into virtual worlds. What once seemed a settled social contract will contort and buckle. Learning to live and thrive in this world is going to be a part of everyone’s life in the twenty-first century.