Hello and Welcome. This page is a collection of 27 quotes that I liked and saved while reading The Coming Wave book by Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar. I hope you will like them too.
By the way, I am Deepak Kundu, an avid book reader, quotes collector and blogger.
The Coming Wave 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- AI systems run retail warehouses, suggest how to write emails or what songs you might like, detect fraud, write stories, diagnose rare conditions, and simulate the impact of climate change. They feature in shops, schools, hospitals, offices, courts, and homes. You already interact many times a day with AI; soon it will be many more, and almost everywhere it will make experiences more efficient, faster, more useful, and frictionless. AI is already here. But it’s far from done.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Global challenges are reaching a critical threshold. Rampant inflation. Energy shortages. Stagnant incomes. A breakdown of trust. Waves of populism. None of the old visions from either left or right seem to offer convincing answers, yet better options seem in short supply. It would take a brave, or possibly delusional, person to argue that all is well, that there are not serious forces of populism, anger, and dysfunction raging across societies – all despite the highest living standards the world has ever known.
- Pause for a moment and imagine a world where robots with the dexterity of human beings that can be “programmed” in plain English are available at the price of a microwave. Can you begin to think of all the uses to which such a valuable technology will be put? Or how widely such tools will be adopted? Who or rather what will be looking after your elderly mother at a care home? How will you order food at a restaurant, and who will bring it to your table? What does law enforcement look like in a hostage situation? Who will staff orchards at harvest time? How will military and paramilitary planners react when no humans need be sent into combat? What will the sports field be like when kids are training at football? What will your window cleaner look like? Who owns all this hardware and IP, who controls it, what safeguards are in place for if – when – it goes wrong? Imagine all this, and it implies a very different political economy from today’s.
- 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.
- Modern civilization writes checks only continual technological development can cash. Our entire edifice is premised on the idea of long-term economic growth. And long-term economic growth is ultimately premised on the introduction and diffusion of new technologies. Whether it’s the expectation of consuming more for less or getting ever more public service without paying more tax, or the idea that we can unsustainably degrade the environment while life keeps getting better indefinitely, the bargain – arguably the grand bargain itself – needs technology.
- 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.
- Governments fight the last war, the last pandemic, regulate the last wave. Regulators regulate for things they can anticipate. This, meanwhile, is an age of surprises. .
- Corporations traditionally have a single, unequivocal goal: shareholder returns. For the most part, that means the unimpeded development of new technologies. While this has been a powerful engine of progress in history, it’s poorly suited to containment of the coming wave. I believe that figuring out ways to reconcile profit and social purpose in hybrid organizational structures is the best way to navigate the challenges that lie ahead, but making it work in practice is incredibly hard.
- 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.
- Pause before building, pause before publishing, review everything, sit down and hammer out the second-, third-, nth-order impacts. Find all the evidence and look at it coldly. Relentlessly course correct. Be willing to stop. Do all this not just because it says so in some form, but because it’s what’s right, it’s what technologists do.
- When people talk about technology – myself included – they often make an argument like the following. Because we build technology, we can fix the problems it creates. This is true in the broadest sense. But, the problem is, there is no functional “we” here. There is no consensus and no agreed mechanism for forming a consensus. There actually is no “we,” and there is certainly no lever any “we” can pull. This should be obvious, but it bears repeating. Even the president of the United States has remarkably limited powers to alter the course of, say, the internet.
- 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.
- 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.