The Coming Wave: AI, Power and the 21st Century's Greatest Dilemma

AI. Synthetic biology. Quantum computing. Everything is about to change. This is the book you need to understand this new world. From the ultimate AI insider, Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, part of Google. Soon you will live surrounded by AIs. They will organise your life, operate your businesses, and run core government services. You will live in a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy. None of us are prepared. As co-founder of the pioneering AI company DeepMind, Mustafa Suleyman has been at the centre of this revolution. The coming decade, he argues, will be defined by this wave of powerful, fast-proliferating new technologies. In The Coming Wave, Suleyman shows how these forces will create immense prosperity but also threaten the nation-state, the foundation of global order. As our fragile governments sleepwalk into disaster, we face an existential dilemma: unprecedented harms arising from unchecked openness on one side and the threat of overbearing surveillance on the other. Can we forge a narrow path between catastrophe and dystopia? This ground-breaking book from the ultimate AI insider establishes 'the containment problem' - the task of maintaining control over powerful technologies - as the essential challenge of our age. A stark and urgent warning on the unprecedented risks that a wave of fast-developing technologies poses to global order, and how we might contain them while we have the chance.