The Coming Wave: AI, Power and Our Future: The instant Sunday Times bestseller from the ultimate AI insider

I made the awful mistake of reading this directly after Huxley's A Brave New World. They pair well together if you intend to give up on humanity and go live in the woods.The tone is serious, invoking images of plausible apocalyptic and dystopian hypothetical futures in turn.Yet it manages still to be constructive, a guide to the possible near-future, a warning to be sure, but never merely that. Suleyman's proximity to the subject is evident and well-used, as he shares his personal experience in directly with the challenges that he presents, as well in as the history of his field and the development of the alignment/containment problem that he describes. This should be essential reading for policy makers and technologists alike, the world over. I can't recommend this book enough. Just don't read Huxley first.

There were two things that drew me to reading The Coming Wave. Firstly, that it was written by someone actively involved in the development of AI over the last decade. The second was that having only been released last autumn, it hopefully wasn't too out of date yet. At the current rate of progress, this isn't a given.There are two main technologies that Mustafa Suleyman tells us are propelling the coming wave, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Synthetic Biology (SynBio). He also touches a little on Quantum Computing in relation to these topics, but if you are after a more in-depth view on this subject, you should really look elsewhere.At £10.99 for the Kindle edition, this isn't a cheap book. In fact, I don't think I've ever paid that much for a non-technical eBook before. However, due to its content a book of this type is likely to date very quickly, so the publishers probably want a return on their investment sooner rather than later.Suleyman accepts some liability for what is about to be unleashed and is part of a growing voice wanting to temper the rapid changes happening around us. Yes, the potential benefits of AI and SynBio are likely to be life changing, but there will always be downsides. From out-of-control AIs and acts of bioterrorism to the breakdown of the nation state as we know it.This leads to the latter part of the book which tries to look ahead to the short and medium term. It's really a thought exercise on approaches for reining in these technologies. How can we get the benefits without the potentially devastating drawbacks? How can we ensure bad actors don't gain access to the more powerful AIs?It's an eye-opening book in many ways, although it does take the shine off the current advances in AI to a degree. Whilst I'd love to think that there could be a global consensus on how to deal with these technologies going forward, the sceptic in me thinks it won't happen until something untoward forces us to.Would I recommend reading The Coming Wave? Yes, I would. Overall, it's an insightful and thought provoking read, that doesn't require any prior knowledge of AI or SynBio. However, be prepared to slog though some sections where the author seems to get bogged down. Oh, and try not to worry about our potential dystopian future too much.

This is the book that everyone with an interest in the future should read. The book is written by an author who understands is subject from first hand experience and the implications of the changes AI will bring in the near future.Explaining the changes, some for the better in medical advances and some that will possibly be of concern when science invents computers that are self learning faster than we can understand.

My beef with AI research for the last 40 years has been that they often seem to mistake "humans exhibit some general intelligence" with "general intelligence will exhibit humanlike traits". If you could make an AI that was as generally intelligent as a squirrel, you'd deserve the Nobel Prize. Instead, thanks to the Turing Test, we keep looking at conversation. And GPT-4 has shown us some very interesting things about intelligence, but mostly how well you can get by without thinking at all. Suleyman proposes a new "Turing Test" for what he calls "artificial capable intelligence", but it's essentially a test of how good an AI is at behaving like an entrepreneurial investor. If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.Anyway, what's the book like? Well, I found the first half infuriatingly superficial. It's a supermarket dash through all the ways AI will be changing our lives, but never in any real depth. I thought You Look Like A Thing And I Love You was a bit lacking in meat, but it was The First Three Minutes compared to this. In fact, if you asked ChatGPT to write a book about the subject, it would look a lot like this.It gets better halfway through (Part III onwards) when the author is on firmer ground with an interesting discussion of AI's impact on society and politics. If the book had started there it would have been half as long and twice as good.On the other hand, I never normally read these "Times bestseller" pop tech books. I mentioned it to a friend and he said he loved it -- possibly because you can skim-read it in a hour or two and then have something to say at a dinner party. Intellectually, though, you'll be hungry again a couple of hours later.

Enjoyed this, good overview, relatively balanced considering this guy is a vested interest, and what's shocking is how little most people know about what's unfolding - when the reality is everyone should to be prepared mentally for a possible future dominated by ML/AI etc.

Easy to read and explained comprehensively

Interesting read with good analysis - the world is changing.

This is a thoughtful, and deep review of risks associated with (particularly) AI and synthetic biology.First positive about the benefits, then describing the downsides, and concluding with a possible route through the perilous hazards...Brilliant!!But it's not going to be easy!