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Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman
Book Reviewed by:An urgent warning of the unprecedented risks that AI and other fast-developing technologies pose to global order, and how we might contain them while we have the chance—from a co-founder of the pioneering artificial intelligence company DeepMind
We are approaching a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change.
Soon you will live surrounded by AIs. They will organise your life, operate your business, 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, part of Google, 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 on one side, the threat of overbearing surveillance on the other.
Can we forge a narrow path between catastrophe and dystopia?
This groundbreaking 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.
Including such prescriptions as improved technical safety, audits, governmental regulations and international alliances, Suleyman is cautiously optimistic about the ability of the collective "we" of humanity to fundamentally change society. However, Suleyman's recurring mantra that containment might not look possible but must be inevitably leaves the reader feeling less than sanguine about sweeping change in a fragmented, fraught world. The Coming Wave is necessary reading, if only to understand the ways technology shapes societies and often directs the course of history. Elegantly written, impeccably researched and passionately argued, this is the technological wake-up call for the 21st century...continued
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(Reviewed by Peggy Kurkowski).
Artificial intelligence grabbed the headlines in November 2022 when OpenAI introduced ChatGPT to the world (GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer). A large language model (LLM) designed to interact informally with a human interlocutor, ChatGPT has since released three more generations on the foundation model, with GPT-4's release in March 2023 marking its most impressive advances yet. "With broad general knowledge and domain expertise, GPT-4 can follow complex instructions in natural language and solve difficult problems with accuracy," according to OpenAI.
ChatGPT-4's capabilities are truly staggering. Now able to work with images, audio and code, this tool can compose poetry, create business plans, suggest...
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When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign...
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Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States
Deeply researched and highly relevant.
