Excerpts from
The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskar
Crown Publishing, 2023; audiobook: Penguin Random House Audio, 2023; Book website: The Coming Wave⩘
Ten areas of focus. This is not a complete map, not remotely a set of final answers, but necessary groundwork. My intent is to seed ideas in the hopes of taking the crucial first steps toward containment.
- Safety: An Apollo program for technical safety – Concretely, a good proposal for legislation would be to require that a fixed portion—say, a minimum of 20 percent—of frontier corporate research and development budgets should be directed toward safety efforts, with an obligation to publish material findings to a government working group so that progress can be tracked and shared.
- Audits: Knowledge is power; power is control – Trust comes from transparency. We absolutely need to be able to verify, at every level, the safety, integrity, or uncompromised nature of a system.
- Choke points: Buy time – Buying time in an era of hyper-evolution is invaluable. Time to develop further containment strategies. Time to build in additional safety measures. Time to test that off switch. Time to build improved defensive technologies. Time to shore up the nation-state, regulate better, or even just get that bill passed. Time to knit together international alliances.
- Makers: Critics should build it – More than anyone else, those working on technology need to be actively working to solve the problems described in this book. The burden of proof and the burden of solutions rest on them, on us. People often ask me, given all this, why work in AI and build AI companies and tools? Aside from the huge positive contribution they can make, my answer is that I don't just want to talk about and debate containment. I want to proactively help make it happen, on the front foot, ahead of where the technology is going. Containment needs technologists utterly focused on making it a reality.
- Businesses: Profit + purpose – The need to balance profits with a positive contribution and cutting-edge safety is accepted in principle by all the major U.S. tech groups. Despite the awesome scale of the rewards on offer, entrepreneurs, execs, and employees alike should keep pushing and exploring corporate forms that can better accommodate the challenge of containment.
- Governments: Survive, reform, regulate – Investing in science and technology education and research and supporting domestic tech businesses create a positive feedback loop where governments have a direct stake in state-of-the-art technology, poised to capitalize on benefits and stamp down harms. Put simply, as an equal partner in the creation of the coming wave, governments stand a better chance of steering it toward the overall public interest.
- Alliances: Time for treaties – We need our generation's equivalent of the nuclear treaty to shape a common worldwide approach—in this case not curbing proliferation altogether but setting limits and building frameworks for management and mitigation that, like the wave, cross borders. This would put clear limits on what work is undertaken, mediate among national licensing efforts, and create a framework for reviewing both.
- Culture: Respectfully embracing failure – Embracing failure must be real, not a sound bite. For a start, being utterly open about failures even on uncomfortable topics should be met with praise, not insults. The first thing a technology company should do when encountering any kind of risk, downside, or failure mode is to safely communicate to the wider world. When a lab leaks, the first thing it should do is advertise the fact, not cover it up. The first things other actors in the space—other companies, research groups, governments—need to then do are listen, reflect, offer support, and most crucially learn and actively implement that learning.
- Movements: People power – Change happens when people demand it. The "we" that builds technology is scattered, subject to a mass of competing and different national, commercial, and research incentives. The more the "we" that is subject to it speaks clearly in one voice, a critical public mass agitating for change, demanding an alignment of approaches, the better chance of good outcomes. Anyone anywhere can make a difference. Fundamentally, neither technologists nor governments will solve this problem alone. But together "we" all might.
- The narrow path: The only way is through – Step 10 is about coherence, ensuring that each element works in harmony with the others, that containment is a virtuous circle of mutually reinforcing measures and not a gap-filled cacophony of competing programs. In this sense, containment isn't about this or that specific suggestion but is an emergent phenomenon of their collective interplay, a by-product of societies that learn to manage and mitigate the risks thrown up by Homo technologicus.
