THE COMING WAVE: AI, Power and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemna PB

**A Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller, Sept 2023**
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE FT BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023**

AI. SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY. QUANTUM COMPUTING. Everything is about to change. This is the only book you need to understand this new world.

From the ultimate AI insider, Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, part of Google.

'Fascinating, well-written, and important' Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens
'Deeply rewarding and consistently astonishing' Stephen Fry
'An excellent guide for navigating unprecedented times' Bill Gates

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 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 stunning book by a man at the very centre of the AI revolution' Rory Stewart
'Essential reading' Daniel Kahneman

Publisher: Bodley Head (7 Sept. 2023)
Language: English
Hardcover: 352 pages

Stephen's Review

The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman was billed as a much-needed look into the world of Artificial Intelligence, but it is actually much more. Suleyman, who is an expert in AI as well as the co-founder of DeepMind which is one of the worlds leading AI companies, is someone who sees the big picture of the application of technology. He starts off by describing what the so called ‘Next Wave’ is, that is, the seismic changes that the latest technology with bring to society as a whole. He gives examples of this from industry, education, defence, medicine as well as other areas of life and argues persuasively that the world will change, particularly because of the developments in AI as well as bio tec.

Having introduced the subject, he talks about whether or not such technology can be controlled, a relevant question especially as there has been much discussion in the press recently about the potential danger of AI. What we are presented with by Suleyman is a nuanced response in which he shows that these technologies can indeed be dangerous, especially as they will become widely available not just to governments (both stable and rogue) but also corporations and individuals. However, he states that without allowing them to develop, humanity will be threatened by an equal danger, an ageing population that is no longer able to sustain itself without the efficiencies that come about through technology. He finishes of in chapter 14 with a helpful list of ways in which containment can enable AI and other technology to develop safely. This is an excellent book, very readable and absorbing. While it is not a Christian book it is important for Christians to be informed about one of the most significant issues of our day.