The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma

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Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared—this must someday become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth.

—Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (1878)

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma is an intriguing history of artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology (SynBio) that also affords a lay reader a sense of the state of the art in both fields. Suleyman’s authority on each is sound, as he directly contributed to both as co-founder of Google’s DeepMind. An engaging and tightly organized read, The Coming Wave focuses on what Suleyman describes as the “containment problem”—that is, how do we contain the unforeseen consequences arising from the radical expansion of individual and group power promised by AI and SynBio?

A driver of his thesis is the recognition that the decreasing costs of each technological domain fuel innovation just as much, if not more so, than scientific breakthroughs. This fuel magnifies the power of four key features that Suleyman claims make containment difficult. The technological features in question are inherently general and omni-use, are likely to hyper-evolve, make an asymmetric impact, and are increasingly autonomous. According to Suleyman, reinforcing the nation-state is our best hope of containment. We assess each feature of his argument in turn. Suleyman is spot on in his assessment of the containment problem. However, we think Suleyman’s focus on the nation-state as the only way to contain these waves is short of the mark and inconsistent with his own hopeful theme.

Suleyman opens The Coming Wave by citing our shared myths about diluvian Armageddons. For many, this strikes the right note on the risks associated with the coming waves of AI and SynBio: they present existential threats to our lives and values. Suleyman’s argument is at home in this space, and he advocates for an active approach to managing the risks imposed by the coming waves of powerful new technologies in a way consistent with our values. A careful read reveals a Nietzschean confidence in our values as a solution to these existential risks. To be sure there is much in this book that strikes a confident chord: we have the power—as individuals and groups—to take these technologies in hand and express our values in action. We must ask, though, why does Suleyman settle on the nation-state as the way to achieve ends that are so clearly counter to state power?

Suleyman’s coming wave is really the cumulative effect of diverse general- purpose technologies that will generate profound, asymmetric societal implications. For example, the invention of the transistor in the mid-20th century led to mighty computing devices in our pockets today. Powerful personal computing, coupled with the Internet, have led to a hyper evolution converging in cases like social media, which may appear mundane but can consume the personal attention of so many individuals. The impact of social media transcends virtual spaces to impact the physical world—for example, people who organized through social media have amassed influence and set off massive changes such as the Arab Spring.

What is new about such convergences is that technologies like AI will enable seismic advances in terms of what individuals and groups can accomplish. For example, around the same time as the publication of The Coming Wave, large language models (LLM) and other generative AI technologies have not only become household discussions but have also unleashed a new paradigm of knowledge work with implications for the scientific community, too. For example, LLMs have been used in conjunction with chemistry tools to perform tasks in organic synthesis, drug discovery, and material design.

SynBio, the ultimate technology for life, can see the same interactive effects of smaller waves. For example, California Institute of Technology Professor Francis Arnold, Nobel laureate and co-chair of the President’s Science Advisory Council, developed enzymes that produce novel chemical reactions to bind silicon and carbon for electronics applications, making the method 15 times more energy efficient compared to standard industrial alternatives.

Suleyman notes other SynBio coming waves, such as the 2016 startup company Solugen’s Bioforge that pulls carbon out of the atmosphere and could result in a carbon negative factory. Similarly, companies like LanzaTech harness genetically modified bacteria to take steel mill waste and repurpose it. Research at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory foreshadows the wider wave of enabling energy technology that could underpin further advancements of AI and SynBio. In 2022, NIF used inertial confinement, compressing hydrogen-rich pellets, to create a fusion reaction of hydrogen ions colliding to create helium resulting in net positive energy. Per Suleyman’s count, now there are 30 fusion startups, and this could be a holy grail of energy production, crucial to ev- erything from AI, SynBio, and quantum computing.

Even with AI’s and SynBio’s positive impacts on productivity and sustainable energy, Suleyman urges us to adopt containment mechanisms. For him, these include regulation, better technical safety, new governance and ownership models, and new modes of accountability and transparency as necessary levers for decreasing the potential negative impacts of coming wave technologies. It is here that readers of Joint Force Quarterly will find policy and security implications. These technologies have clear relevance to the military, in terms of anticipating what near-peers or smaller adversaries are capable of unleashing on the battlefield. For example, Suleyman notes China’s explicit AI dominance, citing Tsinghua University’s publishing of AI-related articles exceeding the United States by a factor of nearly 4.5 times. The Chinese Micius, a quantum satellite project, has enhanced the security of Chinese communication systems beyond traditional computing encryptions, which are still theoretically vulnerable to hacking.

This surge in fundamental technologies is omni-use and carries over to other emerging technologies, for example, cleantech and bioscience. There is a further turn of the screw because one gets the sense from reading The Coming Wave that terms like near-peer and the corresponding conception of the security environment are becoming obsolete. In short, most anyone could eventually make use of Chinese or American ad- vancements, and this means a sweeping democratization of power that no one nation-state should rationally expect to contain alone.

This is the inconvenient fact that makes us suspect that Suleyman’s focus on the nation-state belies his real point— and the key policy implication that containment must be international. To be sure, he claims that “the logic of nation-states is at times painfully simple and yet utterly inevitable.” But this is not a claim that the nation-state is inevitable. What is inevitable are the logical conclusions of decisionmakers who try and see the world from the perspective of the nation-state. The logic of competition is entailed by our Westphalian order, but that entailment follows from a choice we are free to make—we could choose detente with other groups and focus on cooperation.

However, the policy implications of this choice require movement away from nation-state sovereignty. In fact, Suleyman’s discussion is often evocative of different ways—ways antithetical to state power—that we could use to hold groups and individuals accountable for how their use of powerful and fast-evolving new technologies transgress or reinforce our values. This is the most charitable read of Suleyman’s argument because the cooperation needed to contain the flood is against the logic of anti-diluvian nation-states. To contain, we must cooperate; to cooperate, we must evolve nation-states that are capable of international solutions. There are a range of options here: from literal international government to lesser measures that still involve sacrificing state power in favor of cooperation.

We think a careful read of Suleyman suggests just this point, and for that reason we recommend that the joint force find a spot for the book on its shelf. But Suleyman stops short of a more hopeful, and more explicit, vision of the future that is better for people—in terms of respecting rights, avoiding suffering, and fostering beauty—as opposed to reinforcing nation-states and their sovereignty. JFQ