The Coming Wave: The instant Sunday Times bestseller from the ultimate AI insider

We need to follow the chain of reasoning to its logical end point, without fear of where that might lead,

Technologies can fail in the mundane sense of not working: the engine doesn’t start; the bridge falls down. But they can also fail in a wider sense. If technology damages human lives, or produces societies filled with harm, or renders them ungovernable because we empower a chaotic long tail of bad (or unintentionally dangerous) actors—if, in the ag

The delicate bargain of the nation-state will be placed under immense strain just when we need institutions like it most. This is how we end up in the dilemma.

We’d just had a day of talking about the end of the world, but there was still pizza to eat,

Given the increasing availability of the tools, the presenter painted a harrowing vision: Someone could soon create novel pathogens far more transmissible and lethal than anything found in nature. These synthetic pathogens could evade known countermeasures, spread asymptomatically, or have built-in resistance to treatments. If needed, someone could

the price of DNA synthesizers, which can print bespoke strands of DNA, was falling rapidly. Costing a few tens of thousands1 of dollars, they are small enough to sit on a bench in your garage and let people synthesize—that is, manufacture—DNA. And all this is now possible for anyone with graduate-level training in biology or an enthusiasm for self-

AI introduced a host of threats requiring proactive responses. It might lead to massive invasions of privacy or ignite a misinformation apocalypse. It might be weaponized, creating a lethal suite of new cyberweapons, introducing new vulnerabilities into our networked world.

Both pursuing and not pursuing new technologies is, from here, fraught with risk.

attempting to ban development of new technologies is itself a risk: technologically stagnant societies are historically unstable and prone to collapse. Eventually, they lose the capacity to solve problems, to progress.