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,

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.

alongside these benefits, AI, synthetic biology, and other advanced forms of technology produce tail risks on a deeply concerning scale.

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

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.

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

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.

we would need to create a system that could imitate and then eventually outperform all human cognitive abilities, from vision and speech to planning and imagination, and ultimately empathy and creativity. Since

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