The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

AUTOCOMPLETE EVERYTHING: THE RISE OF LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS

As people increasingly take power into their own hands, I expect inequality’s newest frontier to lie in biology.

Credible critics must be practitioners. Building the right technology, having the practical means to change its course, not just observing and commenting, but actively showing the way, making the change, effecting the necessary actions at source, means critics need to be involved. They cannot stand shouting from the sidelines.

Little is ultimately more valuable than intelligence. Intelligence is the wellspring and the director, architect, and facilitator of the world economy. The more we expand the range and nature of intelligences on offer, the more growth should be possible.

Almost every foundational technology ever invented, from pickaxes to plows, pottery to photography, phones to planes, and everything in between, follows a single, seemingly immutable law: it gets cheaper and easier to use, and ultimately it proliferates, far and wide. This proliferation of technology in waves is the story of Homo technologicus—of t

Containment will need to respond to the nature of a technology, and channel it in directions that are easier to control. Recall the four features of the coming wave: asymmetry, hyper-evolution, omni-use, and autonomy.

The coming wave is defined by two core technologies: artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology. Together they will usher in a new dawn for humanity, creating wealth and surplus unlike anything ever seen. And yet their rapid proliferation also threatens to empower a diverse array of bad actors to unleash disruption, instability, and even ca

The story of stirrups and feudalism highlights an important truth: new technologies help create new centers of power with new social infrastructures both enabling them and supporting them. In the last chapter we saw how this process today adds to a series of immediate challenges facing the nation-state. But over the longer term, the implications of

In a few decades, I predict most physical products will look like services. Zero marginal cost production and distribution will make it possible. The migration to the cloud will become all-encompassing, and the trend will be spurred by the ascendancy of low-code and no-code software, the rise of bio-manufacturing, and the boom in 3-D printing. When