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

Founded in the 1980s, Aum Shinrikyo (Supreme Truth) was a Japanese doomsday cult. The group originated in a yoga studio under the leadership of a man who called himself Shoko Asahara. Building a membership among the disaffected, they radicalized as their numbers swelled, becoming convinced that the apocalypse was nigh, that they alone would survive

Another growing area is in the ability for robots to swarm, greatly amplifying the potential capabilities of any individual robot into a hive mind. Examples include the Harvard Wyss Institute’s miniature Kilobots—a swarm of a thousand robots that work collectively and assemble in shapes taken from nature that could be used on difficult, distributed

This engine has created a world economy worth $85 trillion—and counting. From the pioneers of the Industrial Revolution to the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs of today, technology has a magnetic incentive in the form of serious financial rewards. The coming wave represents the greatest economic prize in history. It is a consumer cornucopia and potenti

Quantum computing has far-reaching implications. For instance, the cryptography underlying everything from email security to cryptocurrencies would suddenly be at risk, in an impending event those in the field call “Q-Day.” Cryptography rests on the assumption that an attacker will never have sufficient computing power to try all the different comb

Like AI and biotech, quantum computing helps speed up other elements of the wave. And yet even the mind-bending quantum world is not the limit.

Following the AlexNet breakthrough, AI suddenly became a major priority in academia, government, and corporate life. Geoffrey Hinton and his colleagues were hired by Google. Major tech companies in both the United States and China put machine learning at the heart of their R&D efforts. Shortly after DQN, we sold DeepMind to Google, and the tech

Accountability is enabled by deep understanding. Ownership gives control. Both require governments to get their hands dirty. Although today companies have taken the lead, much of the most speculative fundamental research is still funded by governments. U.S. federal government expenditure on R&D is at an all-time-low share of the total—just 20 p

At its core, the coming wave is a story of the proliferation of power. If the last wave reduced the costs of broadcasting information, this one reduces the costs of acting on it, giving rise to technologies that go from sequencing to synthesis, reading to writing, editing to creating, imitating conversations to leading them. In this, it is qualitat

What happens when many, perhaps the majority, of the tasks required to operate a corporation, or a government department, can be run more efficiently by machines? Who will benefit first from these dynamics, and what will they likely do with this new power?