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

Complex regulations refined over decades made roads and vehicles incrementally safer and more ordered, enabling their growth and spread. And yet 1.35 million people a year still die in traffic accidents.

Investing in science and technology education and research and supporting domestic tech businesses create a positive feedback loop where governments have a direct stake in state-of-the-art technology, poised to capitalize on benefits and stamp down harms. Put simply, as an equal partner in the creation of the coming wave, governments stand a better

Over time, technology tends toward generality.

These systems are called transformers.

Nanomachines would work at speeds far beyond anything at our scale, delivering extraordinary outputs: an atomic-scale nanomotor, for example, could rotate forty-eight billion times a minute. Scaled up, it could power a Tesla with material equivalent in volume to about twelve grains of sand. This is a world of gossamer structures made of diamond, sp

If you were looking to monitor and direct AI research in the past, you would likely have got it wrong, blocking or boosting work that eventually proved irrelevant, entirely missing the most important breakthroughs quietly brewing on the sidelines. Science and technology research is inherently unpredictable, exceptionally open, and growing fast. Gov

Technology is ultimately political because technology is a form of power. And perhaps the single overriding characteristic of the coming wave is that it will democratize access to power. As we saw in part 2, it will enable people to do things in the real world. I think of it like this: just as the costs of processing and broadcasting information pl

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

The challenge lies in designing an algorithm that “knows where to look” for signals in a given sentence. What are the key words, the most salient elements of a sentence, and how do they relate to one another? In AI this notion is commonly referred to as “attention.”