Mustafa Suleyman On the Coming Wave

We are approaching a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change.

Soon you will live surrounded by AIs. They will organize your life, operate your business, and run core government services. You will live in a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy.

None of us are prepared.

As cofounder of the pioneering Artificial Intelligence company DeepMind, part of Google, Mustafa Suleyman has been at the center of this revolution. The coming decade, he argues, will be defined by this wave of powerful, fast-proliferating new technologies.

In The Coming Wave, Suleyman shows how these forces will create immense prosperity but also threaten the nation-state, the foundation of global order. As our fragile governments sleepwalk into disaster, we face an existential dilemma: unprecedented harms on one side, the threat of overbearing surveillance on the other.

Suleyman joins us to discuss how we can get ready to navigate the narrow path between catastrophe and dystopia.

A British artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur, Mustafa Suleyman began his professional work in human rights and then cofounded DeepMind, an AI company acquired by Google. Long prominent in the debate over the ethics of AI, he recently cofounded Inflection AI to develop ways to help humans “talk” to computers.