Skip to main content

The Coming Wave - Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar ****

For some time now there have been dire warnings in the press that AI could be extremely dangerous. I've been doubtful: yes, clearly it messes up the use of essays in schools and universities, and it is likely to replace many white collar jobs, but I struggled to see the existential threat, which I assumed envisaged an artificial general intelligence taking over the world. Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of major AI company DeepMind, paints a far scarier picture, as he knows what he's talking about on this subject.

Starting with the difficulties faced by those who attempt to suppress technological breakthroughs (the waves of the title) - in fact declaring it pretty much impossible - he then gives us the plusses and minuses of AI. We shouldn't ignore those plusses, which certainly exist, and not just for large companies who can fire whole swathes of workers. But the really significant content here is where Suleyman describes the potential negatives. He then goes on to attempt to devise a means of containment to keep us safe, but this is not very convincing.

I'll be honest, the first part of the book, which tries to give historical context, is dull and I was close to giving up on it. But things really come alive when Suleyman is talking about large language models like ChatGPT and how they will develop. My eye-opening moment was when he suggests a new Turing test, which would be when an AI can be told to make $1m in a time period from opening a store on Amazon and succeeds. When the reasonable profession to this possibility sinks in, it is scary: and paves the way for a description of darker applications of AIs from deepfakes with a carefully constructed backstory to military use.

There were two or three other parts of the book that really shone through and are why I've given it four stars. They all involved AI - not surprisingly, given Suleyman's background. The biggest weakness is when he strays away from this (for around half the book). There's a lot, for instance, on synthetic biology, where he hasn't the same authority and strays into expansive statements about what will be possible that don't feel anywhere near as well justified as his picture of the development of artificial intelligence.

In fact the tendency to over-promise is true for practically everything he covers outside of AI. Even at the trivial level, there's a bit of this - he remarks about the transformative power of 5G we now experience, but I struggle to get 4G half the time, and can never do a cross-country journey without losing internet entirely now and then. Not promising for the self-driving cars that are one of the other enthusiasms here.

The book is co-authored: usually this means that the professional writer (Bhaskar) has written it and the celebrity/business person at best has been interviewed. (I know of one example where a celebrity didn't even bother to read their autobiography.) Here, I would have hoped a writer could have come up with a more readable book overall, so perhaps Suleyman did make a significant contribution to the writing as well as the content. 

One small irritation to add: there is a separate US edition, so I really don't know why the UK version had to have US spellings. Perhaps an AI could have helped with that. Overall, it frankly isn't a great read, but for those parts on AI, and particularly generative AI, futures it is an important book.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...
Post a Comment
Read more