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:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Who Invented the Computer? – Ian Watson

Ian Watson is the author of  The Universal Machine  and featured in a recent  Four Way Interview . Saturday June 23 2012 was the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, the troubled genius who invented the modern computer. Why though do so few people recognize his name and his great achievements? In 1936 English mathematician Alan Turing, published a paper,  On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem . This became the foundation of computing. In it Turing presented a theoretical machine that could solve any problem that could be described by instructions encoded on a paper tape. A Turing Machine could calculate square roots, whilst another might solve Sudoku puzzles. Turing demonstrated you could construct a single  Universal Machine  that could simulate any Turing Machine. One machine solving any problem for which a program could be written – sound familiar? He’d invented the computer. Then,  computers  were peop...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ignorance: How it drives science – Stuart Firestein *****

This is a delightful little book that really gets you thinking. I stress the ‘little’ part not as a negative, but as a good thing. There is nothing worse than fat, bloated popular science books where the author feels they have to get 120,000 words to be taken seriously. This is the sort of book that can be read in a couple of hours – but you will get so much more out of it than one of those tedious doorstops. The premise underlying the book is in once sense extremely simple, yet is fundamental to an understanding of what science is and what scientists do. And it is an understanding that is totally at odds with the typical way science is portrayed both in university lectures and popular science books. As Stuart Firestein points out, what is important is not the facts, but rather the area of ignorance. The interesting part and the fundamental heart of science is not about what we know, but about what we don’t know and where we want to look next. Take this lovely quote: ‘Working ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Star Book – Peter Grego ****

This attractive landscape format book combines an excellent introduction to the stars and basic astronomy with a set of star maps, plus in depth looks at some of the stars featured, with a  bonus section on the solar system. Amazon says it’s a hardback, but in fact it’s a paperback with a rather ingenious cover – you can’t tell from the photo, but the words ‘The Star Book’ are punched through as a series of holes that show the white paper of the next page beneath. Like many astronomy/space books, the cover lacks shelf appeal because it is mostly black, but at least there is some original thought here. Unlike many books in this format which tend to concentrate on the pictures, there is a good deal of excellent text by Peter Grego, so there was no feeling that you were only getting the star maps and star ‘biographies’, something these days much more suited to an iPad or smartphone app. Instead, the opening 30 or so pages give a very good introduction that would be valuable to ...
Post a Comment
Read more