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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.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
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