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

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...