The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

When modern bioengineering began in the 1970s, progress was slow and expensive. However the Human Genome project, which culminated in 2003 after thirteen years of research, catalyzed the field. The Human Genome Project was an international scientific endeavor aimed at mapping and sequencing all the genes of the human genome. The cost of human genome sequencing fell a millionfold in under twenty years, going from $1 billion in 2003 to under $1000 in 2022.

Genes can not only be read, they can also be edited and synthesized. CRISPR gene editing is a revolutionary technology that allows precise modifications to DNA sequences, enabling scientists to edit genes. After the first CRISPR paper was published in 2012, its findings were rapidly implemented, giving way to gene-edited plants and animals, and potential solutions for fighting viruses as well as conditions like high cholesterol and cancer. Like AI, genetic engineering is progressing rapidly, with new developments occurring weekly. Tools are becoming cheaper and more accessible; it’s now possible to buy genetic engineering kits for less than $2000 and a benchtop DNA synthesizer for $25,000.

Gene synthesis, which used to be slow, expensive, and difficult, is now becoming faster, cheaper, and easier. What used to be a manual and messy process is becoming more efficient and precise.

Many experiments are now underway in the field of synthetic biology, especially in the realm of medicine. Scientists in 2021 successfully restored partial vision to a blind man. Researchers have found potential treatments for sickle-cell disease, leukemia, and cancer. Soon, Suleyman claims, “the idea of being treated in a generic way will seem positively medieval; everything, from the kind of care we receive to the medicines we are offered, will be precisely tailored to our DNA and specific biomarkers” (112). Some researchers concentrate their efforts on longevity, searching for ways to genetically extend the human life. Suleyman also predicts that genetic doping will become an issue with sports, and that in general, physical self-modifications will become more common. In 2018, a professor in China experimented on a young couple, who gave birth to the world’s first children with edited genomes. This experiment was met with shock and outrage due to the ethical breach it constituted as well as the professor’s unsafe methods.

Aside from medical applications, synthetic biology will give rise to advances in manufacturing, agriculture, energy, and computers. It will enable sustainable ways to produce materials like plastics and cement, create efficient and disease-resistant crops, and give rise to biofuels and carbon-negative factories. DNA printers could theoretically produce anything humans need: “Want to make some washing detergent or a new toy or even grow a house? Just download the ‘recipe’ and hit ‘go’” (115). In the future, computers could even be grown instead of manufactured. DNA can hold much more data than current hardware—in theory, all the data on Earth could be stored in one kilogram of DNA—and all the functional parts of a computer can be replicated with biological materials.

One reason why biological research has exploded in recent years is because Suleyman’s company, DeepMind, catalyzed an enormous breakthrough in the field. To work with proteins—an incredibly important building block of biology—scientists need to know more than simply the DNA sequences that create them; they need to know how each protein folds. Discovering how a protein folds used to be an arduous process, one that could not be solved by brute-force computation. However, Suleyman’s team used AI to make this process significantly faster and more accurate. The problem of protein folding, an area that had bedeviled the field of biology for half a century, was suddenly solved by DeepMind’s AI tool, AlphaFold. Previous experiments had cumulatively catalogued the structure of 0.1 percent of known proteins in existence. In 2022, DeepMind released AlphaFold2 to the public and uploaded 200 million structures at once, representing almost all known proteins. Over a million researchers accessed the tool within a year and a half of launch, including all the world’s top biology labs.

Suleyman considers AI and synthetic biology to be inextricable and even interchangeable. Teams are working on products that generate DNA using natural language instructions. Experiments are being run on brain interfacing technology that connects humans with machines. In other words, AI and synthetic biology are not two separate waves, Suleyman says, but two waves crashing together to form a superwave.

AI and biology are at the center of the coming wave of technology, Suleyman explains, but these two general-purpose technologies are also the accelerants for many more technologies that will all break as part of the same wave within the next twenty years. Other technologies in the coming wave include robotics, quantum computing, and clean energy. Moreover, these technologies will combine in new ways that will lead to additional unpredictable breakthroughs.

Robots have generally been used for single tasks in static environments such as warehouses and factories. But soon, Suleyman says, they will be found in every type of environment: care homes, schools, restaurants, and more.

Today, robots are usually controlled by human programmers. But, as in other applications of machine learning, human supervision gives way to the AI’s ability to learn and eventually generalize to new settings. The new wave of robots can work on general activities and respond to natural language voice commands, such as a robot built by Google that performs household chores through reinforcement learning. Some robots can now work autonomously, like robots that currently perform surgery on pigs.

Another way in which the field of robotics is advancing is in the ability of robots to swarm—to act in large numbers in a coordinated, complex fashion. Kilobots, developed by the Harvard Wyss Institute, work in a swarm of thousands and could be used on tasks like search and rescue operations or stopping soil erosion. Swarming, Suleyman claims, brings both benefits and potential dangers.

With the dropping costs of robot components, soon robots will start appearing in increasingly extreme and sensitive situations. Suleyman gives the example of the first time a robot used targeted lethal force in the United States. To stop a sniper who was shooting at police officers at a Dallas community college, the police department deployed a bomb disposal robot with an explosive fastened to its arm. The robot positioned itself in the room adjacent to the shooter and the explosive detonated, killing the gunman. This incident, Suleyman observes, shows how robots have already started to become integrated into society.

Quantum computing, while a nascent technology, poses risks for the future. Suleyman recounts how in 2019, Google announced that it had reached “quantum supremacy”—the company had built a quantum computer that completed a calculation “in seconds that would, it said, have taken a conventional computer ten thousand years” (127). Quantum computing is unique in that each additional qubit, or quantum bit, doubles a machine’s computing power, leading to exponential increases in power. The implications of the field are serious: It threatens the cryptography underlying email security, cryptocurrency, banking, government communications, and more. At the same time, quantum computing would enable huge advances in many fields, speeding up any problem that requires optimization, from designing traffic flow in cities to modeling chemical reactions.

Clean energy is another aspect of the coming wave of technology. Suleyman points out that renewable energy will become the greatest single source of electricity generation by 2027. The clean energy wave is powered primarily by solar power, but nuclear fusion has “long been considered the holy grail of energy production” (130). The field of nuclear fusion has seen recent breakthroughs: In 2022, the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California, created a reaction demonstrating net energy gain for the first time.

Suleyman concludes the chapter by noting the ways in which the elements of this coming wave will combine. Together, AI, biotechnology, quantum computing, and robots could give way to nanotechnology, a field that envisions manipulating individual atoms as building blocks that could assemble almost anything. This vision, Suleyman acknowledges, is many decades away, but it would be made possible by the technologies that are currently emerging.