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

The chapter opens with the story of a May 2017 ransomware attack that affected organizations like Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), Deutsche Bahn, FedEx, the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, and more. Built using technology stolen from the US National Security Agency (NSA), this attack caused massive damage before it was shut down. Attacks like these, Suleyman warns, demonstrate that there are people willing to use advanced technologies to undermine state functions. If the program were designed to systematically learn about and patch up its own vulnerabilities, it would be virtually unstoppable—and the coming technologies would make a program like this possible.

The coming wave of technology, Suleyman argues, democratizes power. It will accelerate wealth and prosperity but they also empower people who wish to sow chaos. Lethal autonomous weapons will give asymmetric offensive power to violent individuals. As Suleyman points out, offensive technologies proliferate faster and more cheaply than defensive technologies, giving an advantage to those who want to cause harm.

These new technologies will also accelerate both misinformation and disinformation. Leading up to the 2016 election, Russian agents used Facebook to reach over 126 million Americans. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, eighty-two percent of Twitter users advocating for ending lockdown were bots, likely from a targeted Russia campaign. The plummeting production costs of high-quality synthetic media—which empowers agents to create believable deepfakes—threatens to undermine institutions, widen social divisions, influence elections, and weaken journalism.

Advances in biology, Suleyman says, also pose threats to public safety. Lab leaks happen, including in research labs with the highest security standards. He points out that a lab leak may have caused the COVID-19 pandemic, and that this incident would not be the first of its kind. In 1977, an influenza epidemic began when pathogens leaked from a hyper-secure lab. Even BSL-4 laboratories, which are held to the most stringent safety protocols, experience accidents. In 2021, a smallpox vial was left in an unsecured freezer in a BSL-4 lab in the UK.

One area of biology, gain-of-function research, presents heightened risks. This type of research seeks to purposefully create highly transmissible and lethal forms of novel pathogens in order to study how to combat them. While this type of research is well-intentioned, Suleyman believes that it is dangerous, especially considering that even the most secure labs experience leaks.

Lastly, Suleyman discusses how the coming wave of technology will lead to greater automation and job displacement. Unlike in past waves of automation, this coming wave threatens white-collar jobs and will mostly displace work rather than creating new and different jobs.

One way in which the coming wave will affect society, Suleyman says, is by empowering already powerful companies: “I think we’ll see a group of private corporations grow beyond the size and reach of many nation-states” (236). He predicts that, in the future, most physical products will be purchased as services—3D printed or manufactured with atomically precise methods close to the point of sale. This type of future would require scale and massive upfront investment, therefore rewarding the biggest, richest companies, accelerating centralization. It will confer immense competitive advantage to those tech companies that already possess huge resources. These companies will benefit from rapidly compounding returns, which will deepen existing power structures and allow them to transfer value away from wages and towards raw capital.

Suleyman believes that one way in which some nation-states will react to the coming wave will be by increasing surveillance and entrenching their dominance through authoritarian, invasive means. He notes that The Chinese Communist Party candidly admits that it utilizes vast troves of data for “controlling and managing people” and that it aims to bring together data from facial recognition, license plates, DNA, WeChat accounts, and credit cards to monitor its citizens (244). Suleyman points out that an AI-enabled system would allow the CCP to crush dissent and protests in real time, and that this has especially dangerous implications for the Uighur people of northwest China, who are already subject to state surveillance and ethnic cleansing. Overall, Suleyman says, the technology of the coming wave will enable governments to harness trillions of data points to surveil, predict, and influence individuals.

At the same time, he observes that the coming wave will not only allow for extreme centralization of power—it will also fuel fragmentation. With the technologies of the future, any ideological group could fracture off into a small, autonomous, off-grid, state-like entity. These groups could harness AI, synthetic biology, robotics, and clean energy to create the social, financial, educational, and medical infrastructures required for a nation-state. Secessionists, extremist groups, or even corporations could build their own society.

The coming wave will both reinforce some existing power structures and overturn others, simultaneously empowering organizations and individuals, and challenging what it means to exist in a society as well as what it means to be human.

The essential dilemma of the twenty-first century, Suleyman argues, is that humanity will have to navigate a path between catastrophe and dystopia.

There are many ways in which the coming wave of technology can lead to catastrophe: Terrorists could use an autonomous drone swarm equipped with facial recognition technology to kill only people of a specific profile. A mass murderer could use devices to spread a highly transmissible, lethal pathogen. A hostile conspiracist could use synthetic media to sow disinformation. “Cults, lunatics, and suicidal states” will be more empowered than ever to utilize biological and chemical weapons on a vast scale (265). Moreover, catastrophe might be instigated by accident: A war might be sparked by AI that reacts lethally and instantaneously to some provocation for an unknown reason.

Suleyman acknowledges that some people will want to counter catastrophe by strengthening state surveillance and control to the point of dystopia. This, he says, will be tempting in the face of disaster, but it also would constitute a failure.

It is also possible that both catastrophe and dystopia will come to pass, rather than simply one or the other. And on the other hand, stagnation—the refusal to advance technologically—would be another type of failure. The world depends on technology advancing, Suleyman argues. Civilizations last, on average, four hundred years: “Civilizations that collapse are not the exception; they are the rule” (273). He contends that the only reason why modern civilizations have surpassed the four-hundred-year average is because technology has delayed the inevitable. Solving issues such as climate change and maintaining rising standards of living will not happen without technological advancements.

Suleyman asserts that containment of the coming wave seems impossible, but for the sake of humanity, it must be accomplished.