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

In the final chapter, Suleyman proposes ten steps for containment. He explains that these steps should be viewed as concentric layers, and that they all need to work together.

The first step is technical safety. Funding for AI safety and ethics should be increased. Technical considerations, like ensuring that AI sandboxes and simulations have air gaps—in other words, physically segregating them, not enabling internet access, and limiting interaction to a small interface—are important as well. Suleyman also advises developers to program AIs to be cautious and uncertain by default to decrease hallucinations, situations in which an AI confidently gives a wrong answer.

Secondly, Suleyman recommends the institution of audits. Oversight, external scrutiny, and enforceable rules, he says, are necessary for regulation to work. This could be implemented for AI systems, and there is already a promising example of oversight in the field of synthetic biology: A non-profit program called SecureDNA scans synthesized DNA for pathogenic sequences.

Third, Suleyman recommends leveraging choke points—narrow points in the supply chains of these emerging technologies. For instance, most of the machinery used to make chips for advanced GPUs comes from a single Dutch firm. Export controls could slow down the pace of technology development, buying more time for other containment strategies to catch up.

Fourth, Suleyman argues that skeptics should get involved with the technologies of the coming wave because these technologies should be developed by people who are cautious, thoughtful, and aware of their risks.

Fifth, he encourages aligning the incentives of tech companies with containment. He points out the rise of public benefit corporations and B Corps, and believes that the next steps should be technology companies with strong containment mechanisms enshrined as fiduciary duties.

Sixth, Suleyman believes that governments should invest in in-house technical expertise and not rely on third parties. He thinks governments should pay competitive salaries to staffers with tech expertise, incentivizing them away from the private sector. He also believes that taxation should be overhauled, with governments emphasizing taxation of capital rather than labor.

Seventh, Suleyman argues that international cooperation is key to containment and that even countries that are currently engaged in a technology arms race, like the United States and China, can find common ground to establish treaties for this purpose.

Eighth, he asserts that creating a culture of sharing and learning from failures will help resolve mistakes more quickly and effectively. Tech companies will inevitably make mistakes, Suleyman says, and rather than shaming them into secrecy, the public should accept that this is part of the process of technological development and instead encourage companies to share their mistakes openly and widely so that others can learn from them. He gives the example of the airline industry, an industry in which airline companies openly share their mistakes so that their competitors can learn from them and make airline travel safer for everyone.

Ninth, Suleyman explains that the issue of containment needs public input and public pressure and that everybody should participate in debating how these technologies are regulated.

Lastly, he says that the tenth step is coherence: Every previous step needs to work together and reinforce each other in order to be effective.

Suleyman recounts how power looms were invented in 1785, sparking an outrage amongst Luddites, the disgruntled weavers whose wages were halved by the invention.

Humanity needs to make sure this new wave of technology, unlike the introduction of power looms, is tailored toward human needs. Technology, Suleyman believes, should empower the best of humanity, making the world happier and healthier. Containment seems impossible, and the prospect of failure may be frightening, but the benefits of the coming wave are worth fighting for to secure a prosperous future for the world.