The Coming Wave
AI, Power and the Twenty-First Century’s Greatest Dilemma
Mustafa Suleyman
With
Having read it
★★★★★
An interesting book that I felt didn’t start too well – despite it or because of it – waxing lyrical about future technologies and what they could, and even do presently do and offer society, as if it’ll all be fine. (But, maybe that approach was its editorial (or academic, or even marketing-led) point?)
However, it did eventually constructively talk about the many realities we will face if we don’t tackle the ethics and morals of these amazing potentials straight away, as it is all being built, or competently, safely, realistically and for the benefit of everyone.
The coming wave is an exponential curve of amazing technologies, but left to its own (might that even be somewhat inevitable?) self-fulfilling abilities of which the book tackles and explains in parts three and four the issues and conundrums facing us are difficult but well worth the collective and adaptable investigation, analysis, critique and regulation that can and should be moulding its evolution safely and beneficially for its recipients; containment of these things is very important to those living with this coming wave and mean the good of it all can outweigh the bad.
Lots of work around the moral and ethical issues raised by the technologies of the coming wave is being faced, debated and slowly and sensibly enacted and adapted, at least to help continue the conversations and debates of it. Quoted in the book, MIT biotechnologist Kevin Esvelt suggests and has been championing a thoroughly decent containment strategy which is built around three pillars: delay, detect and defend.
So, let’s not just rush forward with the technologies for the sake of it nor because it makes money and grows the economy. We do need a more considered, realistic and rounded approach to matters like these and the many other interconnected things in life today from nations and their governments. They are still important and critical to a society and its many workings, including safety, healthcare and education and with their powers it means many fewer things then become atomised and actually allow for clearer and more effective meaning, responsibility and the potential to set things collaboratively so they are understood by all, for all. But, they do need to change to be more adaptable and effective for the kinds of matters and issues that’ll be faced in the twenty-first century and, hopefully bring an end to things like first-past-the-post voting, operating seemingly just on issues that ‘look good’ for the next election, not the long-term regardless of who might be in power next.
Still, as we’re quite possibly just a panopticon away from self-destruction, just make sure you have this new app to feel relieved and not in anyway responsible for the end of the world . . .
A good passage
For millennia, the Hippocratic oath has been a moral lodestar for the medical profession. In Latin, Primum non nocere. First, do no harm. The Nobel Peace Prize winner and British-Polish scientist Joseph Rotblat, a man who left Los Alamos on the grounds of conscience, argued that scientists need something similar. Social and moral responsibility was, he believed, not something any scientist could ever set aside. I agree, and we should consider a contemporary version for technologists: ask not just what doing no harm means in an age of globe-spanning algorithms and edited genomes but how that can be enacted daily in what are often morally ambiguous circumstances.
Precautionary principles like this are a good first step. Pause before building, pause before publishing, review everything, sit down and hammer out the second-, third-, nth-order impacts. Find all the evidence and look at it coldly. Relentlessly course correct. Be willing to stop. Do all this not just because it says so in some form, but because it’s what’s right, it’s what technologists do.
Actions like this can’t just operate as laws or corporate mantras. Laws are only national, corporate mantras transitory, too often cos-metic. They must instead operate at a deeper level whereby the culture of technology is not that just-go-for-it ‘engineering mindset’ but something more wary, more curious about what might happen. A healthy culture is one happy to leave fruit on the tree, say no, delay benefits for however long it takes to be safe, one where technologists remember that technology is just a means to an end, not the end itself.
A second good passage
When people talk about technology – myself included – they often make an argument like the following. Because we build technology, we can fix the problems it creates. This is true in the broadest sense. But, the problem is, there is no functional ‘we’ here. There is no consensus and no agreed mechanism for forming a consensus. There actually is no
‘we’, and there is certainly no lever any ‘we’ can pull. This should be obvious, but it bears repeating. Even the president of the United States has remarkably limited powers to alter the course of, say, the internet.[...]
Here is a huge role for popular movements. Over the last five or so years, a burgeoning civil society movement has begun to highlight these problems. The media, trade unions, philanthropic organisations, grassroots campaigns – all are getting involved, proactively looking at ways to create contained technology. I hope that my generation of founders and builders energizes these movements rather than stands in the way. Meanwhile, citizen assemblies offer a mechanism for bringing a wider group into the conversation. One proposal is to host a lottery to choose a representative sample of the population to intensively debate and come up with proposals for how to manage these technologies. Given access to tools and advice, this would be one way of making containment a more collective, attentive, grounded process.
Change happens when people demand it. The ‘we’ that builds technology is scattered, subject to a mass of competing and different national, commercial, and research incentives. The more the ‘we’ that is subject to it speaks clearly in one voice, a critical public mass agitating for change, demanding an alignment of approaches, the better chance of good outcomes. Anyone anywhere can make a difference. Fundamentally, neither technologists nor governments will solve this problem alone. But together ‘we’ all might.
A third good passage
Too many visions of the future start with what technology can or might do and work from there. That’s completely the wrong foundation. Technologists should focus not just on the engineering minutiae but on helping to imagine and realize a richer, social, human future in the broadest sense, a complex tapestry of which technology is just one strand. Technology is central to how the future will unfold – that’s undoubtedly true – but technology is not the point of the future, or what’s really at stake. We are.
Technology should amplify the best of us, open new pathways for creativity and cooperation, work with the human grain of our lives and most precious relationships. It should make us happier and healthier, the ultimate complement to human endeavor and life well lived – but always on our terms, democratically decided, publicly debated, with benefits widely distributed. Amid the turbulence, we must never lose sight of this: a vision even the most ardent of Luddites could embrace.
But before we get there, before we can fulfil the boundless potential of coming technologies, the wave and its central dilemma need containment, need an intensified, unprecedented, all-too-human grip on the entire technosphere.