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

Longlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award •One of Kirkus Reviews’ Most Anticipated Books of the Fall

We are approaching a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change.

Soon You are going to live surrounded by AIs. They’re going to organise your life, operate your business, and run core government services and products. You are going to live in a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy.

None of us are prepared.

As co-founder of the pioneering AI company DeepMind, a part of Google, Mustafa Suleyman has been at the centre of this revolution. The coming decade, he argues, will be defined by this wave of powerful, fast-proliferating new technologies.

In The Coming Wave, Suleyman shows how these forces will create immense prosperity but also threaten the nation-state, the foundation of global order. As our fragile governments sleepwalk into disaster, we are facing an existential dilemma: unprecedented harms on one side, the specter of overbearing surveillance on the other.

Can we forge a narrow path between catastrophe and dystopia?

This groundbreaking book from the ultimate AI insider establishes “the containment problem”—the task of maintaining keep watch over over powerful technologies—as the essential challenge of our age.