Mustafa Suleyman > Quotes

“The coming wave is defined by two core technologies: artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

“Within the next couple of years, whatever your job, you will be able to consult an on-demand expert, ask it about your latest ad campaign or product design, quiz it on the specifics of a legal dilemma, isolate the most effective elements of a pitch, solve a thorny logistical question, get a second opinion on a diagnosis, keep probing and testing, getting ever more detailed answers grounded in the very cutting edge of knowledge, delivered with exceptional nuance. All of the world’s knowledge, best practices, precedent, and computational power will be available, tailored to you, to your specific needs and circumstances, instantaneously and effortlessly. It is a leap in cognitive potential at least as great as the introduction of the internet. And that is before you even get into the implications of something like ACI and the Modern Turing Test.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

“The irony of general-purpose technologies is that, before long, they become invisible and we take them for granted. Language, agriculture, writing—each was a general-purpose technology at the center of an early wave. These three waves formed the foundation of civilization as we know it. Now we take them for granted.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

“In the words of John McCarthy, who coined the term “artificial intelligence”: “As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore.” AI is—as those of us building it like to joke—“what computers can’t do.” Once they can, it’s just software.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

“the introduction of the printing press in the fifteenth century caused a 340-fold decrease in the price of a book, further driving adoption and yet more demand.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

“Consider that children who grew up traveling by horse and cart and burning wood for heat in the late nineteenth century spent their final days traveling by airplane and living in houses warmed by the splitting of the atom.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

“in less than ten years the amount of compute used to train the best AI models has increased by nine orders of magnitude—”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

“el reto de la tecnología consistía en la creación y la liberación de su poder. Ahora es al revés: el reto radica en la contención del poder desatado y en garantizar que siga prestándonos servicio tanto a nosotros como al planeta.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, La ola que viene: Tecnología, poder y el gran dilema del siglo XXI

“Over time, then, the implications of these technologies will push humanity to navigate a path between the poles of catastrophe and dystopia. This is the essential dilemma of our age.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

“AI has been climbing the ladder of cognitive abilities for decades, and it now looks set to reach human-level performance across a very wide range of tasks within the next three years.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

“Tiny hardware malfunctions can produce outsized risks. In 1980 a single faulty computer chip costing forty-six cents almost triggered a major nuclear incident over the Pacific. And in perhaps the most well-known case, nuclear catastrophe was only avoided during the Cuban missile crisis when one man, the acting Russian commodore, Vasili Arkhipov, refused to give an order to fire nuclear torpedoes. The two other officers on the submarine, convinced they were under attack, had brought the world within a split second of full-scale nuclear war.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

“Uber was impossible without the smartphone, which itself was enabled by GPS, which was enabled by satellites, which were enabled by rockets, which were enabled by combustion techniques, which were enabled by language and fire.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

“Invention is a cumulative, compounding process. It feeds on itself.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

“Researchers at Meta created a program called CICERO. It became an expert at playing the complex board game Diplomacy, a game in which planning long, complex strategies built around deception and backstabbing is integral. It shows how AIs could help us plan and collaborate, but also hints at how they could develop psychological tricks to gain trust and influence, reading and manipulating our emotions and behaviors with a frightening level of depth, a skill useful in, say, winning at Diplomacy or electioneering and building a political movement. The space for possible attacks against key state functions grows even as the same premise that makes AI so powerful and exciting—its ability to learn”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

“The irony of general-purpose technologies is that, before long, they become invisible and we take them for granted. Language, agriculture, writing—each was a general-purpose technology at the center of an early wave. These three waves formed the foundation of civilization as we know it.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

“Now imagine if, instead of accidentally leaving open a loophole, the hackers behind WannaCry had designed the program to systematically learn about its own vulnerabilities and repeatedly patch them. Imagine if, as it attacked, the program evolved to exploit further weaknesses. Imagine that it then started moving through every hospital, every office, every home, constantly mutating, learning. It could hit life-support systems, military infrastructure, transport signaling, the energy grid, financial databases. As it spread, imagine the program learning to detect and stop further attempts to shut it down. A weapon like this is on the”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

“Throughout history, population size and innovation levels are linked. New tools and techniques give rise to larger populations. Bigger and more connected populations are more potent crucibles for tinkering, experimentation, and serendipitous discovery, a more powerful “collective brain” for making new things. Large populations give rise to greater levels of specialization, new classes of people like artisans and scholars whose livelihood isn’t tied to the land. More people whose lives do not revolve around subsistence means more possible inventors, and more possible reasons for having inventions, and those inventions mean more people in turn.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

“In 1900, 2 percent of fossil fuel production was devoted to producing electricity, by 1950 it was above 10 percent, and in 2000 it reached more than 30 percent. In 1900 global electricity generation stood at 8 terawatt-hours; fifty years later it was at 600, powering a transformed economy. The Nobel Prize–winning economist William Nordhaus calculated that the same amount of labor that once produced fifty-four minutes of quality light in the eighteenth century now produces more than fifty years of light.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

“From the written word to sailing vessels, technology increases interconnectedness, helping to boost its own flow and spread. Each wave hence lays the groundwork for successive waves.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

“(vida + inteligencia) × energía = civilización moderna”
― Mustafa Suleyman, La ola que viene: Tecnología, poder y el gran dilema del siglo XXI

“I argued that AI introduced a host of threats requiring proactive responses. It might lead to massive invasions of privacy or ignite a misinformation apocalypse.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

“hipótesis del escalado es cierta, al menos en parte, las implicaciones son inevitables.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, La ola que viene: Tecnología, poder y el gran dilema del siglo XXI

“Las diversas tecnologías de las que hablo comparten cuatro rasgos clave que explican por qué esta vez es diferente: son generales por naturaleza y, por tanto, de uso universal; evolucionan a una velocidad de vértigo; tienen un impacto asimétrico, y en algunos aspectos son cada vez más autónomas.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, La ola que viene: Tecnología, poder y el gran dilema del siglo XXI

“Technologies are ideas, and ideas cannot be eliminated.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

“Gutenberg just wanted to make money printing Bibles. Yet his press catalyzed the Scientific Revolution and the Reformation, and so became the greatest threat to the Catholic Church since its establishment. Fridge makers didn’t aim to create a hole in the ozone layer with chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), just as the creators of the internal combustion and jet engines had no thought of melting the ice caps. In fact early enthusiasts for automobiles argued for their environmental benefits: engines would rid the streets of mountains of horse dung that spread dirt and disease across urban areas. They had no conception of global warming.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

“el fondo, el Estado nación, la unidad central del orden político mundial actual, propone a sus ciudadanos el trato sencillo y muy persuasivo de que la centralización del poder en el Estado soberano y territorial no solo es posible, sino que sus beneficios superan los riesgos con creces.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, La ola que viene: Tecnología, poder y el gran dilema del siglo XXI

“inteligencia artificial y la biotecnología, la computación cuántica ayuda a acelerar otros elementos de la ola.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, La ola que viene: Tecnología, poder y el gran dilema del siglo XXI

“No pasará mucho tiempo antes de que el «dopaje genético» se convierta en un tema de actualidad en el deporte, la educación y la vida profesional.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, La ola que viene: Tecnología, poder y el gran dilema del siglo XXI

“En 2003, en una ceremonia celebrada en la Casa Blanca, se anunció que se había secuenciado el 92 por ciento del genoma humano y que el código de la vida había quedado al descubierto.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, La ola que viene: Tecnología, poder y el gran dilema del siglo XXI

“technologically stagnant societies are historically unstable and prone to collapse.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave