Recommendations from our site
“The book argues that synthetic biology and genetics mean that even what it is to be human is not actually going to be that clear. We can now manipulate the stuff of life. Add AI to this, and just think it through…The added piece that comes from The Coming Wave is the recognition that almost all scientific progress is two-edged. The analogy is the case of nuclear, where it may be possible to have energy one day that’s too cheap to measure. Fusion offers that possibility going forward. But it also has the capacity to destroy the world in a couple of minutes.” Read more...
“The main author, Mustafa Suleyman, who worked with Michael Bhaskar on the book, is a co-founder of DeepMind, which is now owned by Google. Google and DeepMind are at the heart of some of the technologies mentioned here that are being developed. In the book, he points out that he started out thinking he was going to write a very optimistic book, as a techno optimist himself, and became more pessimistic. It ends with the anguished idea that we’re trying to contain the uncontainable. Suleyman thinks containment is the way to approach this. It can’t be regulated away: there isn’t enough that any individual regulator can do. But he lays out some ways in which he thinks that the potentially lethal consequences of some of these advances might be contained and channelled.” Read more...
The Best Business Books of 2023: the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award
Andrew Hill, Journalist
