The Nature and Proliferation of the Coming Technological Wave

Key Insight

Throughout history, humanity has experienced transformative 'waves' of change, akin to powerful floods, both literal and metaphorical, that reshape the world. These include the rise and fall of empires, religions like Christianity and Islam, and economic booms. Similarly, foundational technologies, from early tools like fire and stone to modern innovations such as phones and planes, follow an immutable law: they become cheaper, easier to use, and proliferate widely across societies. This relentless spread is a hallmark of 'Homo technologicus,' driven by an ecosystem of competitive inventors and entrepreneurs, ensuring expansion is technology's inherent nature.

The current, unprecedented 'coming wave' is defined by two core technologies: artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology, which are unleashing the power to engineer intelligence and life itself. These represent an unparalleled augmentation, promising to usher in a new dawn for humanity by creating immense wealth and surplus, and offering solutions to intractable global challenges such as climate change, aging populations, and sustainable food. Examples of AI's rapid progress include nearly perfect face and object recognition, instant language translation, autonomous driving in some settings, and generating novel images, text, and music with extraordinary detail and coherence. AI is expected to achieve human-level performance across a wide range of tasks within the next three years.

However, the rapid proliferation of these technologies also presents a significant dilemma. While capable of extraordinary good, they simultaneously threaten to empower diverse 'bad actors' to unleash disruption, instability, and catastrophe on an unimaginable scale. Further progress in one area, such as AI, inherently accelerates others, like genetic technologies and robotics, creating a chaotic and cross-catalyzing process beyond anyone's direct control. This dynamic means that the human future both critically depends on these advanced technologies for survival and progress, and is simultaneously imperiled by their uncontrolled expansion, marking a critical turning point in human history.