How to Think about the Predicted AI Tsunami

The founder of Google DeepMind wrote a book projecting 20 years into the future. The Coming Wave (2023) by Mustafa Suleyman. He identifies AI and synthetic biology as the two big technological trends to watch. They push from two sides at the same end of creating intelligent life or very near imitations of it. Humans become less special, less homogenous, and more powerful.

The book is convincing that AI and synthetic biology will change a lot. It’s a scary, dystopian read. Even the optimistic scenarios are scary for their strangeness. Like, I’m mostly writing this to calm down.

So, what should one do about such a future?

  • Don’t worry. Plan. (See The Obstacle Is the Way.)
  • Accept that I cannot change the macro-outcome. Maybe I can influence a few people’s experiences. (See my blog post on the topic.)
  • Trust Jesus.

The technology changes will be driven by money, science, and big collective action successes/failures. The outcomes apply universally to everybody in society, and the only people with impact are the technology developers and decisionmakers themselves.

Fewer people are planning mitigation strategies for the societal fallout. Creative destruction is still destructive. Here is where I could be more impactful. It fits with ambitions toward innovations in private governance and community building.

(To illustrate the past two paragraphs, I’m unable to influence the features and popularity of social media sites like TikTok. But I can teach my family how to live with it and maybe teach a small group at church. That’s the type of marginal solutions for mitigation that I mean.)

“Those who understand history are condemned to watch other idiots repeat it.” -Peter Lamborn Wilson

With this focus on mitigation strategies for ordinary people, the book leaves me two relevant unknowns. These will determine the scope for civil society and marginal actions:

  1. Will government drift toward authoritarianism or irrelevance?
  2. Will labor markets stay relatively tight, or will there be chronic labor surpluses?

Axes I worry about.

The author argues that unless governments beef up their capacities, they’ll be overwhelmed by the effects of new technologies. Imagine all the citizens of a country become X-Men with weird, emergent superpowers. Their mistakes and fights would get out of hand. Unless the government becomes deeply powerful and repressive, it will result in catastrophes that grind down government control.

In a high-functioning authoritarian scenario like China today, there is little scope or need for civil society. People mostly live small, private lives without stepping out of line and markets meet their needs. In an anarchic scenario, people are exposed and need to organize themselves for protection. Historically, people form city states, or gangs, or mutual aid societies, or kibbutzim, or quilombos.

Second, in the author’s vision, it becomes possible to essentially manufacture people. That is, every computer can think like a (super) person, and many computers are mounted on robotic bodies. This opens the possibility that wages and labor participation will fall because robots do the job better. Human labor will become a smaller factor of production and more people will have to fend for themselves, leading subsistence lives.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” -Mark Twain

Let’s look at the four quadrants created by these two axes of possibility, leaving aside for a moment how likely they are:

  • Authoritarian + enough jobs:
    • Go to work every day and don’t step out of line.
    • It’s China or North Korea today.
    • Little scope for independent self-organization. But low-level governance, subordinate to the national government, becomes very important.
  • Anarchic + enough jobs:
    • Go to work every day and watch your back.
    • It’s the USA or Mexico today.
    • Some scope for self-organization, depending how functional.
  • Authoritarian + few jobs:
    • Collect your check and don’t step out of line.
    • It’s Saudi Arabia or the zoo.
    • Some scope for self-organization, depending how big the checks and how repressive.
  • Anarchic + few jobs:
    • This is Mali today in a bad scenario; a good scenario is Wakanda or Luke Skywalker’s house on Tatooine.
    • Hardest to imagine.

Last, it’s possible nothing much changes about our countries, but we all develop scoliosis from too much gaming.

In every case, Jesus says, “The poor you will always have with you.” And there are certain to be novel coordination and governance problems. For me personally, there is work to be done.

What will be will be.