For a bibliography of books consulted, please visit the website the-coming-wave.com/bibliography.
Costing a few tens of thousands For example, the Kilobaser DNA & RNA Synthesizer, sold starting at $25,000. See its website: kilobaser.com/dna-and-rna-synthesizer.
Twenty years after Benz’s patent TÜV Nord Group, “A Brief History of the Internal Combustion Engine,” TÜV Nord Group, April 18, 2019, www.tuev-nord.de/explore/en/remembers/a-brief-history-of-the-internal-combustion-engine.
Ford kept ramping up production Burton W. Folsom, “Henry Ford and the Triumph of the Auto Industry,” Foundation for Economic Education, Jan. 1, 1998, fee.org/articles/henry-ford-and-the-triumph-of-the-auto-industry.
Around 1.4 billion “How Many Cars Are There in the World in 2023?,” Hedges & Company, June 2021, hedgescompany.com/blog/2021/06/how-many-cars-are-there-in-the-world; “Internal Combustion Engine—the Road Ahead,” Industr, Jan. 22, 2019, www.industr.com/en/internal-combustion-engine-the-road-ahead-2357709#.
It is the story of technology itself There is a voluminous academic debate over the precise definition of technology. In this book we go with a commonsense, everyday definition: the application of scientific knowledge (in the broadest possible sense) to produce tools or practical outcomes. However, the full, multifaceted complexity of the term is also acknowledged. Technology extends back into cultures and practices. It is not just transistors, screens, and keyboards. It is the explicit and tacit knowledge of coders, the social lives and societies that support them.
Technology has a clear Scholars of technology make distinctions between diffusion and proliferation that are for the most part elided here. We mean them more in their colloquial rather than formal senses.
As science produces new discoveries This also works in the other direction: technology produces new tools and insights that spur science, as when the steam engine helped clarify the need for the science of thermodynamics or sophisticated glasswork created the telescopes that transformed our understanding of space.
Put simply, a wave is a set Robert Ayres, “Technological Transformations and Long Waves. Part I,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 37, no. 1 (March 1990), www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0040162590900573.
By “general-purpose” This term is surprisingly new for something that has become so central to the understanding of technology, dating back to an economics paper from the early 1990s. See Timothy F. Bresnahan and Manuel Trajtenberg, “General Purpose Technologies ‘Engines of Growth’?,” (working paper, NBER, Aug. 1992), www.nber.org/papers/w4148.
It had a pronounced impact on evolution Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (London: Profile Books, 2010).
General-purpose technologies ripple Account taken from Richard Lipsey, Kenneth Carlaw, and Clifford Bekar, Economic Transformations: General Purpose Technologies and Long-Term Economic Growth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Language, agriculture, writing Technically, language might again be regarded as a proto or foundational general-purpose technology.
One major study pegged Lipsey, Carlaw, and Bekar, Economic Transformations.
Throughout history, population size For a powerful account of how this process worked, see Oded Galor, The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality (London: Bodley Head, 2022).
Bigger and more connected populations Michael Muthukrishna and Joseph Henrich, “Innovation in the Collective Brain,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 371, no. 1690 (2016), royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2015.0192.
At the dawn Galor, The Journey of Humanity, 46.
As the Harvard anthropologist Muthukrishna and Henrich, “Innovation in the Collective Brain.”
The ten thousand years Lipsey, Carlaw, and Bekar, Economic Transformations.
And in the last hundred The remainder coming between 1000 BCE and 1700 CE.
For the futurist Alvin Toffler Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam, 1984). See also the work of Nikolai Kondratiev on long-cycle waves.
The great philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934).
More recently the economist Carlota Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 2002).
Once diffusion starts, however Indeed, an early sign of accelerating proliferation might be that, compared with the millennia-long spread of water mills, within a few years of first being invented, the windmill was seen everywhere from the north of England to Syria. See Lynn White Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 87.
But just fifty years later Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
In the seventeenth century Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten Van Zanden, “Charting the ‘Rise of the West’: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, a Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth Through Eighteenth Centuries,” Journal of Economic History, June 1, 2009, www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/abs/charting-the-rise-of-the-west-manuscripts-and-printed-books-in-europe-a-longterm-perspective-from-the-sixth-through-eighteenth-centuries/0740F5F9030A706BB7E9FACCD5D975D4.
One analysis estimates Max Roser and Hannah Ritchie, “Price of Books: Productivity in Book Production,” Our World in Data, ourworldindata.org/books.
The first electricity power stations Polish Member Committee of the World Energy Council, “Energy Sector of the World and Poland: Beginnings, Development, Present State,” World Energy Council, Dec. 2014, www.worldenergy.org/assets/images/imported/2014/12/Energy_Sector_of_the_world_and_Poland_EN.pdf.
In 1900 global electricity generation Vaclav Smil, “Energy in the Twentieth Century: Resources, Conversions, Costs, Uses, and Consequences,” Annual Review of Energy and the Environment 25 (2000), www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.energy.25.1.21.
As a result, the average person William D. Nordhaus, “Do Real Output and Real Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not,” Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics at Yale University, Jan. 1996, https://cowles.yale.edu/sites/default/files/2022-08/d0381.pdf.
Ten years later there were 5.8 million Galor, The Journey of Humanity, 46.
Today America has many If you include both landlines and mobile phones.
Increasing quality joins decreasing “Televisions Inflation Calculator,” Official Data Foundation, www.in2013dollars.com/Televisions/price-inflation.
Mimicry spurs competition Anuraag Singh et al., “Technological Improvement Rate Predictions for All Technologies: Use of Patent Data and an Extended Domain Description,” Research Policy 50, no. 9 (Nov. 2021), www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733321000950#. There are considerable variations between different sets of technology, however.
Like the internal combustion engine Of course, the proposals date back further, at least to Babbage and Lovelace in the nineteenth century.
By 1945, an important precursor George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (London: Allen Lane, 2012).
Early in that decade IBM’s president Nick Carr, “How Many Computers Does the World Need? Fewer Than You Think,” Guardian, Feb. 21, 2008, www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/feb/21/computing.supercomputers.
Popular Mechanics magazine made James Meigs, “Inside the Future: How PopMech Predicted the Next 110 Years,” Popular Mechanics, Dec. 21, 2012, www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a8562/inside-the-future-how-popmech-predicted-the-next-110-years-14831802/#.
Their power has increased by ten See, for example, Darrin Qualman, “Unimaginable Output: Global Production of Transistors,” Darrin Qualman Blog, April 24, 2017, www.darrinqualman.com/global-production-transistors/; Azeem Azhar, Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It (London: Random House Business, 2021), 21; and Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future (London: Viking, 2022), 128.
In the early 1970s John B. Smith, “Internet Chronology,” UNC Computer Science, www.cs.unc.edu/~jbs/resources/Internet/internet_chron.html.
It created a yet more Azhar, Exponential, 219.
Now humans produce hundreds Ibid., 228.
Understanding technology is, in part Robert K. Merton, On Social Structure and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), gives the classic study, but see also Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Toward a New Modernity (London: SAGE, 1992), for how society has become dominated by the management of risks it has itself created. See also Edward Tenner, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (New York: Vintage, 1997), and Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984).
For many, the word “containment” George F. Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs, July 1947, www.cvce.eu/content/publication/1999/1/1/a0f03730-dde8-4f06-a6ed-d740770dc423/publishable_en.pdf.
As the printing press roared This account is taken from Anton Howes, “Age of Invention: Did the Ottomans Ban Print?,” Age of Invention, May 19, 2021, antonhowes.substack.com/p/age-of-invention-did-the-ottomans.
John Kay, the inventor Examples taken from Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
Similarly, China dismissed Harold Marcuse, “Ch’ien Lung (Qianlong) Letter to George III (1792),” UC Santa Barbara History Department, marcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu/classes/2c/texts/1792QianlongLetterGeorgeIII.htm.
Few societies have ever See, for example, Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988), and Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive (London: Penguin, 2005), for more on this process.
On September 11, 1933 Waldemar Kaempffert, “Rutherford Cools Atomic Energy Hope,” New York Times, Sept. 12, 1933, timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1933/09/12/99846601.html.
Weeks later a Boeing B-29 Alex Wellerstein, “Counting the Dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Aug. 4, 2020, thebulletin.org/2020/08/counting-the-dead-at-hiroshima-and-nagasaki.
In 1946 the Acheson-Lilienthal Report See David Lilienthal et al., “A Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy,” March 16, 1946, fissilematerials.org/library/ach46.pdf.
Although countries like China “Partial Test Ban Treaty,” Nuclear Threat Initiative, Feb. 2008, www.nti.org/education-center/treaties-and-regimes/treaty-banning-nuclear-test-atmosphere-outer-space-and-under-water-partial-test-ban-treaty-ptbt/.
A turning point came in 1968 “Timeline of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT),” Arms Control Association, Aug. 2022, www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Timeline-of-the-Treaty-on-the-Non-Proliferation-of-Nuclear-Weapons-NPT.
After all, it was only in 2019 Liam Stack, “Update Complete: U.S. Nuclear Weapons No Longer Need Floppy Disks,” New York Times, Oct. 24, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy-disks.html.
Accidents are legion The accounts here are largely drawn from Eric Schlosser, Command and Control (London: Penguin, 2014), and John Hughes-Wilson, Eve of Destruction: The Inside Story of Our Dangerous Nuclear World (London: John Blake, 2021).
Tiny hardware malfunctions William Burr, “False Warnings of Soviet Missile Attacks Put U.S. Forces on Alert in 1979–1980,” National Security Archive, March 16, 2020, nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2020-03-16/false-warnings-soviet-missile-attacks-during-1979-80-led-alert-actions-us-strategic-forces.
North Korea went to extraordinary Paul K. Kerr, “Iran–North Korea–Syria Ballistic Missile and Nuclear Cooperation,” Congressional Research Service, Feb. 26, 2016, sgp.fas.org/crs/nuke/R43480.pdf.
China, India, and Pakistan are Graham Allison, “Nuclear Terrorism: Did We Beat the Odds or Change Them?,” PRISM, May 15, 2018, cco.ndu.edu/News/Article/1507316/nuclear-terrorism-did-we-beat-the-odds-or-change-them.
Brazil and Argentina even José Goldemberg, “Looking Back: Lessons from the Denuclearization of Brazil and Argentina,” Arms Control Association, April 2006, www.armscontrol.org/act/2006-04/looking-back-lessons-denuclearization-brazil-argentina.
Plenty of nuclear material Richard Stone, “Dirty Bomb Ingredients Go Missing from Chornobyl Monitoring Lab,” Science, March 25, 2022, www.science.org/content/article/dirty-bomb-ingredients-go-missing-chornobyl-monitoring-lab.
In 2018, plutonium Patrick Malone and R. Jeffrey Smith, “Plutonium Is Missing, but the Government Says Nothing,” Center for Public Integrity, July 16, 2018, publicintegrity.org/national-security/plutonium-is-missing-but-the-government-says-nothing.
It may sound fanciful Zaria Gorvett, “The Lost Nuclear Bombs That No One Can Find,” BBC Future, Aug. 4, 2022, www.bbc.com/future/article/20220804-the-lost-nuclear-bombs-that-no-one-can-find.
Chemical weapons were recently “Timeline of Syrian Chemical Weapons Activity, 2012–2022,” Arms Control Association, May 2021, www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Timeline-of-Syrian-Chemical-Weapons-Activity.
Without them, modeling suggests Paul J. Young, “The Montreal Protocol Protects the Terrestrial Carbon Sink,” Nature, Aug. 18, 2021, www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03737-3.epdf.
After just three pairs Natalie Wolchover, “How Many Different Ways Can a Chess Game Unfold?,” Popular Science, Dec. 15, 2010, www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-12/fyi-how-many-different-ways-can-chess-game-unfold.
In total, the board has “AlphaGo,” DeepMind, www.deepmind.com/research/highlighted-research/alphago. Some, however, report an even higher number; for example, Scientific American cites 10360 configurations. See Christof Koch, “How the Computer Beat the Go Master,” Scientific American, March 19, 2016, www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-computer-beat-the-go-master.
The more technologies there are W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 31.
The technology scholar Everett Rogers Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (New York: Free Press, 1962), or see the writings on industrial revolutions from scholars like Joel Mokyr.
The engineer and futurist Ray Kurzweil Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (New York: Viking Penguin, 2012).
We see this now on See, for example, Azalia Mirhoseini et al., “A Graph Placement Methodology for Fast Chip Design,” Nature, June 9, 2021, www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03544-w; and Lewis Grozinger et al., “Pathways to Cellular Supremacy in Biocomputing,” Nature Communications, Nov. 20, 2019, www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13232-z.
The breakthrough moment took Alex Krizhevsky et al., “ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks,” Neural Information Processing Systems, Sept. 30, 2012, proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2012/file/c399862d3b9d6b76c8436e924a68c45b-Paper.pdf.
In 2012, AlexNet beat Jerry Wei, “AlexNet: The Architecture That Challenged CNNs,” Towards Data Science, July 2, 2019, towardsdatascience.com/alexnet-the-architecture-that-challenged-cnns-e406d5297951.
Thanks to deep learning Chanan Bos, “Tesla’s New HW3 Self-Driving Computer—It’s a Beast,” CleanTechnica, June 15, 2019, cleantechnica.com/2019/06/15/teslas-new-hw3-self-driving-computer-its-a-beast-cleantechnica-deep-dive.
It helps fly drones Jeffrey De Fauw et al., “Clinically Applicable Deep Learning for Diagnosis and Referral in Retinal Disease,” Nature Medicine, Aug. 13, 2018, www.nature.com/articles/s41591-018-0107-6.
By the 2020s there were almost two thousand “Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems,” NeurIPS, papers.nips.cc.
In the last six years “Research & Development,” in Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2021, Stanford University Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, March 2021, aiindex.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/2021-AI-Index-Report-_Chapter-1.pdf.
Everywhere you look, software To paraphrase Marc Andreessen.
At DeepMind we developed systems “DeepMind AI Reduces Google Data Centre Cooling Bill by 40%,” DeepMind, July 20, 2016, www.deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-ai-reduces-google-data-centre-cooling-bill-by-40.
With 1.5 billion parameters “Better Language Models and Their Implications,” OpenAI, Feb. 14, 2019, openai.com/blog/better-language-models.
Over the next few years See Martin Ford, Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything (London: Basic Books, 2021), for a developed comparison.
More realistically, the average American Amy Watson, “Average Reading Time in the U.S. from 2018 to 2021, by Age Group,” Statista, Aug. 3, 2022, www.statista.com/statistics/412454/average-daily-time-reading-us-by-age.
First hundreds of millions Microsoft and NVIDIA built a transformer model with 530 billion parameters, the Megatron-Turing Natural Language Generation model (MT-NLG), thirty-one times larger than their own most powerful transformer models of just a year before. Then came Wu Dao, from the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, with an alleged 1.75 trillion parameters—ten times GPT-3. See, for example, Tanushree Shenwai, “Microsoft and NVIDIA AI Introduces MT-NLG: The Largest and Most Powerful Monolithic Transformer Language NLP Model,” MarkTech Post, Oct. 13, 2021, www.marktechpost.com/2021/10/13/microsoft-and-nvidia-ai-introduces-mt-nlg-the-largest-and-most-powerful-monolithic-transformer-language-nlp-model.
The Chinese company Alibaba “Alibaba DAMO Academy Creates World’s Largest AI Pre-training Model, with Parameters Far Exceeding Google and Microsoft,” Pandaily, Nov. 8, 2021, pandaily.com/alibaba-damo-academy-creates-worlds-largest-ai-pre-training-model-with-parameters-far-exceeding-google-and-microsoft.
Google’s PaLM uses A fantastic image from Alyssa Vance, assuming each “drop” constitutes 0.5 milliliters: mobile.twitter.com/alyssamvance/status/1542682154483589127.
But it uses an efficient training William Fedus et al., “Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity,” Journal of Machine Learning Research, June 16, 2022, arxiv.org/abs/2101.03961.
Or look at DeepMind’s Chinchilla Alberto Romero, “A New AI Trend: Chinchilla (70B) Greatly Outperforms GPT-3 (175B) and Gopher (280B),” Towards Data Science, April 11, 2022, towardsdatascience.com/a-new-ai-trend-chinchilla-70b-greatly-outperforms-gpt-3-175b-and-gopher-280b-408b9b4510.
At the other end of the spectrum See github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT for more details.
Meta has open-sourced Susan Zhang et al., “Democratizing Access to Large-Scale Language Models with OPT-175B,” Meta AI, May 3, 2022, ai.facebook.com/blog/democratizing-access-to-large-scale-language-models-with-opt-175b.
Within days someone had found See, for example, twitter.com/miolini/status/1634982361757790209.
One analysis suggests it makes engineers Eirini Kalliamvakou, “Research: Quantifying GitHub Copilot’s Impact on Developer Productivity and Happiness,” GitHub, Sept. 7, 2022, github.blog/2022-09-07-research-quantifying-github-copilots-impact-on-developer-productivity-and-happiness.
In the words of an eminent Matt Welsh, “The End of Programming,” Communications of the ACM, Jan. 2023, cacm.acm.org/magazines/2023/1/267976-the-end-of-programming/fulltext.
Yet when given the same prompt Emily Sheng et al., “The Woman Worked as a Babysitter: On Biases in Language Generation,” arXiv, Oct. 23, 2019, arxiv.org/pdf/1909.01326.pdf.
Over many hours, Lemoine Nitasha Tiku, “The Google Engineer Who Thinks the Company’s AI Has Come to Life,” Washington Post, June 11, 2022, www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine.
He told an incredulous Wired interviewer Steven Levy, “Blake Lemoine Says Google’s LaMDA AI Faces ‘Bigotry,’ ” Wired, June 17, 2022, www.wired.com/story/blake-lemoine-google-lamda-ai-bigotry.
“As soon as it works” Quoted in Moshe Y. Vardi, “Artificial Intelligence: Past and Future,” Communications of the ACM, Jan. 2012, cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/1/144824-artificial-intelligence-past-and-future/fulltext.
They argue that AI may be slowing Joel Klinger et al., “A Narrowing of AI Research?,” Computers and Society, Jan. 11, 2022, arxiv.org/abs/2009.10385.
Critics like NYU professor Gary Marcus Gary Marcus, “Deep Learning Is Hitting a Wall,” Nautilus, March 10, 2022, nautil.us/deep-learning-is-hitting-a-wall-14467.
eminent professor of complexity Melanie Mitchell See Melanie Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans (London: Pelican Books, 2020), and Steven Strogatz, “Melanie Mitchell Takes AI Research Back to Its Roots,” Quanta Magazine, April 19, 2021, www.quantamagazine.org/melanie-mitchell-takes-ai-research-back-to-its-roots-20210419.
I think it will be done The Alignment Research Center has already tested GPT-4 for precisely this kind of capability. GPT-4 was, at this stage, “ineffective” at acting autonomously, the research found. “GPT-4 System Card,” OpenAI, March 14, 2023, cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4-system-card.pdf. Within days of launch people were getting surprisingly close; see, for example, mobile.twitter.com/jacksonfall/status/1636107218859745286. The version of the test here, though, requires far more autonomy than displayed there.
Just as everything from the steam engine Susan Hockfield, The Age of Living Machines: How Biology Will Build the Next Technology Revolution (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019).
Then, working on bacteria in 1973 Stanley N. Cohen et al., “Construction of Biologically Functional Bacterial Plasmids In Vitro,” PNAS, Nov. 1, 1973, www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.70.11.3240.
This was a thirteen-year “Human Genome Project,” National Human Genome Research Institute, Aug. 24, 2022, www.genome.gov/about-genomics/educational-resources/fact-sheets/human-genome-project.
While Moore’s law justifiably “Life 2.0,” Economist, Aug. 31, 2006, www.economist.com/special-report/2006/08/31/life-20.
Thanks to ever-improving techniques See “The Cost of Sequencing a Human Genome,” National Human Genome Research Institute, Nov. 1, 2021, www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Sequencing-Human-Genome-cost; and Elizabeth Pennisi, “A $100 Genome? New DNA Sequencers Could Be a ‘Game Changer’ for Biology, Medicine,” Science, June 15, 2022, www.science.org/content/article/100-genome-new-dna-sequencers-could-be-game-changer-biology-medicine.
That is, the price dropped Azhar, Exponential, 41.
After the initial CRISPR paper Jian-Feng Li et al., “Multiplex and Homologous Recombination-Mediated Genome Editing in Arabidopsis and Nicotiana benthamiana Using Guide RNA and Cas9,” Nature Biotechnology, Aug. 31, 2013, www.nature.com/articles/nbt.2654.
Fields like RNA editing Sara Reardon, “Step Aside CRISPR, RNA Editing Is Taking Off,” Nature, Feb. 4, 2020, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00272-5.
New techniques like Craspase Chunyi Hu et al., “Craspase Is a CRISPR RNA-Guided, RNA-Activated Protease,” Science, Aug. 25, 2022, www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.add5064.
CRISPR use cases are multiplying Michael Le Page, “Three People with Inherited Diseases Successfully Treated with CRISPR,” New Scientist, June 12, 2020, www.newscientist.com/article/2246020-three-people-with-inherited-diseases-successfully-treated-with-crispr; Jie Li et al., “Biofortified Tomatoes Provide a New Route to Vitamin D Sufficiency,” Nature Plants, May 23, 2022, www.nature.com/articles/s41477-022-01154-6.
In the future, it could offer Mohamed Fareh, “Reprogrammed CRISPR-Cas13b Suppresses SARS-CoV-2 Replication and Circumvents Its Mutational Escape Through Mismatch Tolerance,” Nature, July 13, 2021, www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24577-9; “How CRISPR Is Changing Cancer Research and Treatment,” National Cancer Institute, July 27, 2020, www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2020/crispr-cancer-research-treatment; Zhihao Zhang et al., “Updates on CRISPR-Based Gene Editing in HIV-1/AIDS Therapy,” Virologica Sinica, Feb. 2022, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1995820X22000177; Giulia Maule et al., “Gene Therapy for Cystic Fibrosis: Progress and Challenges of Genome Editing,” International Journal of Molecular Sciences, June 2020, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7313467.
These will create crops Raj Kumar Joshi, “Engineering Drought Tolerance in Plants Through CRISPR/Cas Genome Editing,” 3 Biotech, Sept. 2020, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7438458; Muhammad Rizwan Javed et al., “Current Situation of Biofuel Production and Its Enhancement by CRISPR/Cas9-Mediated Genome Engineering of Microbial Cells,” Microbiological Research, Feb. 2019, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0944501318308346.
Today technologies like CRISPR Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How Gene Editing Will Rewrite Our Futures (London: Icon Books, 2019), 136.
You can now buy a benchtop See, for example, kilobaser.com/shop.
Now they can print millions Yiren Lu, “The Gene Synthesis Revolution,” New York Times, Nov. 24, 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/11/24/magazine/gene-synthesis.html.
The London DNA Foundry “Robotic Labs for High-Speed Genetic Research Are on the Rise,” Economist, March 1, 2018, www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/03/01/robotic-labs-for-high-speed-genetic-research-are-on-the-rise.
Companies such as DNA Script Bruce Rogers, “DNA Script Set to Bring World’s First DNA Printer to Market,” Forbes, May 17, 2021, www.forbes.com/sites/brucerogers/2021/05/17/dna-script-set-to-bring-worlds-first-dna-printer-to-market.
Furthermore, new techniques Michael Eisenstein, “Enzymatic DNA Synthesis Enters New Phase,” Nature Biology, Oct. 5, 2020, www.nature.com/articles/s41587-020-0695-9.
Put it all together Synbio uses not just DNA synthesis but the growing understanding of how genes can be switched on and off, coupled with the discipline of metabolic engineering whereby cells can be encouraged to produce desired substances.
In the words of the Stanford bioengineer Drew Endy, “Endy:Research,” OpenWetWare, Aug. 4, 2017, openwetware.org/wiki/Endy:Research.
In 2010 a team led by Craig Venter “First Self-Replicating Synthetic Bacterial Cell,” JCVI, www.jcvi.org/research/first-self-replicating-synthetic-bacterial-cell.
Just three years later Jonathan E. Venetz et al., “Chemical Synthesis Rewriting of a Bacterial Genome to Achieve Design Flexibility and Biological Functionality,” PNAS, April 1, 2019, www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1818259116.
Now the global GP-write Consortium See GP-write Consortium, Center of Excellence for Engineering Biology, engineeringbiologycenter.org/gp-write-consortium.
Using a gene for light-detecting proteins José-Alain Sahel et al., “Partial Recovery of Visual Function in a Blind Patient After Optogenetic Therapy,” Nature Medicine, May 24, 2021, www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01351-4.
CAR T-Cell therapies engineer bespoke “CureHeart—a Cure for Inherited Heart Muscle Diseases,” British Heart Foundation, www.bhf.org.uk/what-we-do/our-research/cure-heart; National Cancer Institute, “CAR T-Cell Therapy,” National Institutes of Health, www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-terms/def/car-t-cell-therapy.
The field of systems biology See, for example, Astrid M. Vicente et al., “How Personalised Medicine Will Transform Healthcare by 2030: The ICPerMed Vision,” Journal of Translational Medicine, April 28, 2020, translational-medicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12967-020-02316-w.
Its chief scientist, Richard Klausner Antonio Regalado, “How Scientists Want to Make You Young Again,” MIT Technology Review, Oct. 25, 2022, www.technologyreview.com/2022/10/25/1061644/how-to-be-young-again.
This experimental approach aims Jae-Hyun Yang et al., “Loss of Epigenetic Information as a Cause of Mammalian Aging,” Cell, Jan. 12, 2023, www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(22)01570-7.
A world where life spans See, for example, David A. Sinclair and Matthew D. LaPlante, Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To (New York: Atria Books, 2019).
Initial work suggests memory See, for example, Harvard research on memory: “Researchers Identify a Neural Circuit and Genetic ‘Switch’ That Maintain Memory Precision,” Harvard Stem Cell Institute, March 12, 2018, hsci.harvard.edu/news/researchers-identify-neural-circuit-and-genetic-switch-maintain-memory-precision.
Calls for a moratorium John Cohen, “New Call to Ban Gene-Edited Babies Divides Biologists,” Science, March 13, 2019, www.science.org/content/article/new-call-ban-gene-edited-babies-divides-biologists.
Arnold’s method is fifteen times S. B. Jennifer Kan et al., “Directed Evolution of Cytochrome C for Carbon-Silicon Bond Formation: Bringing Silicon to Life,” Science, Nov. 25, 2016, www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aah6219.
This kind of synthetic biology is helping James Urquhart, “Reprogrammed Bacterium Turns Carbon Dioxide into Chemicals on Industrial Scale,” Chemistry World, March 2, 2022, www.chemistryworld.com/news/reprogrammed-bacterium-turns-carbon-dioxide-into-chemicals-on-industrial-scale/4015307.article.
“What if we could grow” Elliot Hershberg, “Atoms Are Local,” Century of Bio, Nov. 7, 2022, centuryofbio.substack.com/p/atoms-are-local.
Theoretically, the entirety of the world’s “The Future of DNA Data Storage,” Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, Sept. 2018, potomacinstitute.org/images/studies/Future_of_DNA_Data_Storage.pdf.
McKinsey estimates that up McKinsey Global Institute, “The Bio Revolution: Innovations Transforming Economies, Societies, and Our Lives,” McKinsey & Company, May 13, 2020, www.mckinsey.com/industries/life-sciences/our-insights/the-bio-revolution-innovations-transforming-economies-societies-and-our-lives.
If you used traditional brute-force computation DeepMind, “AlphaFold: A Solution to a 50-Year-Old Grand Challenge in Biology,” DeepMind Research, Nov. 20, 2020, www.deepmind.com/blog/alphafold-a-solution-to-a-50-year-old-grand-challenge-in-biology.
Mohammed AlQuraishi, a well-known researcher Mohammed AlQuraishi, “AlphaFold @ CASP13: ‘What Just Happened?,’ ” Some Thoughts on a Mysterious Universe, Dec. 9, 2018, moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/alphafold-casp13-what-just-happened.
One headline said it all Tanya Lewis, “One of the Biggest Problems in Biology Has Finally Been Solved,” Scientific American, Oct. 31, 2022, www.scientificamerican.com/article/one-of-the-biggest-problems-in-biology-has-finally-been-solved.
The result has been an explosion Ewen Callaway, “What’s Next for AlphaFold and the AI Protein-Folding Revolution,” Nature, April 13, 2022, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00997-5.
DeepMind uploaded some 200 million Madhumita Murgia, “DeepMind Research Cracks Structure of Almost Every Known Protein,” Financial Times, July 28, 2022, www.ft.com/content/6a088953-66d7-48db-b61c-79005a0a351a; DeepMind, “AlphaFold Reveals the Structure of the Protein Universe,” DeepMind Research, July 28, 2022, www.deepmind.com/blog/alphafold-reveals-the-structure-of-the-protein-universe.
In 2019, electrodes surgically implanted Kelly Servick, “In a First, Brain Implant Lets Man with Complete Paralysis Spell Out ‘I Love My Cool Son,’ ” Science, March 22, 2022, www.science.org/content/article/first-brain-implant-lets-man-complete-paralysis-spell-out-thoughts-i-love-my-cool-son.
Scientists at a start-up called Cortical Labs Brett J. Kagan et al., “In Vitro Neurons Learn and Exhibit Sentience When Embodied in a Simulated Game-World,” Neuron, Oct. 12, 2022, www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6.
Amazon’s “first fully autonomous mobile robot” Mitchell Clark, “Amazon Announces Its First Fully Autonomous Mobile Warehouse Robot,” Verge, June 21, 2022, www.theverge.com/2022/6/21/23177756/amazon-warehouse-robots-proteus-autonomous-cart-delivery.
Amazon’s Sparrow is the first Dave Lee, “Amazon Debuts New Warehouse Robot That Can Do Human Jobs,” Financial Times, Nov. 10, 2022, www.ft.com/content/c8933d73-74a4-43ff-8060-7ff9402eccf1.
Robots are already performing intricate surgery James Gaines, “The Past, Present, and Future of Robotic Surgery,” Smithsonian Magazine, Sept. 15, 2022, www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/the-past-present-and-future-of-robotic-surgery-180980763.
They built a fleet “Helper Robots for a Better Everyday,” Everyday Robots, everydayrobots.com.
With honeybee populations Chelsea Gohd, “Walmart Has Patented Autonomous Robot Bees,” World Economic Forum, March 19, 2018, www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/03/autonomous-robot-bees-are-being-patented-by-walmart.
As costs fall Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2021, aiindex.stanford.edu/report.
The police department had a bomb disposal Sara Sidner and Mallory Simon, “How Robot, Explosives Took Out Dallas Sniper in Unprecedented Way,” CNN, July 12, 2016, cnn.com/2016/07/12/us/dallas-police-robot-c4-explosives/index.html.
In 2019, Google announced Elizabeth Gibney, “Hello Quantum World! Google Publishes Landmark Quantum Supremacy Claim,” Nature, Oct. 23, 2019, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03213-z; Frank Arute et al., “Quantum Supremacy Using a Programmable Superconducting Processor,” Nature, Oct. 23, 2019, www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1666-5.
Chilled to a temperature colder Neil Savage, “Hands-On with Google’s Quantum Computer,” Scientific American, Oct. 24, 2019, www.scientificamerican.com/article/hands-on-with-googles-quantum-computer.
To store equivalent information Gideon Lichfield, “Inside the Race to Build the Best Quantum Computer on Earth,” MIT Technology Review, Feb. 26, 2022, www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/26/916744/quantum-computer-race-ibm-google.
Its key attraction is that each Matthew Sparkes, “IBM Creates Largest Ever Superconducting Quantum Computer,” New Scientist, Nov. 15, 2021, www.newscientist.com/article/2297583-ibm-creates-largest-ever-superconducting-quantum-computer.
Indeed, a relatively small number For certain tasks, at any rate. Charles Choi, “Quantum Leaps in Quantum Computing?,” Scientific American, Oct. 25, 2017, www.scientificamerican.com/article/quantum-leaps-in-quantum-computing.
Renewable energy will become Camilla Hodgson, “Solar Power Expected to Surpass Coal in 5 Years, IEA Says,” Financial Times, Dec. 10, 2022, www.ft.com/content/98cec49f-6682-4495-b7be-793bf2589c6d.
In 2000, solar energy cost “Solar PV Module Prices,” Our World in Data, ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices.
With meaningful private capital Tom Wilson, “Nuclear Fusion: From Science Fiction to ‘When, Not If,’ ” Financial Times, Dec. 17, 2022, www.ft.com/content/65e8f125-5985-4aa8-a027-0c9769e764ad.
Scaled up, it could power a Tesla Eli Dourado, “Nanotechnology’s Spring,” Works in Progress, Oct. 12, 2022, www.worksinprogress.co/issue/nanotechnologys-spring.
Instead, a unit of about thirty Julian Borger, “The Drone Operators Who Halted Russian Convoy Headed for Kyiv,” Guardian, March 28, 2022, www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/28/the-drone-operators-who-halted-the-russian-armoured-vehicles-heading-for-kyiv.
A thousand-strong group of nonmilitary Marcin Wyrwał, “Wojna w Ukrainie. Jak sztuczna inteligencja zabija Rosjan,” Onet, July 13, 2022, www.onet.pl/informacje/onetwiadomosci/rozwiazali-problem-armii-ukrainy-ich-pomysl-okazal-sie-dla-rosjan-zabojczy/pkzrk0z,79cfc278.
A precision missile in a conventional Patrick Tucker, “AI Is Already Learning from Russia’s War in Ukraine, DOD Says,” Defense One, April 21, 2022, www.defenseone.com/technology/2022/04/ai-already-learning-russias-war-ukraine-dod-says/365978.
American, British, and European forces “Ukraine Support Tracker,” Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Dec. 2022, www.ifw-kiel.de/index.php?id=17142.
In the words of the security expert Audrey Kurth Cronin, Power to the People: How Open Technological Innovation Is Arming Tomorrow’s Terrorists (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 2.
The Shenzhen-based company DJI Scott Gilbertson, “Review: DJI Phantom 4,” Wired, April 22, 2016, www.wired.com/2016/04/review-dji-phantom-4.
Combating attacks is difficult Cronin, Power to the People, 320; Derek Hawkins, “A U.S. ‘Ally’ Fired a $3 Million Patriot Missile at a $200 Drone. Spoiler: The Missile Won,” Washington Post, March 17, 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/03/17/a-u-s-ally-fired-a-3-million-patriot-missile-at-a-200-drone-spoiler-the-missile-won.
Should it hold, in ten years Azhar, Exponential, 249.
Outside the weightless world of code See, for example, Michael Bhaskar, Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2021); Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (New York: Dutton, 2011); and Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2017), among many others.
César Hidalgo argues César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies (London: Allen Lane, 2015).
AI already helps find new Neil Savage, “Machines Learn to Unearth New Materials,” Nature, June 30, 2021, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01793-3.
For example, scientists have used Andrij Vasylenko et al., “Element Selection for Crystalline Inorganic Solid Discovery Guided by Unsupervised Machine Learning of Experimentally Explored Chemistry,” Nature Communications, Sept. 21, 2021, www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25343-7.
AI has helped design and build Matthew Greenwood, “Hypercar Created Using 3D Printing, AI, and Robotics,” Engineering.com, June 23, 2021, www.engineering.com/story/hypercar-created-using-3d-printing-ai-and-robotics.
Now simulations speed up Elie Dolgin, “Could Computer Models Be the Key to Better COVID Vaccines?,” Nature, April 5, 2022, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00924-8.
Computational tools help automate Anna Nowogrodzki, “The Automatic-Design Tools That Are Changing Synthetic Biology,” Nature, Dec. 10, 2018, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07662-w.
Quantum technologies, many millions Vidar, “Google’s Quantum Computer Is About 158 Million Times Faster Than the World’s Fastest Supercomputer,” Medium, Feb. 28, 2021, medium.com/predict/googles-quantum-computer-is-about-158-million-times-faster-than-the-world-s-fastest-supercomputer-36df56747f7f.
Discovering new drugs Jack W. Scannell et al., “Diagnosing the Decline in Pharmaceutical R&D Efficiency,” Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, March 1, 2012, www.nature.com/articles/nrd3681.
Life expectancy leveled off Patrick Heuveline, “Global and National Declines in Life Expectancy: An End-of-2021 Assessment,” Population and Development Review 48, no. 1 (March 2022), onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/padr.12477. These declines are, however, on the back of significant long-term improvements.
Progress on conditions like Alzheimer’s “Failed Drug Trials,” Alzheimer’s Research UK, www.alzheimersresearchuk.org/blog-tag/drug-trials/failed-drug-trials.
AI techniques can search through Michael S. Ringel et al., “Breaking Eroom’s Law,” Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, April 16, 2020, www.nature.com/articles/d41573-020-00059-3.
In 2020 an AI system Jonathan M. Stokes, “A Deep Learning Approach to Antibiotic Discovery,” Cell, Feb. 20, 2020, www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30102-1.
Start-ups like Exscientia “Exscientia and Sanofi Establish Strategic Research Collaboration to Develop AI-Driven Pipeline of Precision-Engineered Medicines,” Sanofi, Jan. 7, 2022, www.sanofi.com/en/media-room/press-releases/2022/2022-01-07-06-00-00-2362917.
To date eighteen clinical assets Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth, State of AI Report 2022, Oct. 11, 2022, www.stateof.ai.
In six hours it identified Fabio Urbina et al., “Dual Use of Artificial-Intelligence-Powered Drug Discovery,” Nature Machine Intelligence, March 7, 2022, www.nature.com/articles/s42256-022-00465-9.
At launch, the PlayStation 2 K. Thor Jensen, “20 Years Later: How Concerns About Weaponized Consoles Almost Sunk the PS2,” PCMag, May 9, 2020, www.pcmag.com/news/20-years-later-how-concerns-about-weaponized-consoles-almost-sunk-the-ps2; Associated Press, “Sony’s High-Tech Playstation2 Will Require Military Export License,” Los Angeles Times, April 17, 2000, www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-17-fi-20482-story.html.
A more appropriate term For more on the term “multi-use,” see, for example, Cronin, Power to the People.
Now single systems like DeepMind’s Scott Reed et al., “A Generalist Agent,” DeepMind, Nov. 10, 2022, www.deepmind.com/publications/a-generalist-agent.
Internal research on GPT-4 @GPT-4 Technical Report, OpenAI, March 14, 2023, cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4.pdf. See mobile.twitter.com/michalkosinski/status/1636683810631974912 for one of the early experiments.
Early research even claimed Sébastien Bubeck et al., “Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early Experiments with GPT-4,” arXiv, March 27, 2023, arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712.
AIs are already finding ways Alhussein Fawzi et al., “Discovering Novel Algorithms with AlphaTensor,” DeepMind, Oct. 5, 2022, www.deepmind.com/blog/discovering-novel-algorithms-with-alphatensor.
The AI researcher Stuart Russell Stuart Russell, Human Compatible: AI and the Problem of Control (London: Allen Lane, 2019).
Indeed, there is a strong case Manuel Alfonseca et al., “Superintelligence Cannot Be Contained: Lessons from Computability Theory,” Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Jan. 5, 2021, jair.org/index.php/jair/article/view/12202; Jaime Sevilla and John Burden, “Response to Superintelligence Cannot Be Contained: Lessons from Computability Theory,” Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, Feb. 25, 2021, www.cser.ac.uk/news/response-superintelligence-contained.
Even days before its first public competition See, for example, Cade Metz, Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook and the World (London: Random House Business, 2021), 170.
More than 280 million people Google, “The Future of Go Summit: 23 May–27 May, Wuzhen, China,” Google Events, events.google.com/alphago2017 [inactive].
This was a crisis for America Paul Dickson, “Sputnik’s Impact on America,” Nova, PBS, Nov. 6, 2007, www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/sputnik-impact-on-america.
In the words of Xi Jinping Lo De Wei, “Full Text of Xi Jinping’s Speech at China’s Party Congress,” Bloomberg, Oct. 18, 2022, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-18/full-text-of-xi-jinping-s-speech-at-china-20th-party-congress-2022.
China’s top-down model See, for example, Nigel Inkster, The Great Decoupling: China, America and the Struggle for Technological Supremacy (London: Hurst, 2020).
“By 2030, China’s AI theories” Graham Webster et al., “Full Translation: China’s ‘New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan,’ ” DigiChina, Stanford University, Aug. 1, 2017, digichina.stanford.edu/work/full-translation-chinas-new-generation-artificial-intelligence-development-plan-2017.
Indeed, Tsinghua publishes more Benaich and Hogarth, State of AI; Neil Savage, “The Race to the Top Among the World’s Leaders in Artificial Intelligence,” Nature Index, Dec. 9, 2020, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03409-8; “Tsinghua University May Soon Top the World League in Science Research,” Economist, Nov. 17, 2018, www.economist.com/china/2018/11/17/tsinghua-university-may-soon-top-the-world-league-in-science-research.
China has a growing and impressive Sarah O’Meara, “Will China Lead the World in AI by 2030?,” Nature, Aug. 21, 2019, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02360-7; Akira Oikawa and Yuta Shimono, “China Overtakes US in AI Research,” Nikkei Asia, Aug. 10, 2021, asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Datawatch/China-overtakes-US-in-AI-research.
In terms of volume of AI research Daniel Chou, “Counting AI Research: Exploring AI Research Output in English- and Chinese-Language Sources,” Center for Security and Emerging Technology, July 2022, cset.georgetown.edu/publication/counting-ai-research.
China overtook the United States Remco Zwetsloot, “China Is Fast Outpacing U.S. STEM PhD Growth,” Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Aug. 2021, cset.georgetown.edu/publication/china-is-fast-outpacing-u-s-stem-phd-growth.
In the early years of the twenty-first century Graham Allison et al., “The Great Tech Rivalry: China vs the U.S.,” Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center, Dec. 2021, www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/GreatTechRivalry_ChinavsUS_211207.pdf.
On current trends it will Xinhua, “China Authorizes Around 700,000 Invention Patents in 2021: Report,” XinhuaNet, Jan. 8, 2021, english.news.cn/20220108/ded0496b77c24a3a8712fb26bba390c3/c.html; “U.S. Patent Statistics Chart, Calendar Years 1963–2020,” U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, May 2021, www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/us_stat.htm. Figures for the United States are, however, from 2020. It’s also important to say that high-value patents are also growing quickly: State Council of the People’s Republic of China, “China Sees Growing Number of Invention Patents,” Xinhua, Jan. 2022, english.www.gov.cn/statecouncil/ministries/202201/12/content_WS61deb7c8c6d09c94e48a3883.html.
It has more of the world’s Joseph Hincks, “China Now Has More Supercomputers Than Any Other Country,” Time, Nov. 14, 2017, time.com/5022859/china-most-supercomputers-world.
Xi Jinping has explicitly called Jason Douglas, “China’s Factories Accelerate Robotics Push as Workforce Shrinks,” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 18, 2022, www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-factories-accelerate-robotics-push-as-workforce-shrinks-11663493405.
In 2014, China filed the same number Allison et al., “Great Tech Rivalry.”
A year later the Chinese built Zhang Zhihao, “Beijing-Shanghai Quantum Link a ‘New Era,’ ” China Daily USA, Sept. 30, 2017, usa.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2017-09/30/content_32669867.htm.
They’re investing more than $10 billion Amit Katwala, “Why China’s Perfectly Placed to Be Quantum Computing’s Superpower,” Wired, Nov. 14, 2018, www.wired.co.uk/article/quantum-computing-china-us.
Hefei scientists even claimed to have built Han-Sen Zhong et al., “Quantum Computational Advantage Using Photons,” Science, Dec. 3, 2020, www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abe8770.
Micius’s lead researcher Quoted in Amit Katwala, Quantum Computing (London: Random House Business, 2021), 88.
China is already ahead Allison et al., “Great Tech Rivalry.”
“We have no competing fighting chance” Katrina Manson, “US Has Already Lost AI Fight to China, Says Ex-Pentagon Software Chief,” Financial Times, Oct. 10, 2021, www.ft.com/content/f939db9a-40af-4bd1-b67d-10492535f8e0.
“Advanced technology is the sharp weapon” Quoted in Inkster, The Great Decoupling, 193.
Almost every country now For a detailed breakdown, see “National AI Policies & Strategies,” OECD.AI, oecd.ai/en/dashboards.
Vladimir Putin believes the leader “Putin: Leader in Artificial Intelligence Will Rule World,” CNBC, Sept. 4, 2017, www.cnbc.com/2017/09/04/putin-leader-in-artificial-intelligence-will-rule-world.html.
The French president Emmanuel Macron Thomas Macaulay, “Macron’s Dream of a European Metaverse Is Far from a Reality,” Next Web, Sept. 14, 2022, thenextweb.com/news/prospects-for-europes-emerging-metaverse-sector-macron-vestager-meta.
Security, wealth, prestige “France 2030,” Agence Nationale de la Recherche, Feb. 27, 2023, anr.fr/en/france-2030/france-2030.
By 2030 its economy “India to Be a $30 Trillion Economy by 2050: Gautam Adani,” Economic Times, April 22, 2022, economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/indicators/india-to-be-a-30-trillion-economy-by-2050-gautam-adani/articleshow/90985771.cms.
Under it, India established Trisha Ray and Akhil Deo, “Priorities for a Technology Foreign Policy for India,” Washington International Trade Association, Sept. 25, 2020, www.wita.org/atp-research/tech-foreign-policy-india.
We live in an age Cronin, Power to the People.
For example, GitHub has Neeraj Kashyap, “GitHub’s Path to 128M Public Repositories,” Towards Data Science, March 4, 2020, towardsdatascience.com/githubs-path-to-128m-public-repositories-f6f656ab56b1.
The original such service arXiv, “About ArXiv,” arxiv.org/about.
The great stock of the world’s “The General Index,” Internet Archive, Oct. 7, 2021, archive.org/details/GeneralIndex.
Worldwide R&D spending “Research and Development: U.S. Trends and International Comparisons,” National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, April 28, 2022, ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20225.
Amazon’s R&D budget alone Prableen Bajpai, “Which Companies Spend the Most in Research and Development (R&D)?,” Nasdaq, June 21, 2021, www.nasdaq.com/articles/which-companies-spend-the-most-in-research-and-development-rd-2021-06-21.
Alphabet, Apple, Huawei, Meta “Huawei Pumps $22 Billion into R&D to Beat U.S. Sanctions,” Bloomberg News, April 25, 2022, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/huawei-rivals-apple-meta-with-r-d-spending-to-beat-sanctions; Jennifer Saba, “Apple Has the Most Growth Fuel in Hand,” Reuters, Oct. 28, 2021, www.reuters.com/breakingviews/apple-has-most-growth-fuel-hand-2021-10-28.
And yet it was also LeCun Metz, Genius Makers, 58.
NVIDIA wasn’t complaining Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence, 103.
Two hundred and fifty passengers “First in the World: The Making of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway,” Science+Industry Museum, Dec. 20, 2018, www.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/making-the-liverpool-and-manchester-railway.
Five years in, it was delivering This and the wider account are drawn from William Quinn and John D. Turner, Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
At their peak, railway stocks Ibid.
The railway boom of the 1840s “The Beauty of Bubbles,” Economist, Dec. 18, 2008, www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2008/12/18/the-beauty-of-bubbles.
Carlota Perez sees an equivalent Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital.
Science has to be converted An extensive economics literature examines the microeconomics of innovation, showing how sensitive and wrapped in economic incentives this process is. See, for example, Lipsey, Carlaw, and Bekar, Economic Transformations, for an overview.
Per capita GDP has risen See Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millenarian Perspective (Paris: OECD Publications, 2001), or the more up-to-date “GDP Per Capita, 1820 to 2018,” Our World in Data, ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-2020?yScale=log.
Now, globally, this sits Nishant Yonzan et al., “Projecting Global Extreme Poverty up to 2030: How Close Are We to World Bank’s 3% Goal?,” World Bank Data Blog, Oct. 9, 2020, blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/projecting-global-extreme-poverty-2030-how-close-are-we-world-banks-3-goal.
In the nineteenth century, inventions Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge, Capitalism in America: A History (London: Allen Lane, 2018), 15.
Isaac Singer’s sewing machine Ibid., 47.
In Germany, for example Charlie Giattino and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, “Are We Working More Than Ever?,” Our World in Data, ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever.
Tech is by far the biggest “S&P 500 Data,” S&P Dow Jones Indices, July 2022, www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/indices/equity/sp-500/#data.
Hundreds of billions of dollars In 2021 alone more than $600 billion of venture capital was invested globally, mainly in tech and biotech businesses, ten times the amount a decade earlier. See Gené Teare, “Funding and Unicorn Creation in 2021 Shattered All Records,” Crunchbase News, Jan. 5, 2022, news.crunchbase.com/business/global-vc-funding-unicorns-2021-monthly-recap. Meanwhile, private equity investments in technology also spiked to more than $400 billion in 2021, by far the largest single category. See Laura Cooper and Preeti Singh, “Private Equity Backs Record Volume of Tech Deals,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 3, 2022, www.wsj.com/articles/private-equity-backs-record-volume-of-tech-deals-11641207603.
Investment in AI technologies See, for example, Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2021, although the numbers have certainly grown in the generative AI boom since then.
PwC forecasts AI will add “Sizing the Prize—PwC’s Global Artificial Intelligence Study: Exploiting the AI Revolution,” PwC, 2017, www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/data-and-analytics/publications/artificial-intelligence-study.html.
McKinsey forecasts a $4 trillion boost Jacques Bughin et al., “Notes from the AI Frontier: Modeling the Impact of AI on the World Economy,” McKinsey, Sept. 4, 2018, www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/artificial-intelligence/notes-from-the-ai-frontier-modeling-the-impact-of-ai-on-the-world-economy; Michael Ciu, “The Bio Revolution: Innovations Transforming Economies, Societies, and Our Lives,” McKinsey Global Institute, May 13, 2020, www.mckinsey.com/industries/pharmaceuticals-and-medical-products/our-insights/the-bio-revolution-innovations-transforming-economies-societies-and-our-lives.
Boosting world robot installations “How Robots Change the World,” Oxford Economics, June 26, 2019, resources.oxfordeconomics.com/hubfs/How%20Robots%20Change%20the%20World%20(PDF).pdf.
Consider that the world economy The World Economy in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century,” OECD, Sept. 22, 2006, read.oecd-ilibrary.org/development/the-world-economy/the-world-economy-in-the-second-half-of-the-twentieth-century_9789264022621-5-en#page1.
With generalist AI Philip Trammell et al., “Economic Growth Under Transformative AI,” Global Priorities Institute, Oct. 2020, globalprioritiesinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/Philip-Trammell-and-Anton-Korinek_economic-growth-under-transformative-ai.pdf. This leads to the extraordinary and impossible scenario of an increase “rapid enough to produce infinite output in a finite period of time.”
Assuming favorable weather conditions Hannah Ritchie et al., “Crop Yields,” Our World in Data, ourworldindata.org/crop-yields.
In the twenty-first century, yields “Farming Statistics—Final Crop Areas, Yields, Livestock Populations and Agricultural Workforce at 1 June 2020 United Kingdom,” U.K. Government Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, Dec. 22, 2020, assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/946161/structure-jun2020final-uk-22dec20.pdf.
Corn yields per hectare Ritchie et al., “Crop Yields.”
The labor required Smil, How the World Really Works, 66.
In 1945, around 50 percent Max Roser and Hannah Ritchie, “Hunger and Undernourishment,” Our World in Data, ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment.
While clean electricity generation Smil, How the World Really Works, 36.
Since the start of the twenty-first century Ibid., 42.
Imagine the average tomato Ibid., 61.
What’s more, to meet global demand Daniel Quiggin et al., “Climate Change Risk Assessment 2021,” Chatham House, Sept. 14, 2021, www.chathamhouse.org/2021/09/climate-change-risk-assessment-2021?7J7ZL,68TH2Q,UNIN9.
And yet it’s largely not been invented Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future (New York: Crown, 2022), 155.
AI has helped design an enzyme Hongyuan Lu et al., “Machine Learning–Aided Engineering of Hydrolases for PET Depolymerization,” Nature, April 27, 2022, www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04599-z.
“When you see something” “J. Robert Oppenheimer 1904–67,” in Oxford Essential Quotations, ed. Susan Ratcliffe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780191826719.001.0001/q-oro-ed4-00007996.
“What we are creating now” Quoted in Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral.
At its heart, the nation-state There is clearly a lot of complexity with and a large literature on the use of the terms “nation-state” and “state.” However, here we use them in a fairly basic way: nation-states are the countries of the world, their people, and their governments (with all the great diversity and complexity that implies); states are the governments and systems of rule and social service within those nation-states. Ireland, Israel, India, and Indonesia are all very different kinds of nations and states, yet we can still think about them as a coherent set of bodies despite their many distinctions. Nation-states have always been “something of a fiction,” in the words of Wendy Brown (Walled States, Waning Sovereignty [New York: Zone Books, 2010], 69)—how can the people be sovereign if power is exercised over them? Nonetheless, the nation-state is an incredibly useful and powerful fiction.
Literacy rates, life expectancy Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, “Literacy,” Our World in Data, ourworldindata.org/literacy.
Western societies in particular In the words of William Davies, Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World (London: Jonathan Cape, 2018).
Trust in government One-third (35 percent) of the U.K. population reported that they trust their national government, lower than the average across the OECD countries (41 percent). Half (49 percent) of the U.K. population said they did not trust the national government. “Building Trust to Reinforce Democracy: Key Findings from the 2021 OECD Survey on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions,” OECD, www.oecd.org/governance/trust-in-government.
For recent presidents such as Obama “Public Trust in Government: 1958–2022,” Pew Research Center, June 6, 2022, www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/06/06/public-trust-in-government-1958-2022.
Quite remarkably, a 2018 study Lee Drutman et al., “Follow the Leader: Exploring American Support for Democracy and Authoritarianism,” Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, March 2018, fsi-live.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/followtheleader_2018mar13.pdf.
No less than 85 percent of Americans “Bipartisan Dissatisfaction with the Direction of the Country and the Economy,” AP NORC, June 29, 2022, apnorc.org/projects/bipartisan-dissatisfaction-with-the-direction-of-the-country-and-the-economy.
Distrust extends to nongovernment See, for example, Daniel Drezner, The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats Are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), and the Edelman Trust Barometer: “2022 Edelman Trust Barometer,” Edelman, www.edelman.com/trust/2022-trust-barometer.
A Democracy Perception Index poll Richard Wike et al., “Many Across the Globe Are Dissatisfied with How Democracy Is Working,” Pew Research Center, April 29, 2019, www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/04/29/many-across-the-globe-are-dissatisfied-with-how-democracy-is-working/; Dalia Research et al., “Democracy Perception Index 2018,” Alliance of Democracies, June 2018, www.allianceofdemocracies.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Democracy-Perception-Index-2018-1.pdf.
Since 2010, more countries “New Report: The Global Decline in Democracy Has Accelerated,” Freedom House, March 3, 2021, freedomhouse.org/article/new-report-global-decline-democracy-has-accelerated.
A key catalyst of instability See, for example, Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014), and Anthony B. Atkinson, Inequality: What Can Be Done? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015), for wider surveys.
Between 1980 and 2021 “Top 1% National Income Share,” World Inequality Database, wid.world/world/#sptinc_p99p100_z/US;FR;DE;CN;ZA;GB;WO/last/eu/k/p/yearly/s/false/5.6579999999999995/30/curve/false/country.
Wealth is ever more Richard Mille, “Forbes World’s Billionaires List: The Richest in 2023,” Forbes, www.forbes.com/billionaires/. While it’s true GDP is a flow, not a stock like wealth, the comparison is still arresting.
Government policy, a shrinking Alistair Dieppe, “The Broad-Based Productivity Slowdown, in Seven Charts,” World Bank Blogs: Let’s Talk Development, July 14, 2020, blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/broad-based-productivity-slowdown-seven-charts.
Forty million people in the United States Jessica L. Semega et al., “Income and Poverty in the United States: 2016,” U.S. Census Bureau, www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2017/demo/P60-259.pdf, reported in digitallibrary.un.org/record/1629536?ln=en.
These are especially worrying trends See, for example, Christian Houle et al., “Social Mobility and Political Instability,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Aug. 8, 2017, journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0022002717723434; and Carles Boix, “Economic Roots of Civil Wars and Revolutions in the Contemporary World,” World Politics 60, no. 3 (April 2008): 390–437.
It would take a brave The demise of the nation-state is hardly a novel idea; see, for example, Rana Dasgupta, “The Demise of the Nation State,” Guardian, April 5, 2018, www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/05/demise-of-the-nation-state-rana-dasgupta.
A meta-analysis published Philipp Lorenz-Spreen et al., “A Systematic Review of Worldwide Causal and Correlational Evidence on Digital Media and Democracy,” Nature Human Behaviour, Nov. 7, 2022, www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01460-1.
As the historian of technology Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), 6.
While technology doesn’t simplistically See, for example, Jenny L. Davis, How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2020). Technologies are, in the words of Ursula M. Franklin (The Real World of Technology [Toronto: House of Anansi, 1999]), prescriptive; that is, their creation or use prompts or requires certain behaviors, divisions of labor, or outcomes. Farmers in possession of a tractor will go about their work and structure their needs in a different way from farmers with two oxen and a plow. The division of labor prompted by a factory system produces different kinds of social organizations from a society of hunter-gatherers—a culture of compliance and administration. “Patterns laid down in the practice of technology become part of a society’s life” (55).
The clock produced set times See Mumford, Technics and Civilization, for a brilliant analysis on the impacts of mechanical clocks.
The printing press helped Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
On one trajectory, some liberal The Cambridge political scientist David Runciman talks about “zombie democracies,” which means something similar: “The basic idea is that the people are simply watching a performance in which their role is to give or withhold applause at the appropriate moments. Democratic politics has become an elaborate show.” David Runciman, How Democracy Ends (London: Profile Books, 2019), 47.
The NHS had been hit See, for example, S. Ghafur et al., “A Retrospective Impact Analysis of the WannaCry Cyberattack on the NHS,” NPJ Digital Medicine, Oct. 2, 2019, www.nature.com/articles/s41746-019-0161-6, for more.
WannaCry tricked some users Mike Azzara, “What Is WannaCry Ransomware and How Does It Work?,” Mimecast, May 5, 2021, www.mimecast.com/blog/all-you-need-to-know-about-wannacry-ransomware.
The ensuing damage cost Andy Greenberg, “The Untold Story of NotPetya, the Most Devastating Cyberattack in History,” Wired, Aug. 22, 2018, www.wired.com/story/notpetya-cyberattack-ukraine-russia-code-crashed-the-world.
In the words of one NSA staffer James Bamford, “Commentary: Evidence Points to Another Snowden at the NSA,” Reuters, Aug. 22, 2016, www.reuters.com/article/us-intelligence-nsa-commentary-idUSKCN10X01P.
“An equivalent scenario” Brad Smith, “The Need for Urgent Collective Action to Keep People Safe Online: Lessons from Last Week’s Cyberattack,” Microsoft Blogs: On the Issues, May 14, 2017, blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2017/05/14/need-urgent-collective-action-keep-people-safe-online-lessons-last-weeks-cyberattack.
Power is “the ability or capacity” Definitions taken from Oxford Languages, languages.oup.com.
In the words of a New York Times Ronen Bergman et al., “The Scientist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Control Killing Machine,” New York Times, Sept. 18, 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/world/middleeast/iran-nuclear-fakhrizadeh-assassination-israel.html.
The cost of military-grade drones Azhar, Exponential, 192.
By 2028, $26 billion a year Fortune Business Insights, “Military Drone Market to Hit USD 26.12 Billion by 2028; Rising Military Spending Worldwide to Augment Growth,” Global News Wire, July 22, 2021, www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2021/07/22/2267009/0/en/Military-Drone-Market-to-Hit-USD-26-12-Billion-by-2028-Rising-Military-Spending-Worldwide-to-Augment-Growth-Fortune-Business-Insights.html.
In May 2021, for example David Hambling, “Israel Used World’s First AI-Guided Combat Drone Swarm in Gaza Attacks,” New Scientist, June 30, 2021, www.newscientist.com/article/2282656-israel-used-worlds-first-ai-guided-combat-drone-swarm-in-gaza-attacks.
Start-ups like Anduril Dan Primack, “Exclusive: Rebellion Defense Raises $150 Million at $1 Billion Valuation,” Axios, Sept. 15, 2021, www.axios.com/2021/09/15/rebellion-defense-raises-150-million-billion-valuation; Ingrid Lunden, “Anduril Is Raising Up to $1.2B, Sources Say at a $7B Pre-money Valuation, for Its Defense Tech,” TechCrunch, May 24, 2022, techcrunch.com/2022/05/24/filing-anduril-is-raising-up-to-1-2b-sources-say-at-a-7b-pre-money-valuation-for-its-defense-tech.
As the cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier, “The Coming AI Hackers,” Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center, April 2021, www.belfercenter.org/publication/coming-ai-hackers.
Researchers at Meta created Anton Bakhtin et al., “Human-Level Play in the Game of Diplomacy by Combining Language Models with Strategic Reasoning,” Science, Nov. 22, 2022, www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ade9097.
When non-state See Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum, The Future of Violence: Robots and Germans, Hackers and Drones—Confronting A New Age of Threat (New York: Basic Books, 2015), for a more developed version of this argument.
Both looked and sounded First reported in Nilesh Cristopher, “We’ve Just Seen the First Use of Deepfakes in an Indian Election Campaign,” Vice, Feb. 18, 2020, www.vice.com/en/article/jgedjb/the-first-use-of-deepfakes-in-indian-election-by-bjp.
In another widely publicized incident Melissa Goldin, “Video of Biden Singing ‘Baby Shark’ Is a Deepfake,” Associated Press, Oct. 19, 2022, apnews.com/article/fact-check-biden-baby-shark-deepfake-412016518873; “Doctored Nancy Pelosi Video Highlights Threat of ‘Deepfake’ Tech,” CBS News, May 25, 2019, www.cbsnews.com/news/doctored-nancy-pelosi-video-highlights-threat-of-deepfake-tech-2019-05-25.
If you want to watch TikTok @deeptomcruise, www.tiktok.com/@deeptomcruise?lang=en.
A bank in Hong Kong Thomas Brewster, “Fraudsters Cloned Company Director’s Voice in $35 Million Bank Heist, Police Find,” Forbes, Oct. 14, 2021, www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/10/14/huge-bank-fraud-uses-deep-fake-voice-tech-to-steal-millions.
All the documents seemed Catherine Stupp, “Fraudsters Used AI to Mimic CEO’s Voice in Unusual Cybercrime Case,” Wall Street Journal, Aug. 30, 2019, www.wsj.com/articles/fraudsters-use-ai-to-mimic-ceos-voice-in-unusual-cybercrime-case-11567157402.
It’s not the president charging Which is a real deepfake. See Kelly Jones, “Viral Video of Biden Saying He’s Reinstating the Draft Is a Deepfake,” Verify, March 1, 2023, www.verifythis.com/article/news/verify/national-verify/viral-video-of-biden-saying-hes-reinstating-the-draft-is-a-deepfake/536-d721f8cb-d26a-4873-b2a8-91dd91288365.
His radicalizing messages were Josh Meyer, “Anwar al-Awlaki: The Radical Cleric Inspiring Terror from Beyond the Grave,” NBC News, Sept. 21, 2016, www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/anwar-al-awlaki-radical-cleric-inspiring-terror-beyond-grave-n651296; Alex Hern, “ ‘YouTube Islamist’ Anwar al-Awlaki Videos Removed in Extremism Clampdown,” Guardian, Nov. 13, 2017, www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/13/youtube-islamist-anwar-al-awlaki-videos-removed-google-extremism-clampdown.
Soon these videos will be fully Eric Horvitz, “On the Horizon: Interactive and Compositional Deepfakes,” ICMI ’22: Proceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, arxiv.org/abs/2209.01714.
According to Facebook U.S. Senate, Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence: Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election, vol. 5, Counterintelligence Threats and Vulnerabilities, 116th Congress, 1st sess., www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/report_volume5.pdf; Nicholas Fandos et al., “House Intelligence Committee Releases Incendiary Russian Social Media Ads,” New York Times, Nov. 1, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/us/politics/russia-technology-facebook.html.
Unfortunately, it’s far from just Russia It is, however, often Russia. In 2021, 58 percent of cyberattacks came from Russia alone. See Tom Burt, “Russian Cyberattacks Pose Greater Risk to Governments and Other Insights from Our Annual Report,” Microsoft Blogs: On the Issues, Oct. 7, 2021, blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2021/10/07/digital-defense-report-2021.
More than seventy countries Samantha Bradshaw et al., “Industrialized Disinformation: 2020 Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation,” Oxford University Programme on Democracy & Technology, Jan. 13, 2021, demtech.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/posts/industrialized-disinformation.
The CIA, too, is no stranger See, for example, Krassi Twigg and Kerry Allen, “The Disinformation Tactics Used by China,” BBC News, March 12, 2021, www.bbc.co.uk/news/56364952; Kenddrick Chan and Mariah Thornton, “China’s Changing Disinformation and Propaganda Targeting Taiwan,” Diplomat, Sept. 19, 2022, thediplomat.com/2022/09/chinas-changing-disinformation-and-propaganda-targeting-taiwan/; and Emerson T. Brooking and Suzanne Kianpour, “Iranian Digital Influence Efforts: Guerrilla Broadcasting for the Twenty-first Century,” Atlantic Council, Feb. 11, 2020, www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/iranian-digital-influence-efforts-guerrilla-broadcasting-for-the-twenty-first-century.
Eighty-two percent of influential users Virginia Alvino Young, “Nearly Half of the Twitter Accounts Discussing ‘Reopening America’ May Be Bots,” Carnegie Mellon University, May 27, 2020, www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2020/may/twitter-bot-campaign.html.
Cue an “Infocalypse” See Nina Schick, Deep Fakes and the Infocalypse: What You Urgently Need to Know (London: Monoray, 2020); and Ben Buchanan et al., “Truth, Lies, and Automation,” Center for Security and Emerging Technology, May 2021, cset.georgetown.edu/publication/truth-lies-and-automation.
In the words of a Brookings Institution William A. Galston, “Is Seeing Still Believing? The Deepfake Challenge to Truth in Politics,” Brookings, Jan. 8, 2020, www.brookings.edu/research/is-seeing-still-believing-the-deepfake-challenge-to-truth-in-politics.
First discovered in China Figure taken from William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View (London: Oneworld, 2022), 112, who cites a variety of sources, although acknowledges none are certain about this number. See also H. C. Kung et al., “Influenza in China in 1977: Recurrence of Influenza Virus A Subtype H1N1,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 56, no. 6 (1978), www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2395678/pdf/bullwho00443-0095.pdf.
What was unusual about the H1N1 flu Joel O. Wertheim, “The Re-emergence of H1N1 Influenza Virus in 1977: A Cautionary Tale for Estimating Divergence Times Using Biologically Unrealistic Sampling Dates,” PLOS ONE, June 17, 2010, journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0011184.
A version of the earlier virus See, for example, Edwin D. Kilbourne, “Influenza Pandemics of the 20th Century,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 12, no. 1 (Jan. 2006), www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3291411; and Michelle Rozo and Gigi Kwik Gronvall, “The Reemergent 1977 H1N1 Strain and the Gain-of-Function Debate,” mBio, Aug. 18, 2015, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542197.
And yet accidents and leaks See, for example, good accounts in Alina Chan and Matt Ridley, Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 (London: Fourth Estate, 2022), and MacAskill, What We Owe the Future.
Just two years later anthrax spores Kai Kupferschmidt, “Anthrax Genome Reveals Secrets About a Soviet Bioweapons Accident,” Science, Aug. 16, 2016, www.science.org/content/article/anthrax-genome-reveals-secrets-about-soviet-bioweapons-accident.
In 2007 a leaking pipe T. J. D. Knight-Jones and J. Rushton, “The Economic Impacts of Foot and Mouth Disease—What Are They, How Big Are They, and Where Do They Occur?,” Preventive Veterinary Medicine, Nov. 2013, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3989032/#bib0005. It should be noted the damage was much less than the 2001 outbreak, which was from natural causes.
In 2021, a pharmaceutical company Maureen Breslin, “Lab Worker Finds Vials Labeled ‘Smallpox’ at Merck Facility,” The Hill, Nov. 17, 2021, thehill.com/policy/healthcare/581915-lab-worker-finds-vials-labeled-smallpox-at-merck-facility-near-philadelphia.
Before it was eradicated Sophie Ochmann and Max Roser, “Smallpox,” Our World in Data, ourworldindata.org/smallpox; Kelsey Piper, “Smallpox Used to Kill Millions of People Every Year. Here’s How Humans Beat It,” Vox, May 8, 2022, www.vox.com/future-perfect/21493812/smallpox-eradication-vaccines-infectious-disease-covid-19.
Quite incredibly, it escaped See, for example, Kathryn Senio, “Recent Singapore SARS Case a Laboratory Accident,” Lancet Infectious Diseases, Nov. 2003, www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(03)00815-6/fulltext; Jane Parry, “Breaches of Safety Regulations Are Probable Cause of Recent SARS Outbreak, WHO Says,” BMJ, May 20, 2004, www.bmj.com/content/328/7450/1222.3; and Martin Furmanski, “Laboratory Escapes and ‘Self-Fulfilling Prophecy’ Epidemics,” Arms Control Center, Feb. 17, 2014, armscontrolcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Escaped-Viruses-final-2-17-14-copy.pdf.
Even as the number of BSL-4 labs Alexandra Peters, “The Global Proliferation of High-Containment Biological Laboratories: Understanding the Phenomenon and Its Implications,” Revue Scientifique et Technique, Dec. 2018, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30964462. The number of labs has gone from fifty-nine to sixty-nine in the last two years, most are in urbanized contexts, and the number of labs handling deadly pathogens is above a hundred. A new generation of “BSL-3+” labs have also boomed. See Filippa Lentzos et al., “Global BioLabs Report 2023,” King’s College London, May 16, 2023, www.kcl.ac.uk/warstudies/assets/global-biolabs-report-2023.pdf.
Between 1975 and 2016 David Manheim and Gregory Lewis, “High-Risk Human-Caused Pathogen Exposure Events from 1975–2016,” F1000Research, July 8, 2022, f1000research.com/articles/10-752.
A survey of biosafety officers David B. Manheim, “Results of a 2020 Survey on Reporting Requirements and Practices for Biocontainment Laboratory Accidents,” Health Security 19, no. 6 (2021), www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/hs.2021.0083.
A U.S. risk assessment from 2014 Lynn C. Klotz and Edward J. Sylvester, “The Consequences of a Lab Escape of a Potential Pandemic Pathogen,” Frontiers in Public Health, Aug. 11, 2014, www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2014.00116/full.
Few areas of biology are as controversial Thanks in particular to Jason Matheny and Kevin Esvelt for their discussion on this topic.
Work with an avian flu Martin Enserink and John Cohen, “One of Two Hotly Debated H5N1 Papers Finally Published,” Science, May 2, 2012, www.science.org/content/article/one-two-hotly-debated-h5n1-papers-finally-published.
For a time U.S. funding agencies Amber Dance, “The Shifting Sands of ‘Gain-of-Function’ Research,” Nature, Oct. 27, 2021, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02903-x.
There is at least some indication Chan and Ridley, Viral; “Controversial New Research Suggests SARS-CoV-2 Bears Signs of Genetic Engineering,” Economist, Oct. 27, 2022, www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2022/10/22/a-new-paper-claims-sars-cov-2-bears-signs-of-genetic-engineering.
Both the FBI and the U.S. Department of Energy See, for example, Max Matza and Nicholas Yong, “FBI Chief Christopher Wray Says China Lab Leak Most Likely,” BBC, March 1, 2023, www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-64806903.
In late 2022, an NIH study Da-Yuan Chen et al., “Role of Spike in the Pathogenic and Antigenic Behavior of SARS-CoV-2 BA.1 Omicron,” bioRxiv, Oct. 14, 2022, www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.13.512134v1.
Many felt the research shouldn’t Kiran Stacey, “US Health Officials Probe Boston University’s Covid Virus Research,” Financial Times, Oct. 20, 2022, www.ft.com/content/f2e88a9c-104a-4515-8de1-65d72a5903d0.
Early analysis of ChatGPT Shakked Noy and Whitney Zhang, “Experimental Evidence on the Productivity Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence,” MIT Economics, March 10, 2023, economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/inline-files/Noy_Zhang_1_0.pdf.
That in turn could affect hiring The likely total is less, however, but still considerable. See James Manyika et al., “Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained: What the Future of Work Will Mean for Jobs, Skills, and Wages,” McKinsey Global Institute, Nov. 28, 2017, www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work/jobs-lost-jobs-gained-what-the-future-of-work-will-mean-for-jobs-skills-and-wages. Exact wording: “We estimate that about half of all the activities people are paid to do in the world’s workforce could potentially be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technologies.” Second statistic from Mark Muro et al., “Automation and Artificial Intelligence: How Machines Are Affecting People and Places,” Metropolitan Policy Program, Brookings, Jan. 2019, www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/2019.01_BrookingsMetro_Automation-AI_Report_Muro-Maxim-Whiton-FINAL-version.pdf.
The economists Daron Acemoglu Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, “Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets,” Journal of Political Economy 128, no. 6 (June 2020), www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/705716.
Today algorithms perform the vast Ibid.; Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism (London: Little, Brown, 2017), 54. See also Justin Baer and Daniel Huang, “Wall Street Staffing Falls Again,” Wall Street Journal, Feb. 19, 2015, www.wsj.com/articles/wall-street-staffing-falls-for-fourth-consecutive-year-1424366858; Ljubica Nedelkoska and Glenda Quintini, “Automation, Skills Use, and Training,” OECD, March 8, 2018, www.oecd-ilibrary.org/employment/automation-skills-use-and-training_2e2f4eea-en.
Economists like David Autor David H. Autor, “Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 29, no. 3 (Summer 2015), www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.29.3.3.
Buying into that fear This is the view of Azeem Azhar: “Overall, though, the lasting impact of automation will not be the loss of jobs” (Azhar, Exponential, 141).
Labor markets also have immense friction See Daniel Susskind, A World Without Work: Technology, Automation and How We Should Respond (London: Allen Lane, 2021), for a developed account of these frictions.
The Private Sector Job Quality Index “U.S. Private Sector Job Quality Index (JQI),” University at Buffalo School of Management, Feb. 2023, ubwp.buffalo.edu/job-quality-index-jqi. See also Ford, Rule of the Robots.
Even those who don’t foresee Autor, “Why Are There Still So Many Jobs?”
At first blush, stirrups White, Medieval Technology and Social Change. The account is not universally accepted, however. For a more skeptical reading of Lynn White’s famous thesis, see, for example, “The Great Stirrup Controversy,” The Medieval Technology Pages, web.archive.org/web/20141009082354/http://scholar.chem.nyu.edu/tekpages/texts/strpcont.html.
This ungovernable “post-sovereign” world Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty.
Its customs, duties, and dividends William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 233.
Organizations too are a kind of intelligence Richard Danzig first proposed this idea to me over dinner and then published an excellent paper: “Machines, Bureaucracies, and Markets as Artificial Intelligences,” Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Jan. 2022, cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/Machines-Bureaucracies-and-Markets-as-Artificial-Intelligences.pdf.
To get a sense of these concentrations “Global 500,” Fortune, fortune.com/global500/. As of October 2022. World Bank numbers suggest somewhat lower: World Bank, “GDP (Current US$),” World Bank Data, data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD.
Companies already control the largest clusters Benaich and Hogarth, State of AI Report 2022.
There is already a pronounced James Manyika et al., “Superstars: The Dynamics of Firms, Sectors, and Cities Leading the Global Economy,” McKinsey Global Institute, Oct. 24, 2018, www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/innovation-and-growth/superstars-the-dynamics-of-firms-sectors-and-cities-leading-the-global-economy.
Ninety percent of these disputes Colin Rule, “Separating the People from the Problem,” The Practice, July 2020, thepractice.law.harvard.edu/article/separating-the-people-from-the-problem.
Zero marginal cost production See, for example, Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (New York: Palgrave, 2014).
What’s more, owners of the best systems Erik Brynjolfsson calls a situation where AI takes over more and more of the economy, locking large numbers of people in an equilibrium where they have no work, no wealth, and no meaningful power, the “Turing Trap.” Erik Brynjolfsson, “The Turing Trap: The Promise & Peril of Human-Like Artificial Intelligence,” Stanford Digital Economy Lab, Jan. 11, 2022, arxiv.org/pdf/2201.04200.pdf.
Little wonder there is talk See, for example, Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class (New York: Encounter Books, 2020).
Despite the best efforts of revolutionaries James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998).
On the way, and throughout the day “How Many CCTV Cameras Are There in London?,” CCTV.co.uk, Nov. 18, 2020, www.cctv.co.uk/how-many-cctv-cameras-are-there-in-london.
Compared with the West Benaich and Hogarth, State of AI Report 2022.
By 2015 this was the inspiration Dave Gershgorn, “China’s ‘Sharp Eyes’ Program Aims to Surveil 100% of Public Space,” OneZero, March 2, 2021, onezero.medium.com/chinas-sharp-eyes-program-aims-to-surveil-100-of-public-space-ddc22d63e015.
A team of leading researchers Shu-Ching Jean Chen, “SenseTime: The Faces Behind China’s Artificial Intelligence Unicorn,” Forbes, March 7, 2018, www.forbes.com/sites/shuchingjeanchen/2018/03/07/the-faces-behind-chinas-omniscient-video-surveillance-technology.
Chinese police even have sunglasses Sofia Gallarate, “Chinese Police Officers Are Wearing Facial Recognition Sunglasses,” Fair Planet, July 9, 2019, www.fairplanet.org/story/chinese-police-officers-are-wearing-facial-recogni%C2%ADtion-sunglasses.
Around half the world’s billion CCTV This and below stats taken from a New York Times investigation: Isabelle Qian et al., “Four Takeaways from a Times Investigation into China’s Expanding Surveillance State,” New York Times, June 21, 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/06/21/world/asia/china-surveillance-investigation.html.
This AI-enabled system could spot Ross Andersen, “The Panopticon Is Already Here,” Atlantic, Sept. 2020, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/china-ai-surveillance/614197.
Authorities have built an iris-scan Qian et al., “Four Takeaways from a Times Investigation into China’s Expanding Surveillance State.”
In 2019, the U.S. government banned “NDAA Section 889,” GSA SmartPay, smartpay.gsa.gov/content/ndaa-section-889.
Yet, just a year later, three federal agencies Conor Healy, “US Military & Gov’t Break Law, Buy Banned Dahua/Lorex, Congressional Committee Calls for Investigation,” IPVM, Dec. 1, 2019, ipvm.com/reports/usg-lorex.
More than one hundred U.S. towns Zack Whittaker, “US Towns Are Buying Chinese Surveillance Tech Tied to Uighur Abuses,” TechCrunch, May 24, 2021, techcrunch.com/2021/05/24/united-states-towns-hikvision-dahua-surveillance.
In smart warehouses Joshua Brustein, “Warehouses Are Tracking Workers’ Every Muscle Movement,” Bloomberg, Nov. 5, 2019, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-05/am-i-being-tracked-at-work-plenty-of-warehouse-workers-are.
Companies like Vigilant Solutions Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2021).
Even your take-out pizza Joanna Fantozzi, “Domino’s Using AI Cameras to Ensure Pizzas Are Cooked Correctly,” Nation’s Restaurants News, May 29, 2019, www.nrn.com/quick-service/domino-s-using-ai-cameras-ensure-pizzas-are-cooked-correctly.
Before the coming wave Consider that an up-to-date novel about surveillance dystopias like Dave Eggers’s The Every hasn’t really moved in terms of what exactly is surveilled and is presented not as far-out science fiction but as a satire on contemporary technology companies.
It may be the best-armed The analyst was Brigadier General (Ret.) Assaf Orion of Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies. “The Future of U.S.-Israel Relations Symposium,” Council on Foreign Relations, Dec. 2, 2019, www.cfr.org/event/future-us-israel-relations-symposium, quoted in Kali Robinson, “What Is Hezbollah?,” Council on Foreign Relations, May 25, 2022, www.cfr.org/backgrounder/what-hezbollah.
It also conducts various commercial See, for example, “Explained: How Hezbollah Built a Drug Empire via Its ‘Narcoterrorist Strategy,’ ” Arab News, May 3, 2021, www.arabnews.com/node/1852636/middle-east.
It is instead a strange Lina Khatib, “How Hezbollah Holds Sway over the Lebanese State,” Chatham House, June 30, 2021, www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/2021-06/2021-06-30-how-hezbollah-holds-sway-over-the-lebanese-state-khatib.pdf.
The coming wave, however This would simply be to vastly expand certain existing trends whereby, as in centralization, private actors take on more roles traditionally thought to be the preserve of the state. See, for example, Rodney Bruce Hall and Thomas J. Biersteker, The Emergence of Private Authority in Global Governance (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Recall that over just the last decade “Renewable Power Generation Costs in 2019,” IRENA, June 2020, www.irena.org/publications/2020/Jun/Renewable-Power-Costs-in-2019.
Hyper-libertarian technologists James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age (New York: Touchstone, 1997).
A bonfire of public services Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, April 13, 2009, www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian. See Balaji Srinivasan, The Network State (1729 publishing, 2022), for a more thoughtful take on how technological constructs might supersede the nation-state.
England’s population Niall Ferguson, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe (London: Allen Lane, 2021), 131.
World War I killed Numbers are from ibid.
A novel human transmissible virus Numbers taken from a confidential briefing, but we understand this is considered plausible by biosecurity experts.
It’s not hard to see It is remarkable that a third of scientists working on AI believe it could lead to a catastrophe. Jeremy Hsu, “A Third of Scientists Working on AI Say It Could Cause Global Disaster,” New Scientist, Sept. 22, 2022, www.newscientist.com/article/2338644-a-third-of-scientists-working-on-ai-say-it-could-cause-global-disaster.
Founded in the 1980s, Aum Shinrikyo See Richard Danzig and Zachary Hosford, “Aum Shinrikyo—Second Edition—English,” CNAS, Dec. 20, 2012, www.cnas.org/publications/reports/aum-shinrikyo-second-edition-english; and Philipp C. Bleak, “Revisiting Aum Shinrikyo: New Insights into the Most Extensive Non-state Biological Weapons Program to Date,” James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Dec. 10, 2011, www.nti.org/analysis/articles/revisiting-aum-shinrikyo-new-insights-most-extensive-non-state-biological-weapons-program-date-1.
At Aum Shinrikyo’s peak popularity Federation of American Scientists, “The Operation of the Aum,” in Global Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction: A Case Study of the Aum Shinrikyo, Senate Government Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Oct. 31, 1995, irp.fas.org/congress/1995_rpt/aum/part04.htm.
As a report on the implications Danzig and Hosford, “Aum Shinrikyo.”
Some will inevitably say See, for example, Nick Bostrom, “The Vulnerable World Hypothesis,” Sept. 6, 2019, nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf, for perhaps the most developed version of this thesis. In a thought experiment responding to the prospect of “easy nukes,” he envisages a “high-tech panopticon” where everyone has a “freedom tag,” “worn around the neck and bedecked with multidirectional cameras and microphones. Encrypted video and audio is continuously uploaded from the device to the cloud and machine-interpreted in real time. AI algorithms classify the activities of the wearer, his hand movements, nearby objects, and other situational cues. If suspicious activity is detected, the feed is relayed to one of several patriot monitoring stations.”
The wave provides both motive Martin Bereaja et al., “AI-tocracy,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, March 13, 2023, academic.oup.com/qje/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/qje/qjad012/7076890.
And on the continuum Balaji Srinivasan foresees something very like this outcome, with America the zombie, China the demon: “As America descends into anarchy, the CCP points to their functional-but-highly-unfree system as the only alternative, and exports a turnkey version of their surveillance state to other countries as the next version of Belt and Road, as a piece of ‘infrastructure’ that comes complete with a SaaS subscription to China’s all-seeing AI eye.” Srinivasan, The Network State, 162.
The philosopher of technology Isis Hazewindus, “The Threat of the Megamachine,” IfThenElse, Nov. 21, 2021, www.ifthenelse.eu/blog/the-threat-of-the-megamachine.
A survey of sixty civilizations Michael Shermer, “Why ET Hasn’t Called,” Scientific American, Aug. 2002, michaelshermer.com/sciam-columns/why-et-hasnt-called.
Without new technologies Ian Morris, Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future (London: Profile Books, 2010); Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies; Diamond, Collapse.
Over the next century Stein Emil Vollset et al., “Fertility, Mortality, Migration, and Population Scenarios for 195 Countries and Territories from 2017 to 2100: A Forecasting Analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study,” Lancet, July 14, 2020, www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(20)30677-2/fulltext.
Countries including Japan, Germany Peter Zeihan, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization (New York: Harper Business, 2022).
China is a major part Xiujian Peng, “Could China’s Population Start Falling?” BBC Future, June 6, 2022, www.bbc.com/future/article/20220531-why-chinas-population-is-shrinking.
All of this means Zeihan, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning, 203.
Demand for lithium, cobalt “Climate-Smart Mining: Minerals for Climate Action,” World Bank, www.worldbank.org/en/topic/extractiveindustries/brief/climate-smart-mining-minerals-for-climate-action.
Given the population and resource constraints Galor, The Journey of Humanity, 130.
In 1955, toward the end of his life John von Neumann, “Can We Survive Technology?,” in The Neumann Compendium (River Edge, N.J.: World Scientific, 1995), geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/von_Neumann_1955.pdf.
How do they account for an age David Cahn et al., “AI 2022: The Explosion,” Coatue Venture, coatue-external.notion.site/AI-2022-The-Explosion-e76afd140f824f2eb6b049c5b85a7877.
As we’ve seen, even wealthy nations “2021 GHS Index Country Profile for United States,” Global Health Security Index, www.ghsindex.org/country/united-states.
Yet a catalog of disastrous decisions Edouard Mathieu et al., “Coronavirus (COVID-19) Deaths,” Our World in Data, ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths.
National budgets for such things For example, compared with during the 1957 Asian flu, the U.S. federal budget is vastly bigger, in absolute terms of course, but also as a percentage of GDP (16.2 percent versus 20.8 percent). In 1957 there was no dedicated Department of Health, and the forerunner of the CDC was still a relatively fledgling organization at eleven years old. Ferguson, Doom, 234.
The most ambitious legislation “The Artificial Intelligence Act,” Future of Life Institute, artificialintelligenceact.eu.
Some argue it’s too focused See, for example, “FLI Position Paper on the EU AI Act,” Future of Life Institute, Aug. 4, 2021, futureoflife.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/FLI-Position-Paper-on-the-EU-AI-Act.pdf?x72900; and David Matthews, “EU Artificial Intelligence Act Not ‘Futureproof,’ Experts Warn MEPs,” Science Business, March 22, 2022, sciencebusiness.net/news/eu-artificial-intelligence-act-not-futureproof-experts-warn-meps.
Some believe it lets big tech Khari Johnson, “The Fight to Define When AI Is High Risk,” Wired, Sept. 1, 2021, www.wired.com/story/fight-to-define-when-ai-is-high-risk.
And yet 1.35 million people “Global Road Safety Statistics,” Brake, www.brake.org.uk/get-involved/take-action/mybrake/knowledge-centre/global-road-safety#.
The government has issued Jennifer Conrad, “China Is About to Regulate AI—and the World Is Watching,” Wired, Feb. 22, 2022, www.wired.com/story/china-regulate-ai-world-watching.
It proactively banned various Christian Smith, “China’s Gaming Laws Are Cracking Down Even Further,” SVG, March 15, 2022, www.svg.com/799717/chinas-gaming-laws-are-cracking-down-even-further.
Draft regulation of recommendation “The National Internet Information Office’s Regulations on the Administration of Internet Information Service Algorithm Recommendations (Draft for Comment) Notice of Public Consultation,” Cyberspace Administration of China, Aug. 27, 2021, www.cac.gov.cn/2021-08/27/c_1631652502874117.htm.
It doesn’t describe how countries See, for example, Alex Engler, “The Limited Global Impact of the EU AI Act,” Brookings, June 14, 2022, www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2022/06/14/the-limited-global-impact-of-the-eu-ai-act. A study of 250,000 international treaties suggests they tend not to achieve their ends. See Steven J. Hoffman et al., “International Treaties Have Mostly Failed to Produce Their Intended Effects,” PNAS, Aug. 1, 2022, www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2122854119.
Our prehistoric brains See George Marshall, Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), for a detailed elaboration of this point.
As recently as the 1970s Rebecca Lindsey, “Climate Change: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide,” Climate.gov, June 23, 2022, www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide.
The International Atomic Energy Agency “IAEA Safety Standards,” International Atomic Energy Agency, www.iaea.org/resources/safety-standards/search?facility=All&term_node_tid_depth_2=All&field_publication_series_info_value=&combine=&items_per_page=100.
The main monitor of bioweapons Toby Ord, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 57.
The number of AI safety researchers Benaich and Hogarth, State of AI Report 2022.
Given there are around For an estimate the number of AI researchers, see “What Is Effective Altruism?,” www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-effective-altruism#fn-15.
The original Apollo missions NASA, “Benefits from Apollo: Giant Leaps in Technology,” NASA Facts, July 2004, www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/80660main_ApolloFS.pdf.
Giving off light Kevin M. Esvelt, “Delay, Detect, Defend: Preparing for a Future in Which Thousands Can Release New Pandemics,” Geneva Centre for Security Policy, Nov. 14, 2022, dam.gcsp.ch/files/doc/gcsp-geneva-paper-29-22.
There’s also great work being done Jan Leike, “Alignment Optimism,” Aligned, Dec. 5, 2022, aligned.substack.com/p/alignment-optimism.
The computer scientist Stuart Russell Russell, Human Compatible.
This means attacking your systems Deep Ganguli et al., “Red Teaming Language Models to Reduce Harms: Methods, Scaling Behaviors, and Lessons Learned,” arXiv, Nov. 22, 2022, arxiv.org/pdf/2209.07858.pdf.
On the technical side Sam R. Bowman et al., “Measuring Progress on Scalable Oversight for Large Language Models,” arXiv, Nov. 11, 2022, arxiv.org/abs/2211.03540.
At present only a fraction Security DNA Project, “Securing Global Biotechnology,” SecureDNA, www.securedna.org.
Xi Jinping was worried Ben Murphy, “Chokepoints: China’s Self-Identified Strategic Technology Import Dependencies,” Center for Security and Emerging Technology, May 2022, cset.georgetown.edu/publication/chokepoints.
Indeed, China spends more Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology (New York: Scribner, 2022).
One technology executive Demetri Sevastopulo and Kathrin Hille, “US Hits China with Sweeping Tech Export Controls,” Financial Times, Oct. 7, 2022, www.ft.com/content/6825bee4-52a7-4c86-b1aa-31c100708c3e.
In the short to medium term Gregory C. Allen, “Choking Off China’s Access to the Future of AI,” Center for Strategic & International Studies, Oct. 11, 2022, www.csis.org/analysis/choking-chinas-access-future-ai.
If it takes hundreds of billions Julie Zhu, “China Readying $143 Billion Package for Its Chip Firms in Face of U.S. Curbs,” Reuters, Dec. 14, 2022, www.reuters.com/technology/china-plans-over-143-bln-push-boost-domestic-chips-compete-with-us-sources-2022-12-13.
NVIDIA, the American manufacturer Stephen Nellis and Jane Lee, “Nvidia Tweaks Flagship H100 Chip for Export to China as H800,” Reuters, March 22, 2023, www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-tweaks-flagship-h100-chip-export-china-h800-2023-03-21.
ASML’s machines Moreover, not just the machines but many component parts have only one manufacturer, like high-end lasers from Cymer or mirrors from Zeiss so pure that, were they the size of Germany, an irregularity would be only a few millimeters wide.
These three companies have See, for example, Michael Filler on Twitter, May 25, 2022, twitter.com/michaelfiller/status/1529633698961833984.
A crunch on the rare earth “Where Is the Greatest Risk to Our Mineral Resource Supplies?,” USGS, Feb. 21, 2020, www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/new-methodology-identifies-mineral-commodities-whose-supply-disruption?qt-news_science_products=1#qt-news_science_products.
Some 80 percent of the high-quality quartz Zeihan, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning, 314.
Indeed, at times shrill criticism Lee Vinsel, “You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype,” Medium, Feb. 1, 2021, sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5.
Promisingly, research on ethical AI Stanford University Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2021.
Major shortfalls For example, Shannon Vallor, “Mobilising the Intellectual Resources of the Arts and Humanities,” Ada Lovelace Institute, June 25, 2021, www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/blog/mobilising-intellectual-resources-arts-humanities.
Forming a coalition Kay C. James on Twitter, March 20, 2019, twitter.com/KayColesJames/status/1108365238779498497.
There’s a good chance of positive “B Corps ‘Go Beyond’ Business as Usual,” B Lab, March 1, 2023, www.bcorporation.net/en-us/news/press/b-corps-go-beyond-business-as-usual-for-b-corp-month-2023.
Although today companies have “U.S. Research and Development Funding and Performance: Fact Sheet,” Congressional Research Service, Sept. 13, 2022, sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R44307.pdf.
Investing in science and technology See, for example, Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths (London: Anthem Press, 2013).
Their first task should be These points are well made in Jess Whittlestone and Jack Clark, “Why and How Governments Should Monitor AI Development,” arXiv, Aug. 31, 2021, arxiv.org/pdf/2108.12427.pdf.
In 2015 there was virtually “Legislation Related to Artificial Intelligence,” National Conference of State Legislatures, Aug. 26, 2022, www.ncsl.org/research/telecommunications-and-information-technology/2020-legislation-related-to-artificial-intelligence.aspx.
The OECD AI Policy Observatory OECD, “National AI Policies & Strategies,” OECD AI Policy Observatory, oecd.ai/en/dashboards/overview.
In 2022 the White House released “Fact Sheet: Biden-Harris Administration Announces Key Actions to Advance Tech Accountability and Protect the Rights of the American Public,” White House, Oct. 4, 2022, www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2022/10/04/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-announces-key-actions-to-advance-tech-accountability-and-protect-the-rights-of-the-american-public.
Today U.S. labor is taxed Daron Acemoglu et al., “Taxes, Automation, and the Future of Labor,” MIT Work of the Future, mitsloan.mit.edu/shared/ods/documents?PublicationDocumentID=7929.
This is sometimes called Arnaud Costinot and Ivan Werning, “Robots, Trade, and Luddism: A Sufficient Statistic Approach to Optimal Technology Regulation,” Review of Economic Studies, Nov. 4, 2022, academic.oup.com/restud/advance-article/doi/10.1093/restud/rdac076/6798670.
MIT economists have argued Daron Acemoglu et al., “Does the US Tax Code Favor Automation?,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (Spring 2020), www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Acemoglu-FINAL-WEB.pdf.
In an era of hyper-scaling Sam Altman, “Moore’s Law for Everything,” Sam Altman, March 16, 2021, moores.samaltman.com.
Use of blinding laser weapons “The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons,” United Nations, www.un.org/disarmament/the-convention-on-certain-conventional-weapons.
A study of 106 countries Françoise Baylis et al., “Human Germline and Heritable Genome Editing: The Global Policy Landscape,” CRISPR Journal, Oct. 20, 2020, www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/crispr.2020.0082.
In the aftermath of the first Eric S. Lander et al., “Adopt a Moratorium on Heritable Genome Editing,” Nature, March 13, 2019, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00726-5.
By the early 2010s Peter Dizikes, “Study: Commercial Air Travel Is Safer Than Ever,” MIT News, Jan. 23, 2020, news.mit.edu/2020/study-commercial-flights-safer-ever-0124.
We met again in 2017 “AI Principles,” Future of Life Institute, Aug. 11, 2017, futureoflife.org/open-letter/ai-principles.
Social and moral responsibility Joseph Rotblat, “A Hippocratic Oath for Scientists,” Science, Nov. 19, 1999, www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.286.5444.1475.
Because we build technology See, for example, proposals from Rich Sutton, “Creating Human-Level AI: How and When?,” University of Alberta, Canada, futureoflife.org/data/PDF/rich_sutton.pdf?x72900; Azeem Azhar, “We are the ones who decide what we want from the tools we build” (Azhar, Exponential, 253); or Kai-Fu Lee, “We will not be passive spectators in the story of AI—we are the authors of it” (Kai-Fu Lee and Qiufan Cheng, AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future [London: W. H. Allen, 2021, 437]).
Communication around AI Patrick O’Shea et al., “Communicating About the Social Implications of AI: A FrameWorks Strategic Brief,” FrameWorks Institute, Oct. 19, 2021, www.frameworksinstitute.org/publication/communicating-about-the-social-implications-of-ai-a-frameworks-strategic-brief.
Research shows that when Stefan Schubert et al., “The Psychology of Existential Risk: Moral Judgments About Human Extinction,” Nature Scientific Reports, Oct. 21, 2019, www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-50145-9.
Meanwhile, citizen assemblies offer Aviv Ovadya, “Towards Platform Democracy,” Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center, Oct. 18, 2021, www.belfercenter.org/publication/towards-platform-democracy-policymaking-beyond-corporate-ceos-and-partisan-pressure.
Referencing the Asilomar principles “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter,” Future of Life Institute, March 29, 2023, futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments.
A complaint against LLMs Adi Robertson, “FTC Should Stop OpenAI from Launching New GPT Models, Says AI Policy Group,” The Verge, March 30, 2023, www.theverge.com/2023/3/30/23662101/ftc-openai-investigation-request-caidp-gpt-text-generation-bias.
One good example comes Esvelt, “Delay, Detect, Defend.” For another example of a holistic approach to containment strategy, see Allison Duettmann, “Defend Against Physical Threats: Multipolar Active Shields,” Foresight Institute, Feb. 14, 2022, foresightinstitute.substack.com/p/defend-physical.
The economist Daron Acemoglu Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, The Narrow Corridor: How Nations Struggle for Liberty (London: Viking, 2019).
Technology should amplify See, for example, arguments like that of Divya Siddarth et al., “How AI Fails Us,” Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics, Dec. 1, 2021, ethics.harvard.edu/how-ai-fails-us.
