The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman review – AI, synthetic biology and a new dawn for humanity

The DeepMind co-founder calls for the ‘containment’ of new technology in a heartfelt and candid exploration of what the future may hold for usWhat is it with wave metaphors? Technological determinists – people who believe that technology drives history – love them. Think ofAlvin Toffler, who saw the history of civilisation as a succession of three such waves (agricultural, industrial and post-industrial). The idea is of immense power, unstoppable, moving inexorably towards us as we cower before its immensity, much as the dinosaurs must have done when they saw themile-high tsunami heading in their direction.Mustafa Suleyman says he is not a determinist, but at times he sounds awfully like one. “At its heart,” he writes at one point, “technology emerges to fill human needs. If people have powerful reasons to build and use it, it will get built and used. Yet in most discussions of technology people still get stuck on what it is, forgetting why it was created in the first place. This i s not about some innate techno-determinism. This is about what it means to be human.”Continue reading...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Computing and the net books Artificial intelligence (AI) Science and nature books Synthetic biology Consciousness Genetics Technology Culture Source Type: news