Artificial Intelligence is very much in the news these days, so I decided to do a critical analysis of one of works discussing AI on the bestseller lists, The Coming Wave, by one of the key figures identified with its development, Mustafa Suleyman.

Blurbs promoting The Coming Wave contain all the usual hyperbole from experts and notables. For this jaded reader, however, the book didn’t need all that hype. It is actually a thoughtful piece of work, one with some flaws undoubtedly, but nevertheless quite compelling.

This is not a work that goes into the technical intricacies of AI. It provides a fairly simple understanding of the basics of AI, which can be summed up as a process involving a program that teaches machines to answer complex questions from a universe of data and learn from their mistakes to become more precise and comprehensive—to the point where they rewrite the algorithm themselves to allow them to take on and solve problems of even greater complexity. This recursive process of “deep learning” eventually enables the machine to solve problems infinitely faster than the human mind, relegating humans to a general supervisory role where, eventually, they are supplanted by more sophisticated machines.

There is no limit to the machine’s ability to turn out ever more complex programs. The only constraint to the whole process is the material one of how many transistors can be imprinted on a silicon wafer or computer chip. However, these limits continue to be breached by ever more sophisticated micro-processes that have allowed the number of transistors per chip to increase ten-million-fold over the last 50 years, adding up to vast computational power, and so far there is no end in sight.

AI, the author tells us, really only took off in the last decade. Now it is one of the two technologies central to the coming “technological wave.” The other is genetic engineering, which began with the discovery of the structure of the DNA, the molecule encoding the instructions for producing an organism. Over the last 50 years, genetic research has led to revolutionary breakthroughs in gene sequencing, which involves the unlocking of the information contained in the genomes of humans and organisms. CRISPR, a process of cutting genes using enzymes. and advances in laser technology like laser microinjection, have made “gene editing” immensely easier, to the point that the only barriers to producing humans with edited genes are not practical ones but ethical concerns.

The main contention of Suleyman, the founder of the outfit DeepMind, which was later bought by Google, is that AI and genetic engineering are the central technologies of the near future, which will not only pollinate each other but also synergize with existing technologies, from pharmaceuticals to energy technologies like solar and hydrogen, to the Internet, quantum computing, and robotics. The explosive interaction of these technologies will produce the “next wave.”

It is difficult not to agree with the author’s contention that the impact of the AI/bio-tech-led revolution will be immense, but he tends to be overly deterministic, seeing the relationships among technology, society, and politics as being largely unidirectional rather than interactive.  Nowhere is this techno-determinism more evident than when he claims that it was the stirrup, which revolutionized warfare in favor of mounted cavalry, that created the hierarchical social relationships among mounted knights controlling land and peasants that formed European feudal society.

This simplistic understanding of societal evolution should not, however, blind us to this work’s useful insights, among them the contradictory drives of technological centralization and diffusion. The state’s goal to preserve the existing social order will push it to control the development and diffusion of AI, but the radical reduction of costs and simplification of complex knowledge will put AI within the reach of everyone, including non-compliant individuals and organizations who can wage “asymmetric warfare” against the state.

Although the author is a key figure in the development of AI, he inclines towards techno-pessimism when it comes to society’s ability to control the development of AI. He acknowledges the labor-displacing impact of AI but offers no effective solutions to counteract this tendency. Although he offers suggestions to “contain” AI’s negative impacts, he appears resigned to the replacement of “homo technologicus” by super-intelligent machines at the “top of the food chain.” He seems open to the possibility that AI can make the leap from machine life to sentience, or self-consciousness, at some point in its evolution.

There are important gaps in the book. One is the digital divide between the Global North and the Global South, though one can infer from his analytical thrust that this gap will grow exponentially.  But the biggest flaw in this book is its failure to situate the development of AI in the dynamics of capitalism. This is a blind spot that owes itself to the author’s technological determinism or reductionism. True, Suleyman identifies investors’ push to gain windfalls from AI development as an important factor behind AI development, but the discussion is superficial. In the Global North, one cannot divorce the speed of AI’s spread from the drive of the Big Tech firms to exploit and monopolize the technology in the service of amassing greater and greater profits. It is Big Capital’s priorities that directs AI’s development into profitable channels while its use to service socially necessary but unprofitable activities such as health care lags behind.

In his notebook, the Grundrisse, Marx envisioned a post-capitalist world where machines freed human beings from exploitation and the drudgery of work to fully develop their potential as human beings in creative endeavors. Technology would enable

the free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labor time so as to posit surplus labor, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labor of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them…Truly wealthy [is] a nation, when the working day is 6 rather than 12 hours. Wealth is not command over surplus labor…but rather, disposable time outside that needed in direct production, for every individual and the whole society.

So long as capitalist relations of production are dominant, only a very small minority of humanity can enjoy this condition. For the vast majority, AI is seen as a threat to their jobs, rather than an opportunity for liberation. The farthest the system can go is to improvise measures like the universal basic income that seek mainly to pacify people rather than release their potential to be truly human. So long as capital reigns, AI will merely exponentially increase the gap between the billionaire elite and the rest of humanity. While a post-capitalist society will not eliminate the risks associated with AI, controls on the profit drive will likely make their containment and regulation immeasurably easier.

One of the more interesting sections of the book is on China and AI. The author cannot contain his admiration for China’s ability to focus its resources single-mindedly on being on the cutting edge of AI development once it realized AI-fueled technological development would be the next wave—a moment that the author traces to the time AlphaGo, an AI machine produced by his company, beat the world’s top player in the ancient Chinese game of Go, Ke Jie, in 2017. Already moving fast at that time, China’s development of AI and other technologies took a Great Leap Forward so that by the time of writing, China had surged “ahead across the spectrum of fundamental technologies, investing at an epic scale, a burgeoning IP behemoth with ‘Chinese characteristics.’”

DeepSeek, the sensational Chinese AI program, was launched in 2024, a year after The Coming Wave was published. DeepSeek revolutionized AI by innovatively maximizing output from much less advanced chips than those produced by the United States and its allies to come out with computational results that were equal to, if not faster, that the most advanced western AI, and at much lower cost. Perhaps out of recognition that it was DeepMind’s beating the Chinese world champion Ke Jie at Go in 2017 that sparked China’s AI revolution—its “Sputnik moment”—the creators of the Chinese program christened it with a similar-sounding name.

So what will the future bring in terms of AI’s impact on geopolitical competition? Suleyman gives us a hint of where he thinks things are heading by quoting the Pentagon’s first chief software officer who resigned in 2021 out of great frustration: “We have no competing chance against China in 15 to 20 years. Right now, it’s already a done deal; it is already over in my opinion.”

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