Now Reading: The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman
There are books don not try to impress you, they try to corner you. The Coming Wave by is one of them squarely in that category. It is buy no means a technical manual. It’s not even really an “AI book” in the narrow sense. It’s a thesis about power: who gets it, how fast it spreads, and why, this time, we may not be able to contain it.
The core idea: this isn’t just another tech cycle
Suleyman’s central claim is simple, and slightly uncomfortable: We are entering a new wave of general-purpose technologies, i.e., AI and synthetic biology, that will diffuse faster, wider, and with less friction than anything before. This matters because general-purpose technologies don’t stay in their lane. They leak. They recombine. They scale.
Steam engines industrialised labour. The internet digitised communication. This wave? It industrialises intelligence and biology simultaneously. That combination is doing something qualitatively different:
- Lowering the cost of capability (anyone can do more, faster)
- Increasing asymmetry (small actors can have massive impact)
- Accelerating proliferation (once it works, it spreads globally)
That last point is the one most people underestimate. Technology doesn’t diffuse because it’s safe. It diffuses because it’s useful—and incentives don’t wait for governance to catch up.
Containment vs Control
The strongest part of the book is not the prediction, but his framing of the dilemma. Suleyman argues we’re stuck on a narrow path:
- Too little control → catastrophic misuse (bioengineering, cyber, autonomous systems)
- Too much control → authoritarian surveillance states
There’s no clean solution. Just trade-offs.
He frames this as a “containment problem” (borrowing loosely from Cold War thinking) but with a critical twist:
You can’t lock this technology in a bunker.
AI and biotech are:
- Cheap
- Distributed
- Dual-use (the same tools cure disease and create it)
- Increasingly hard to detect or regulate centrally
That kills most naïve policy ideas on arrival. If your strategy depends on “just regulate it” or “just slow it down”, you’re already behind the curve. Some of the aspects that does very well include the argument on proliferation: Once capability exists, diffusion is inevitable. The convergence of AI and Biotech is genuinely important and Suleyman does very well in discussing it. Finally, framing this as a geopolitical question (rather than a commercial one) is a good take. The policy prescriptions (global coordination, new institutions, etc.) seem like the right direction, but I was left wishing something more “practical”. This is the bit the book hints at but doesn’t operationalise: containment is not a policy problem—it’s an architecture problem.
The coming wave is about the collapse of friction in capability. When the cost of doing powerful things approaches zero:
- Expertise matters less
- Gatekeeping erodes
- Institutions lose control
That’s the actual disruption, not intelligence per se, but access to power.
And historically, that never ends neatly. The book forces a reframing:
- Not “What can AI do?”
- But “What happens when everyone can do it?”
And more importantly:
- Not “Can we control it?”
- But “What does control even mean when capability is everywhere?”
Read it less as prophecy, more as pressure-testing. Because the wave isn’t coming. It’s already breaking.