Having recently finished Brian Christian’s The Alignment Problem, which looks closely at the micro-level mechanics of model safety and reward metrics, I picked up Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave as a natural follow-up. Where Christian concentrates on aligning individual algorithms, Suleyman zooms out: how society can contain and govern these systems once they proliferate globally.
Suleyman argues that we are entering a technological wave comparable to the advent of printing or electricity, but distinguished by exponential speed and significant potential for misapplication.
He identifies four defining characteristics of this wave:
In software development, open-source proliferation is traditionally viewed as a pure net positive. But when open-source code includes self-improving, general-purpose models that interact with physical infrastructure, the boundary between a helpful utility and a zero-day exploit disappears.
At the heart of the book lies a fundamental contradiction facing 21st-century governance:
| Modern Path | The Risk |
|---|---|
| Unchecked Openness | Rapid democratisation of frontier tools leads to catastrophic misuse (engineered pandemics, autonomous warfare, societal destabilisation). |
| Hard Bans & Total Control | Enforcing strict prohibitions requires intrusive, state-level surveillance that fundamentally suppresses civil liberties and open society. |
Historically, attempts to ban general-purpose technologies, whether Pope Urban II outlawing the crossbow or imperial China restricting shipbuilding, have consistently failed. Technology diffuses because knowledge cannot be locked in a vault indefinitely. Unlike nuclear weapons, which depend on rare physical materials like enriched uranium, software and synthetic DNA sequences consist of intangible, highly portable information.
For platform engineers, this dilemma mirrors a familiar trade-off: how do you keep an open platform secure without locking down every user interaction and destroying its core utility?
Suleyman does not give in to fatalism. Instead, he outlines a multi-layered framework for Containment, a coordinated effort to keep technology under human control.
Rather than relying solely on top-down bans, he highlights physical and technical choke points:
This is among the most practical parts of the book. It reframes tech policy away from vague ethical statements and towards defence-in-depth engineering: applying rate limits, hardware security, supply chain auditing, and access controls at the structural level.
What gives The Coming Wave its weight is Suleyman’s position. He is not an outside observer or academic; he spent over a decade at the centre of modern AI development. When he describes the exponential growth curves of frontier models, he is drawing on direct operational experience.
A few key takeaways stood out:
Because Suleyman covers geopolitics, economics, biology, and computer science in a single volume, the proposed solutions can occasionally feel overly optimistic about global cooperation. Expecting competing superpowers to strictly enforce international containment treaties requires a level of diplomatic harmony that currently seems out of reach.
Additionally, readers expecting deep code walkthroughs or technical architecture diagrams should note that the focus is explicitly strategic, economic, and policy-oriented rather than computer science theory.
The Coming Wave is a worthwhile read for anyone trying to understand the broader geopolitical and societal stakes of frontier technology.
Suleyman offers a pragmatic blueprint for navigating the narrow path between technological anarchy and authoritarian control. For software engineers, product managers, and tech leaders, it serves as a grounded reminder to look beyond immediate product roadmaps and consider the systemic impact of the tools we build.
Rating: 8.5/10
Author: Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskar
Publisher: Crown / Bodley Head
Publication date: 2023
ISBN-13: 978-0593593950