Warning: This article may contain traces of truth. Consume at your own risk!
In what might be the most expensive self-help book for tech billionaires contemplating whether to build their doomsday bunkers in New Zealand or Mars, Mustafa Suleyman – co-founder of DeepMind and current Microsoft AI executive-has graced us with “The Coming Wave,” a 352-page existential panic attack bound in hardcover. Written with Michael Bhaskar, this treatise on technological doom makes AI safety engineers look like carefree optimists by comparison, and transforms “we’re all going to die” from a morbid observation into a publishing opportunity.
The Ultimate Tech Bro “I Told You So” Letter
As someone who helped create the very AI systems he now warns could destroy civilization, Suleyman has written what essentially amounts to the world’s most elaborate “don’t blame me when the robots kill everyone” disclaimer. It’s the equivalent of Dr. Frankenstein publishing “10 Reasons Why My Monster Might Destroy The Village And Why That’s Not Technically My Fault” while still actively stitching together corpses in his basement laboratory.
“The Coming Wave” positions Suleyman as the ultimate insider – someone who has simultaneously helped accelerate AI development at Google’s DeepMind and now Microsoft while wringing his hands about the consequences. This is like watching someone install rocket boosters on a runaway train while selling you insurance for the inevitable crash.
What makes this particularly delightful is Suleyman’s diagnosis: we face an unprecedented technological wave combining artificial intelligence and synthetic biology that will transform society so dramatically that nation-states themselves could collapse.1 The solution? “Containment” – a concept he admits is virtually impossible but insists we must achieve anyway.2 It’s rather like suggesting we solve global warming by pretending to be British and asking the sun to please tone it down a bit.
The Waves of Technological Change (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Apocalypse)
Suleyman builds his argument on the concept that technology comes in “waves” – 24 previous general-purpose technologies that diffused across the globe, from fire to the internet.3 The 25th wave-a tsunami of AI and synthetic biology-is allegedly unlike anything we’ve seen before.
Dr. Helena Rutherford, historian of technological hyperbole at the Institute for Measured Responses, explains: “Throughout history, every generation believes their technological moment is uniquely dangerous. In the 1800s, people thought trains moving at 30 MPH would cause women’s uteruses to fly out of their bodies. Now we worry AI chatbots will convince us to liquidate our assets and invest in digital snake oil. The fear remains the same; only the uteruses change.”
The book argues that previous technological waves took decades to reshape society, but this one will hit us with unprecedented speed. This might be more convincing if Suleyman hadn’t made similar predictions about DeepMind’s AI systems curing all diseases very soon – a deadline that, like most techno-utopian forecasts, seems to perpetually remain just a few years away.
The Containment Problem (Or: How to Put Toothpaste Back in the Tube Using Only Your Thoughts)
The central thesis of “The Coming Wave” is what Suleyman calls “the containment problem” – how to maintain control over powerful technologies that, once released, spread uncontrollably.4 He argues this is “the essential challenge of our age,” which is a bold statement considering we’re also dealing with climate change, rising authoritarianism, and people who still use LinkedIn for dating.
According to Suleyman, containment of these technologies is simultaneously impossible yet absolutely necessary – a philosophical position that’s both deeply profound and utterly useless, like claiming water is both wet and dry depending on how you look at it.5
“Containment of the coming wave is not possible in our current world,” Suleyman writes, before devoting the rest of the book to explaining why we must contain it anyway.6 This logical pretzel would make even Elon Musk’s Twitter threads seem straightforward by comparison.
The book’s most amusing aspect is how it positions nuclear weapons as our only partial containment success story – a claim that might surprise residents of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and anyone who lived through the Cold War’s multiple near-misses with global thermonuclear annihilation. If that’s our best example of successful containment, perhaps we should start preparing for the robot apocalypse now!
The Curious Case of the Missing Solutions
In a display of investigative brilliance that would make Sherlock Holmes abandon his pipe in frustration, Suleyman spends three-quarters of the book explaining why containment is impossible before pivoting to claim it must somehow be possible anyway. This is the literary equivalent of a tech startup pivoting from “blockchain for pets” to “AI-powered blockchain for pets” after burning through their Series A funding.
What makes this especially delightful is the book’s proposed solutions, which include:
- Technical safety measures that somehow prevent misuse
- International collaboration at an unprecedented scale
- A vague collection of governance frameworks that would require nation-states to surrender sovereignty
- The spontaneous emergence of global ethical consensus
As Dr. Rutherford notes, “These proposals would be challenging in a world where we can all agree on basic facts. In our current reality, where people can’t even agree whether the Earth is flat or not, they’re about as practical as suggesting we solve climate change by harnessing the power of unicorn flatulence.”
The Economics of Apocalyptic Literature
Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of “The Coming Wave” is its brilliant business model. After helping build some of the world’s most powerful AI systems at DeepMind, Suleyman has now written a bestselling book warning about the dangers of the very technologies he helped create – an entrepreneurial strategy so cynically brilliant it deserves its own Harvard Business School case study.
“The coming wave represents the greatest economic prize in history. It is a consumer cornucopia and potential profit centre without parallel,” Suleyman writes, in what might be the most nakedly capitalist assessment of impending doom since disaster insurance salesmen discovered climate change.7
This statement perfectly encapsulates Silicon Valley’s approach to existential risk: acknowledge the potential for catastrophe while simultaneously salivating over the profit opportunities it presents. It’s disaster capitalism with a TED Talk polish.
The Psychological Dimension: Pessimism Aversion Syndrome
One of the book’s more insightful observations is how humans exhibit “pessimism aversion” – a psychological tendency to dismiss catastrophic warnings.8 Suleyman recounts warning tech leaders about the “pitchforks” that would come if automation eliminated jobs too quickly, only to be met with polite nods and no actual engagement.
This reveals the true audience for “The Coming Wave”: it’s not written to prevent catastrophe but to establish an alibi. When the robots eventually rise up, Suleyman can point to his book and say, “See? I warned everyone!” while retreating to his well-stocked New Zealand compound.
As Dr. Arthur Chambers, Chief Psychologist at the Center for Technological Anxiety, explains: “There’s a peculiar satisfaction in predicting doom while doing nothing substantial to prevent it. It combines moral superiority with zero accountability. If the disaster happens, you were right. If it doesn’t, people forget you predicted it at all.”
The Suleyman Contradiction
The most delicious irony of “The Coming Wave” is how it embodies the very contradictions it claims to address. Suleyman writes, “If this book feels contradictory in its attitude toward technology, part positive and part foreboding, that’s because such a contradictory view is the most honest assessment of where we are”.
This statement serves as both a profound insight and a convenient shield against criticism. It’s like a restaurant offering both undercooked and overcooked steak while claiming the contradictory preparation is the most honest assessment of proper cooking techniques.
The book’s fundamental tension stems from Suleyman’s dual identity as both prophet of doom and profiteer of boom. As co-founder of DeepMind (acquired by Google) and now CEO of Microsoft AI, he has built his career and fortune on developing the very technologies he now claims threaten humanity’s existence.
This is rather like the CEO of ExxonMobil writing a passionate book about the dangers of fossil fuels while continuing to drill for oil – technically correct but morally suspect.
The Narrow Path Between Existential Risk and Reviewer Fatigue
As “The Coming Wave” reaches its conclusion, Suleyman presents his vision of navigating between catastrophe and dystopia, urging readers to walk a “narrow path” toward a future where technology serves humanity rather than destroying it. This path, however, remains conveniently vague – like a Silicon Valley CEO promising to “do better” after their platform has been used to undermine democracy.
The book culminates with ten steps toward containment, including technical safety measures, international collaboration, and a recognition that “the fate of humanity hangs in the balance”. These proposals, while well-intentioned, have all the practical applicability of suggesting we solve world hunger by everyone agreeing to share their lunch.
Conclusion: Apocalypse Later, Please
“The Coming Wave” ultimately succeeds not as a blueprint for salvation but as a perfect encapsulation of Silicon Valley’s relationship with the technologies it creates: simultaneously taking credit for innovation while disclaiming responsibility for consequences.
As technological waves continue to crash against “unsurmountable boulders of inequities”, Suleyman’s book serves as both warning and alibi-a time capsule of techno-anxiety that future archaeologists (human or robotic) can point to as evidence that we saw the tsunami coming but were too busy arguing about surfboard designs to evacuate the beach.
In a world where technology increasingly outpaces our ability to control it, perhaps the most honest conclusion is one Suleyman himself might agree with: we’re probably doomed, but at least we’ll have some excellent books explaining why.
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References
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/90590134-the-coming-wave ↩︎
- https://www.supersummary.com/the-coming-wave/summary/ ↩︎
- https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Aether-ASOR/Book-Reviews/Article/3718538/the-coming-wave-technology-power-and-the-21st-centurys-greatest-dilemma/ ↩︎
- https://the-coming-wave.com/ ↩︎
- https://issues.org/coming-wave-suleyman-bhaskar-review-mitcham-fuchs/ ↩︎
- https://mds.marshall.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1051&context=criticalhumanities ↩︎
- http://spe.org.uk/reading-room/book-reviews/the-coming-wave/ ↩︎
- https://substack.com/home/post/p-153748049 ↩︎
