The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century’s Greatest Dilemma
Book Author: Mustafa Suleyman (with Michael Bhaskar)
Mustafa Suleyman argues that we’re entering a “coming wave” powered primarily by AI and synthetic biology, a pair of general-purpose (“omni-use”) technologies whose reach is so broad that benefits and harms will diffuse everywhere at once. He frames the central policy challenge as containment—how to keep extraordinary capability within safe bounds without crushing innovation.
What makes this book sing is the vantage point. Suleyman is not a distant observer; he co-founded DeepMind and later became a senior AI executive, giving him rare operator clarity on how fast capabilities move and how incentives actually work inside labs and platforms. That insider perspective shows up in his taxonomy of why containment is hard: asymmetry (small actors can wield outsized power), hyper-evolution (capabilities compound rapidly), omni-use (the same tool swings from medical breakthroughs to misuse), and autonomy (systems act without continuous human supervision). These four features repeat across chapters as a decision-maker’s checklist rather than abstract slogans
Suleyman’s most valuable contribution is a governance agenda that’s specific enough to argue with: tighter controls at the “chokepoints” (advanced chips and large compute clusters), independent audits for powerful models, and a layered licensing regime for frontier systems—complemented by safety research scaled like an Apollo-style program. You can disagree with the feasibility or political economy, but the program gives operators, investors, and policymakers a concrete starting point.
The book is at its best when connecting geopolitics to product reality: dual-use foundation models spilling across borders; bio-automation lowering barriers for both therapeutics and threats; and “diffusion beats prohibition” as a sobering baseline for anyone betting on pure top-down control. That framing has resonated widely—even Bill Gates called it his favorite contemporary book on AI for balancing promise and peril.
Where it falls short: Some remedies read more like a sketchbook than an engineering spec. Critics have fairly noted that while the diagnosis is urgent and convincing, the prescriptive layer sometimes feels thin relative to the magnitude of the risks described. I agree: the institutional mechanics—who pays, who enforces, who’s liable when multi-actor systems fail—need far more operational detail to be actionable globally.
Why I Recommend This Book
If you make capital allocation or product decisions in AI or biotech, The Coming Wave is a sharp tool. It gives you (1) a crisp mental model—the four features—to stress-test roadmaps and investment memos; (2) a pragmatic containment agenda to translate ethics into contracts, audits, and deployment gates; and (3) a geopolitical lens to anticipate where diffusion, regulation, and competition will actually bite. Even when you disagree, you’ll argue at the right level of abstraction—and with better questions for your teams and boards.
As an operator’s field guide to the next decade, this is essential reading: clear about the upside, honest about the downside, and usefully opinionated about governance. I’m docking fractional points because the “how” behind enforcement and liability needs more meat—but I’d still hand this to founders, policymakers, and LPs before most AI policy decks. It sharpened my own diligence checklists around compute access, auditability, and bio-adjacent risk. If you influence code, capital, or compliance, read it.
