The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman
The cofounder of DeepMind, which drew worldwide attention after developing the artificial intelligence that defeated Lee Sedol 9 dan in Go, the founder of Inflection AI, and now a leading figure at Microsoft overseeing its artificial intelligence business, has stepped into the center of one of the defining technological debates of our era. This is a book in which he analyzes the impact that waves of new technology will have, their benefits, and above all, their dangers.
Suleyman begins by defining the success of technology along two independent dimensions: “technical success” and “social success.” Technical success, simply put, concerns how accurately and efficiently a tool fulfills its intended purpose. For example, the purpose of an airplane is to transport passengers and cargo through the sky; if it reaches its destination at the intended speed and in the correct direction without crashing or making an emergency landing, then it can at least be considered a technical success.
We can confidently say that over the past several centuries humanity has achieved remarkable progress in this kind of success. Social success is different. Rather than asking whether a tool achieved its purpose, social success evaluates whether that purpose was beneficial to society. For example, a nuclear missile can deliver a nuclear bomb to a target location in a very short amount of time, but the result is massive loss of life and long term radioactive contamination, making it a clear example of a socially failed technology. According to Suleyman, unfortunately humanity has shown relatively limited progress in this kind of success.
Using these two layers of evaluation for technology, and starting from the premise that technology fundamentally tends to spread and replicate, he introduces a wide range of technologies from artificial intelligence to biotechnology, robotics, and quantum technology, while exploring both the impact they will have on future society and the ways we can minimize their negative shocks while maximizing their positive benefits.
Reviewed by Teen Volunteer, 5/13/2026.