Nathan Gardels at Noema:
Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of DeepMind and former vice president for AI products and policy at Google, offers some deep thoughts in his just-released book, “The Coming Wave: Technology, Power and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma” (written with Michael Bhaskar).
The “wave” he sees washing over all aspects of society, for better and worse, is propelled by generative AI and another general-purpose technological innovation — synthetic biology, which, powered by the processing prowess of intelligent machines, can read and rewrite genetic code and then boot up life in the lab. “For the first time core components of our technological ecosystem directly address two foundational properties of our world: intelligence and life. In other words, technology is undergoing a phase transition. No longer simply a tool, it’s going to engineer life and rival — and surpass — our own intelligence,” Suleyman writes.
more here.