The core book, “The Coming Wave“ by Mustafa Sulleyman was published in September, 2023. It addresses a wave of change that is driven by AI and genetic engineering. Our SDG will explore the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence, and to a lesser extent biogenetics. We will review the history of AI from its early origins, to its current state, and also the potentials for AI in the future. We will address the ethical and social implications of AI and the opportunities and risks associated with it. The author discusses why this wave of technology change will occur more rapidly than past waves, such as electricity and automobiles. He emphasizes that we may have to find a way to “contain“ AI to avoid the worst risks, and he discusses how that might be done.
Mustafa Sulleyman is a serial entrepreneur and AI pioneer. He is best known for co-founding Deep Mind (now part of Google) and Inflection AI. “The Coming Wave“ has already received widespread praise and review by among others: Bill Gates; Yuval Harari; Eric Schmidt, a former CEO of Google; Elon Musk; Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple; and Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft.
Our SDG will also feature hands-on exploration of many of the new AI applications, including: chatbots, such as Chat GTP, Bing Chat, Google’s Bard, Anthropic‘s Claude 2, and Inflection’s PI; image generators, such as DALLE from Open AI, and Midjourney; digital assistants like Siri and Alexa; facial recognition technology; and translation apps. Members will choose not only a chapter from the core book to lead a discussion on, but also will choose an AI application to report on and where possible, will have the group try out before discussing at our session.
Week 1; Chapter 1, Containment Is Not Possible; and Chapter 2, Endless Proliferation, through page 44.
Week 2: Chapter 2, Endless Proliferation, from page 45 to end of chapter; and Chapter 3, The Containment Problem.
Week 3: Chapter 4, The Technology of Intelligence.
Week 4: Chapter 5, The Technology of Life; and Chapter 6, The Wider Wave.
Week 5: Chapter 7, Four Features of the Coming Wave.
Week 6: Chapter 8, Unstoppable Incentives.
Week 7: Chapter 9, The Grand Bargain.
Week 8: Chapter 10, Fragility Amplifiers.
Week 9: Chapter 11, The Future of Nations.
Week 10: Chapter 12, The Dilemma.
Week 11: Chapter 13, Containment Must Be Possible.
Week 12: Chapter 14, Ten Steps Towards Containment, through to page 326.
Week 13: chapter 14, to the end of the chapter, and Life After the Anthropocene, which ends the book.
Week 14: New developments in AI since the book was finished in the summer of 2023.
“The Coming Wave” by Mustafa Sulleyman