I’m currently reading two books on Artificial Intelligence (AI), concurrently – ‘The Coming Wave’ by Mustafa Suleyman and ‘Superagency’ by LinkedIn’s co-founder, Reid Hoffman.
In both books, the authors talk about containing AI – that is, controlling, curbing, or even stopping it from extreme intelligence that might be a threat to humanity.
They argue that like any other invention in history, AI will change our way of life, and likewise encounter doom-mongers who will try to sprinkle possible fear of the ever-evolving models.
Of course, we have seen the possible extinction-level threat to humanity being thrown around such as massive job displacement, total human obsolescence, and a world where a tiny cabal of techno-elites capture whatever benefits, if any, AI enables.
And so on, and so on.
But the elephant in the room seems to be the containing part. Is it even doable?
I mean, we have already seen an even more powerful Chinese model ‘Deepseek’ shake the entire AI ecosystem with it’s powerful capabilities.
And more is to come.
Reid in his book ‘Superagency’ says Coordinating at a group level to ban, constrain, or even just contain a new technology is hard.
“Doing so at a state or national level is even harder. Coordinating globally is like herding cats—if cats were armed, tribal, and had different languages, different gods, and dreams for the future that went beyond their next meal,” he opines.
In the same tone, Suleyman in ‘The Coming Wave’ asserts that the new technology, just like any other that humans have ever come up with, is bringing human history to a turning point.
He says, “If containing it is impossible, the consequences for our species are dramatic, potentially dire. Equally, without its fruits we are exposed and precarious.”
Seemingly, Properly addressing this wave, containing technology, and ensuring that it always serves humanity means overcoming pessimism aversion.
The surest way to prevent a bad future is to steer toward a better one that, by its existence, makes significantly worse outcomes harder to achieve.