The Coming Wave

Consider that children who grew up traveling by horse and cart and burning wood for heat in the late nineteenth century spent their final days traveling by airplane and living in houses warmed by the splitting of the atom.

Nonetheless, understanding the coming wave is not about making a snap judgment about where things will be this or that year; it is about closely tracking the development of multiple exponential curves over decades, projecting them into the future, and asking what that means.

What seems like near-magic engineering one day is just another part of the furniture the next.

We’ll come to robots later, but the truth is that for a vast range of tasks in the world economy today all you need is access to a computer; most of global GDP is mediated in some way through screen-based interfaces amenable to an AI.

guaranteed. Thomas Edison invented the phonograph so people could record their thoughts for posterity and to help the blind. He was horrified when most people just wanted to play music.

The idea that technology alone can solve social and political problems is a dangerous delusion. But the idea that they can be solved without technology is also wrongheaded. Seeing the frustrations of public servants up close made me want to find other effective ways to get things done at scale, working not against but in concert with the state to make more productive, fairer, kinder societies.

These tools will only temporarily augment human intelligence. They will make us smarter and more efficient for a time, and will unlock enormous amounts of economic growth, but they are fundamentally labor replacing. They will eventually do cognitive labor more efficiently and more cheaply than many people working in administration, data entry, customer service (including making and receiving phone calls), writing emails, drafting summaries, translating documents, creating content, copywriting, and so on. In the face of an abundance of ultra-low-cost equivalents, the days of this kind of “cognitive manual labor” are numbered.

The stirrup was an apparently simple innovation. But with it came a social revolution changing hundreds of millions of lives. A system of politics, economics, war, and culture that structured European life for nearly a thousand years rested, in part, on those small metallic triangles.

Something more like the pre-nation-state world emerges in this scenario, neo-medieval, smaller, more local, and constitutionally diverse, a complex, unstable patchwork of polities. Only this time with hugely powerful technology. When northern Italy was a patchwork of small city-states, it gave us the Renaissance, yet was also a field of constant internecine war and feuding. Renaissance is great; unceasing war with tomorrow’s military technology, not so much.

the fourteenth-century Black Death. England’s population1 was seven million in 1300, but by 1450, crushed by waves of the plague, it was down to just two million.

World War I killed2 around 1 percent of the global population; World War II, 3 percent. Or take the violence unleashed by Genghis Khan and the Mongol army across China and central Asia in the thirteenth century, which took the lives of up to 10 percent of the world’s population.

I believe that figuring out ways to reconcile profit and social purpose in hybrid organizational structures is the best way to navigate the challenges that lie ahead, but making it work in practice is incredibly hard.

It was a foundational lesson for me: shareholder capitalism works because it is simple and clear, and governance models too have a tendency to default to the simple and clear. In the shareholder model, lines of accountability and performance tracking are quantified and very transparent. It may be possible to design more modern structures in theory, but operating them in practice is another story.

As the century wears on, the lesson of the Cold War will have to be relearned: there is no path to technological safety without working with your adversaries.

happen. A healthy culture is one happy to leave fruit on the tree, say no, delay benefits for however long it takes to be safe, one where technologists remember that technology is just a means to an end, not the end itself.