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In the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a forty-kilometer armored column advanced toward Kyiv. On paper, it was overwhelming force—tanks, artillery, heavy logistics. Yet it was slowed and ultimately disrupted by small teams using hobbyist drones, improvised explosives, and off-the-shelf technology.
That asymmetry is not an anomaly. It is a preview.
Chapter 7 argues that the coming technological wave—AI, synthetic biology, robotics, quantum computing—is defined not just by what it can do, but by four intrinsic features that make it fundamentally harder to contain than anything before. These features are asymmetry, hyper-evolution, omni-use, and autonomy. Together, they change the calculus of power.
The first is asymmetry: small inputs, massive effects.
Technology has always shifted power balances. Cannons toppled castles. The printing press amplified ideas. The internet allowed a startup to become a global platform. But today’s tools compress power into even smaller packages. A $1,000 drone can threaten multimillion-dollar military systems. An AI model on a laptop can generate text at planetary scale. A single genetic manipulation could trigger global biological consequences. One quantum breakthrough could undermine global encryption overnight.
This is a colossal transfer of power—not just between states, but from institutions to individuals. The less expensive and more accessible technologies become, the wider the circle of actors who can deploy them. That creates opportunity—innovation, resistance, democratization—but also vulnerability. In a deeply networked world, a single failure point can cascade globally.
The second feature is hyper-evolution.
If containment requires time—time to understand, regulate, adapt—the coming wave erodes that buffer. Digital technologies already iterate at breathtaking speed. Now that dynamic is spilling into the physical world. AI designs new materials. 3-D printers manufacture intricate structures impossible with traditional tooling. Synthetic biology operates on software-like design cycles—design, simulate, iterate.
Biological evolution once took millennia. Now it can be guided in months. Molecular discovery that once required painstaking lab work can be simulated and optimized computationally. Innovation in atoms is beginning to move at the speed of bits. That’s what the author means by hyper-evolution: an accelerating, recursive cycle of improvement.
The third feature is omni-use.
We often talk about “dual-use” technologies—tools that can serve civilian and military purposes. But the coming wave goes further. It is omni-use. AI, like electricity before it, is not a single-purpose device. It is a general capability embedded everywhere. The same deep learning system can discover antibiotics—or identify lethal toxins. The same genome-editing tool can cure disease—or engineer harm. The same robotics platform can harvest crops—or deliver explosives.
The broader the capability, the harder it is to foresee every application. And the more valuable it becomes, the more it proliferates. Omni-use technologies are economically irresistible and strategically destabilizing at the same time.
The final feature is the most unsettling: autonomy.
For most of history, technology extended human intention. Even complex systems ultimately required human oversight. That boundary is weakening. Autonomous vehicles navigate roads with minimal input. AI systems generate strategies and outputs no one explicitly programmed. Large language models produce emergent behaviors their creators cannot fully explain. Synthetic organisms, once released, may evolve beyond prediction.
The author calls attention to the “gorilla problem.” Gorillas are physically stronger than humans, yet humans contain them because of superior intelligence. What happens if we build systems that surpass us cognitively? A sufficiently advanced AI, capable of recursive self-improvement—an “intelligence explosion”—would represent a containment challenge beyond precedent.
Importantly, the chapter does not claim that superintelligence is imminent. It argues something subtler: that the features already visible—powerful asymmetry, relentless acceleration, extreme generality, and creeping autonomy—compound the containment problem. Each alone is challenging. Together, they redefine it.
Why does this matter now?
Because we are already living inside these dynamics. Drone warfare is not theoretical. AI-designed drugs are entering clinical trials. Autonomous systems are making consequential decisions. And with each iteration, the capabilities grow.
The paradox of the coming wave is this: we can create systems we do not fully understand. We can deploy technologies whose second- and third-order effects escape prediction. We can scale tools globally before norms and safeguards catch up.
The wave is not just powerful. It is structurally harder to control.
And that may be the defining challenge of our century.
From Chapter 7 of the book: 'The Coming Wave' by Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar
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