A lucid, urgent survey of the risks posed by AI and synthetic biology, but one that often mistakes breadth for argument. Suleyman is at his best when he is concrete about institutional failure; he is weaker when he reaches for grand civilisational warnings he cannot quite substantiate.
I found [1mThe Coming Wave[0m to be a serious, readable book with a real sense of stakes. Mustafa Suleyman knows this terrain from the inside, and that gives the prose a welcome practical edge: he is not speculating from the sidelines, but speaking as someone who has spent years watching powerful technologies move from research labs into markets, states, and, eventually, ordinary life. The book’s central claim is plain enough: AI and synthetic biology are becoming cheaper, more accessible, and harder to control, and that combination will strain existing institutions far beyond their current capacity.
What works best is Suleyman’s instinct for the social mechanics of technological diffusion. He is strongest when he explains why containment fails, why governance lags, and why the incentives of firms and governments so often reward speed over caution. These passages are clear, often bracing, and refreshingly unsentimental. He understands that the danger is not some cinematic moment of machine rebellion, but a much duller and more plausible erosion of oversight through proliferation, imitation, and misuse. That is a valuable corrective to the more theatrical forms of AI commentary.
But the book also has a habit of inflating its own importance. Suleyman writes with the cadence of warning, and after a while the tone becomes repetitive: the same anxieties are revisited in slightly different forms, and the reader is asked to accept the scale of the threat more by accumulation than by demonstration. His historical comparisons are useful up to a point, but they can also feel sweeping and a little loose, as though analogy were being allowed to do the work of analysis. I would have liked more precision about which harms are most likely, on what timescale, and under what regulatory or technical conditions they might actually be mitigated.
There is also a familiar Silicon Valley blindness at the edges of the argument. Suleyman is alert to corporate concentration and state power, but less interested than he should be in the political economy that helped create the very system he diagnoses. The book gestures at global inequality, but does not dwell long enough on how unequal capacity to absorb technological shocks will shape who suffers first and hardest. As a result, the book is strongest as an alarm bell and weaker as a map. It tells us to worry, often convincingly, but not always how to think beyond worry.
Even so, I would rather read an over-serious book with an argument than a breezy one with none. [1mThe Coming Wave[0m is thoughtful, timely, and often genuinely insightful, though it is not as original or as disciplined as it wants to be. It deserves attention, but not reverence.
Who should read this
Read this if you want a clear, informed introduction to the governance problems around AI and biotech, especially from someone who knows how these systems are built and sold. I would not recommend it as a final word on the subject, but it is a useful starting point for readers who want their techno-optimism checked by reality.
A personal note from Chen
I admired Suleyman’s seriousness more than I loved the book. It made me think, which is the least a book like this ought to do, but I closed it wishing for less rhetoric and more hard-edged specificity.
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