The Coming Wave

Suleyman's argument is that AI and synthetic biology are converging into forms of power cheap and fast enough that no government will be able to contain them through traditional regulation, and he spends the back half proposing narrower, more technical containment measures as a partial answer. The framing of simultaneous transformation and danger is clear-eyed, and the book's biotech chapters, drawing on Suleyman's DeepMind background, are more specific than most AI-panic books manage. But reviewers have consistently flagged the padding — a four-hundred-page argument that repeats its own thesis more than it builds on it — and pushed back on the technological-determinism running through it, the assumption that these technologies develop on a fixed track that society can only brace for rather than actually redirect.