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LOOMUS Book Picks Grounded in First-Principles Thinking

The Coming Wave

By Mustafa Suleyman

The Coming Wave

A founder, fresh from the inside of DeepMind, ringing a bell.

"
— The Big Idea
Containment is not, on the face of it, possible.
And yet for all our sakes, it must be.

A reading of The Coming Wave
by Mustafa Suleyman

— The Architecture

A wave is four forces.

THE WAVE i. ASYMMETRIC small actor, huge leverage ii. HYPER-EVOLUTIONARY compounds faster than rules iii. OMNI-USE peaceful and weaponizable iv. AUTONOMOUS acts, plans, pursues goals — four reasons the wave is uncontainable

Cost-to-act collapses.
Capability spreads out.

The new Turing test

— $100K in. $1M out. Autonomously.

RESEARCH DESIGN MAKE MARKET SHIP $100K SEED ACI AGENT capable $1M RESULT — in a few months, without you. THE NEW TURING TEST

Forget conversation. Can it negotiate, contract, ship? That's the test for Artificial Capable Intelligence.

— Why founders should read this

Last wave: publishing got cheap.
This wave: agency does.

Capability that used to need a nation-state, a Pfizer, or a Lockheed is collapsing into a laptop. If you're building in AI or biotech, you're not exempt from the containment problem — you're the only people positioned to solve it.

— The comparison

Three doors. One narrow path.

CATASTROPHE uncontained NARROW PATH must be built DYSTOPIA over-controlled things break apart ✕ BREAKDOWN build it, rung by rung ONLY VIABLE everything controlled ⌧ TOTAL CONTROL

Catastrophe or dystopia.
Or build the narrow path.

— The Margin Notes Inbox

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More from LOOMUS Book Picks

Curated by humans · No algorithm
No. 01
A Brief History of Intelligence
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Five evolutionary breakthroughs from worm to poet — and why LLMs only got the last one.
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No. 02
A Thousand Brains
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150,000 cortical columns. Each one a learner. All voting at once.
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No. 03
The Coming Wave
Mustafa Suleyman
Catastrophe, dystopia, or the narrow path. Pick one — and build it.
— You're here
No. 04
Models of the Mind
Grace Lindsay
How maths shaped what we know about the brain.
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No. 05
The Story of Art
E. H. Gombrich
A first-principles tour of why humans make pictures.
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No. 06
Life 3.0
Max Tegmark
Three levels of life. We're about to invent the third — and choose between twelve futures.
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