Niall Ferguson, Columnist

We Need AI Arms Control to Keep the New Cold War From Turning Hot

A new book by Mustafa Suleyman, a pioneer in artificial intelligence, highlights the pitfalls facing the world as the US and China vie for supremacy in a technology as potentially dangerous as nuclear fission.

August 27, 2023 at 12:00 PM UTC

By Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author, most recently, of “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.” He is a columnist for The Free Press.

The case for AI arms control is getting stronger.
Photographer: Angela Papuga/Getty Images North America

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Who will be the Robert Oppenheimer of the artificial intelligence revolution? That was the question I kept asking myself as I read Mustafa Suleyman's dazzling new book, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma. Perhaps it will be Suleyman himself.

While Suleyman’s ideas about how to contend with the challenges posed by AI demand our respect and attention, they recall to mind the agonizing dilemmas of the nuclear age — not to mention the toxic politics that coincided with the early Cold War.