The Uninvited Guest: What The Coming Wave Taught Me About Living with AI Disruption

Nobody sent a calendar invite.

The wave just arrived — in quarterly earnings calls, in layoff announcements, in the slow realization that the job description you had last year looks a little different now. Maybe a lot different.

If you’re reading this from inside that uncertainty, this post is for you.

I recently finished The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman — co-founder of DeepMind and one of the people who helped build the technology now reshaping how we all work. It’s not a comfortable book. But it’s an honest one. And honest, right now, is more useful than comfortable.

The premise you can’t argue with

Suleyman’s central argument is blunt: this wave — AI, synthetic biology, and the technologies converging around them — cannot be uninvented. There is no “undo.” There is no version of events where we collectively decide it was a bad idea and walk it back.

The question was never whether it would arrive. The question is always: what do we do now that it has?

That reframing matters more than it sounds. Because a lot of the anxiety I see — and feel — is rooted in the wrong question. We keep asking “will AI take my job?” when the more actionable question is “given that AI is here, what does my next move look like?”

One question traps you. The other gives you somewhere to go.

What the wave actually feels like from the inside

I went through a layoff a couple of years ago. Different circumstances, but the feeling is recognizable: the calendar empties, the noise stops, and you’re left sitting with a version of yourself that was defined by a role that no longer exists.

It’s disorienting in a specific way. Not because you’ve failed — but because the ground moved and nobody asked your permission.

That’s what AI disruption feels like for a lot of people right now. The ground is moving. The roles that felt stable don’t feel that way anymore. And the uncertainty isn’t about whether you’re good enough — it’s about whether the map you’ve been using still matches the territory.

It mostly doesn’t. And that’s genuinely hard.

But here’s what I took from Suleyman, and from my own time in that stillness: disruption doesn’t erase what you’ve built. It just changes where it applies.

The containment trap

One of the book’s most useful ideas is about containment — the instinct to try to slow, limit, or control the wave. Suleyman is skeptical. Not because he thinks regulation is bad, but because history suggests that no single actor, government, or company has ever successfully contained a genuinely powerful general-purpose technology.

The internet wasn’t contained. Mobile wasn’t contained. AI won’t be either.

This matters for how you think about your own response. If you’re waiting for the disruption to stop before you make your next move, you may be waiting a long time. The more useful posture is to stop optimizing for a world that’s going away — and start building leverage in the one that’s arriving.

That’s not resignation. It’s navigation.

What doesn’t change

Here’s the part that gets lost in every “AI is eating jobs” headline: the things that matter most about good work are remarkably stable.

Judgment. Context. Trust. The ability to read a room, to hold a standard, to make a call when the data is ambiguous. The capacity to bring people together around a hard problem and keep them moving when momentum stalls.

AI is accelerating execution. It’s making the what faster and cheaper. But it hasn’t — and may not — replace the why and the who.

The engineers and leaders I’ve watched thrive through this transition aren’t the ones who learned the most AI tools the fastest. They’re the ones who stayed clear on what they bring that the tools can’t replicate — and got better at that, specifically.

Suleyman frames it as a question of co-evolution: how do humans and these technologies grow together, rather than in opposition? That framing opens up a different kind of thinking. Less defensive. More deliberate.

The anxiety is information

If you’re anxious about what AI means for your work or your team, that anxiety is worth listening to — not as a sign that something is wrong with you, but as a signal that your environment is changing faster than your map.

The response to that isn’t to panic. It’s to update the map.

What skills are becoming more valuable in your domain? Where are the new bottlenecks forming now that execution is cheaper? What do the people and teams doing well right now have in common?

These are navigable questions. They don’t require certainty about the future — just honest attention to the present.

The Coming Wave doesn’t offer easy reassurance. Suleyman is clear that this is a genuinely difficult moment, with real risks that deserve serious attention. But the tone underneath the complexity isn’t despair — it’s urgency. The urgency of people who believe we still have meaningful choices to make about how this unfolds.

I find that steadying. Not because it makes the wave smaller, but because it reminds me that agency is still part of the equation.

A closing thought

The uninvited guest is here. It’s sitting at the table and it’s not leaving.

The question isn’t how to make it go away. It’s how to figure out what the table looks like now — what role you play, what you bring, what you build next.

That’s not a small question. But it’s the right one.

And you don’t have to answer it all at once.

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Inspired by Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave — a book I’d recommend to anyone trying to think clearly about this moment, not just react to it.