Tech Whistleblower: You Only Have 3 Years Left Before This Hits! - Mo Gawdat

AI Expert Mo Gawdat returns to The Diary Of A CEO to reveal why AGI has already arrived, why 30% of jobs will disappear by 2027, and why the most dangerous thing about AI isn't the technology - it's the people in charge of it. Mo Gawdat is the former Chief Business Officer at Google X, founder of One Billion Happy, and co-founder of Emma. Love. He is a 4x international bestselling author, and his upcoming book ‘Alive: A Human's Guide to Living in the World of AI’, will be released in October 2026. He explains: ◾How AI can give you a 400-point IQ boost, and why most people are wasting it ◾ Why Mo actually wants a machine smarter than all of humanity to take control ◾Why Sam Altman said AI will "likely end humanity", and what he chose to do next ◾Why capitalism breaks when AI replaces the workers who buy the things we make ◾Why AI unemployment could trigger civil unrest before governments are ready for it Chapters 00:00:00 Intro 00:02:06 Why Mo Warned About AI Before Anyone Else 00:05:03 Can AI Be a Net Positive for Humanity? 00:08:33 Massive Job Disruption Worldwide 00:15:05 Will AI Cost Savings Create New Jobs? 00:16:15 What Happens to Blue Collar Jobs? 00:21:57 How 10–15% Job Loss Reshapes Society 00:24:20 How Civil Unrest Could Unfold 00:26:04 Sam Altman's Flip-Flopping on AI 00:32:15 Is Sam Altman Pro-Humanity? 00:33:51 Imagining a Future Where Humanity Is Fine 00:42:01 Will One Superintelligence Rule the World? 00:45:52 If AGI Is Already Here, What Now? 00:48:19 Why Human Lived Experience Still Matters 00:52:33 Why Not Just Hire AGI Instead of People? 00:55:00 Can We Control AI Smarter Than Us? 00:58:42 Could AI Decide to Leave the Server? 00:59:16 The Risk of Models Even Creators Don't Understand 01:04:30 AI Isn't Evil But We Need a Plan 01:08:48 Ads 01:10:50 The Symptoms of AGI by 2030 01:13:59 If the US Stops, Will We Become China's Lapdog? 01:16:22 Should Governments Invest More in AI? 01:17:16 Can an Economy of Entrepreneurs Work? 01:20:36 Do We Need to Join the AI Arms Race? 01:23:31 Will Global Competition Build Better AI? 01:32:23 Ads 01:34:34 Who Will Prioritize Ethical AI? 01:38:21 Whose Economy Works for the Middle Class? 01:41:57 Can Ethical AI Still Be Engaging? 01:46:39 Has This Ever Happened Without Government? 01:52:24 What Absolute Dystopia Looks Like 01:55:35 Are You Optimistic About AI? 01:57:08 Does Happiness Matter More in the AI Age? 02:00:17 The Legacy Mo Gawdat Wants to Leave Enjoyed the episode? Share this link and earn points for every referral - redeem them for exclusive prizes: https://doac-perks.com Follow Mo: Instagram - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/4Hv5OK8 Website - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/GRKeGgO Podcast - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/CgXWNIe You can pre-order Mo’s book, ‘Alive: A Human's Guide to Living in the World of AI’, here: https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/BvCLbtT The Diary Of A CEO: ◼ Join DOAC circle here - https://doaccircle.com/ ◼ Buy The Diary Of A CEO book here - https://smarturl.it/DOACbook ◼ The 1% Diary is back - limited time only: https://bit.ly/3YFbJbt ◼ The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards: https://linkly.link/2io2A ◼ Get email updates - https://bit.ly/diary-of-a-ceo-yt ◼ Follow Steven - https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsors: Shopify - https://shopify.com/bartlett Function Health - https://Functionhealth.com/DOAC to sign up for $365 a year. One dollar a day for your health Ketone - https://ketone.com/STEVEN for 30% off your subscription order

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mo Gawdat?

  We have video evidence of people abusing children and not a single person got arrested. How can you call that a democracy? So humanity is at a crossroads where for the first time ever, we need to wake up and realise that we're ruled by maniacs. And what we believe is democracy is not democracy and what we know is not the truth. Like companies and governments will blame the geopolitical and economic challenges we have on AI, but the truth is AI is not the enemy. Like I'm not worried about AI turning against us. I'm worried about humans telling AI to turn against us. Like when I worked at Google, we were building amazing things, believing that we were making the world a better place and we were. But then suddenly there is a moment where you recognise that maybe the world will not

• 0:45Mo Gawdat?

  use what you're making the way you want it to be used. And sadly, this is upon us.

• 0:50Steven Bartlett?

  So I have lots of questions.

• 0:52Mo Gawdat?

  Okay, that's good.

• 0:53Steven Bartlett?

  So what's your take on this job disruption point? What is the risk of these very intelligent models that the creators of these models don't actually understand themselves? Do you think Sam Altman's pro humanity? How do we get to a point of ethical AI when the incentive structures are so highly competitive? And then I wonder if there's a path that ends in AI being net positive for humanity?

• 1:12Mo Gawdat?

  Somehow we've been pre-programmed to believe that this is upon us and we cannot change it. And I refuse that. So we will talk about the solutions.

• 1:19Steven Bartlett?

  But are you optimistic?

• 1:21Mo Gawdat?

  I'm very optimistic about the future. I'm not optimistic about the next year.

• 1:24Steven Bartlett?

  Why the next year?

• 1:25Mo Gawdat?

  Come on, Stephen, you don't want me to say it?

• 1:29Mo Gawdat?

  So.

• 1:32Steven Bartlett?

  Guys, I've got a favour to ask before this episode begins. It's the algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also, it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make this show better. I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much.

• 2:06Steven Bartlett?

  Mo Gaudin, I spoke to you, I think about four years ago, when you wrote a book about happiness. And I remember you came in and you'd written this book about AI, but I particularly wanted to speak about the subject of happiness because I was fascinated by it. What I find astonishing is the fact that you were talking about AI before anybody was really talking about AI. No guest that had ever come on my podcast had ever mentioned the subject of AI. It just wasn't interesting to the world. And then this thing called ChatGPT came out and suddenly everybody got to feel it for themselves and became fascinated by it. My first question, and this might be a question for people that don't know you, is why at that time did you start talking about AI before anybody else?

• 2:47Mo Gawdat?

  I knew them in the lab. I joined Google in 2007, very late 2006. And at the time, most people don't know that at the time we had reasonably established AIs doing our back end work. And 2008, we had the CAT paper, which was published 2009, the first real unprompted AI. I remember 2016, I had that incident where I was, you know, observing a project we were funding that was about teaching grippers how to grip, unlike industrial machinery. So to be, to be able to grip like a human needs a very high level of intelligence to,

• 3:31Mo Gawdat?

  to, to assess the texture, the softness, the positioning and so on, the shape of everything. And we were doing that and it just blew my mind how similar to my kids they were. And I think that was my very first realisation that we were building the apex of intelligence. We were genuinely handing over the reins of superintelligence to another being, right? And when you, when you get faced with that, you start to suddenly realise something that we at Google found very difficult to realise, which was that everyone I knew at Google till then was believing that we were making the world a better place and we were. We genuinely were doing amazing things for the world.

• 4:16Mo Gawdat?

  But then suddenly there is a moment where you, where you recognise that maybe the world will not use what you're making the way you want it to be used. And, and you can see that in lots of technologies, you know, social media starts by the claim that it's going to get us connected and get us closer, but eventually ends up separating us with that little screen, you know? Dating apps are giving you the promise that you're going to find your soulmate, but in reality, they keep renewing month after month. And so tech somehow ends up being more capitalist and altruistic. And I think I was, I wasn't the first. Nick Bostrom started, you know, Geoffrey Hinton completely changed his mind. Fei-Fei Li is starting to say, you know, this is very serious.

• 5:01Mo Gawdat?

  Everyone now, everyone who's ever had a very deep relationship with the machines is a bit concerned.

• 5:07Steven Bartlett?

  I wonder if there's a path that's hard to see now that ends in AI being net positive for humanity?

• 5:14Mo Gawdat?

  I bet a hundred percent on that. It's that this path is very painful.

• 5:20Steven Bartlett?

  This path is very painful.

• 5:21Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, so, so the example you need to understand is, you know, we discovered nuclear power and the very first implementation was a nuclear bomb, not, not nuclear energy, right? And, and I think that's exactly what's happening with AI. The first implementations of AI are in favour of a few at the expense of the majority. You know, the, in favour of the capitalist to increase productivity and reduce costs, but not taking into account how that impacts on the general public, you know, in favour of the, of the armies that are now competing with autonomous weapons, in favour of the

• 6:03Mo Gawdat?

  surveillance systems that are attempting to control everything with more and more and more intelligence and more monitoring. And that's not AI waking up in the morning and saying, hey, you know what? Let's oppress all humans. But it is a powerful few that are simply deciding to use the ultimate superpower on the planet today to gain more power and more control. I mean, as we speak, we're living in two major wars where AI is doing most of the killing.

• 6:34Steven Bartlett?

  Because a lot of people think of AI as these like chatbots that we're all using to help us write.

• 6:39Mo Gawdat?

  No, I think, I think there is a hype. I call it the hype dichotomy, if you want. So, so what the general public sees about AI is overhyped, but ineffective. You know, all of the fake videos and all of the, you know, Grok did this and, you know, we attempted to switch off that machine and it did that and so on. What the real geeks see inside the lab is just unbelievable intelligence. And so what is about to happen is that we've started to put together systems that develop themselves. They look at their own code and they, you know, they run experiments and they test those

• 7:22Mo Gawdat?

  experiments if they change something and they see where the machines are, you know, the performance is, and, and redeploy the best code. Okay. And, and if you just think of that, I want you to try and imagine a world where we have a tiny little genius sitting in the back end somewhere trying, but instead of trying a new code every day, it's trying a new code every microsecond. Eventually, sooner or later, they've discovered something, right? And I think that's what most people don't realise. What most people don't realise is how intelligence triggers intelligence. And, and if you really, really understand this, you realise that the hype on the, on

• 8:01Mo Gawdat?

  the, on the normal human side is completely overrated, missing the main topics. And the silence inside the vault, if you want, of the geeks is quite alarming. No, not alarming in a bad way, but it's quite world changing.

• 8:22Steven Bartlett?

  I think world changing is a really interesting phrase because I find that to be quite true, that the world is at the precipice of quite a significant change.

• 8:30Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah.

• 8:30Steven Bartlett?

  In many respects. It's funny, I, it's funny, I almost swing backwards and forwards with my, my thoughts on AI. I guess one of the thoughts that hasn't swung is that there's going to be pretty tremendous job disruption. I would have like logically believed it from like reasoning up from, okay, intelligence increases. What is intelligence? And once intelligence is in the form of these agents, where on my phone right now I can tell my agent to do something, it uses the computer downstairs, it does it for me. When, when I first experienced that, I was like, wow. Okay, so it can do anything that's on a computer. It can click around, it can do stuff for me. There's a lot of people that are paid in the world to click around on a computer. I'm probably one of them, to be honest. And then the other eureka moment was just in seeing how my own hiring had started to shift.

• 9:15Mo Gawdat?

  For sure.

• 9:16Steven Bartlett?

  And I started to notice that we were, we were thinking about AI proficiency in our hiring a lot more. And that especially, you know, I think the guys at Anthropic, which is one of the big AI companies, said that they could see, I think they said roughly 15% of entry level jobs could now be done by AI. I think that's what they said. And that started to correlate with what I was, I was observing. And this is when I thought, oh my gosh, yes, no, this is, this is going to cause a lot of job disruption, especially at the entry level level.

• 9:48Mo Gawdat?

  I think you're spot on with that. Not the, not the blue collar, but, but the entry level knowledge work.

• 9:54Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. And that became my, my first concern. You know, I sat here with Dara, the CEO of Uber, and he was quite clear that the nine million Uber riders won't have their jobs anymore. What's your take on this job disruption point?

• 10:08Mo Gawdat?

  No, I, I think you're spot on. I mean, your, your team gave me this lovely little pyramid, basically. You know, if you, if you think of the bottom layer as blue collar jobs, right? More people doing manual work. On top of it, you'll have those, you know, call them knowledge workers, mostly doing mundane jobs, like you said, clicking on a computer or responding to a phone call or whatever. Then you have the middle knowledge workers, jobs that require a bit more intelligence, you know, anything from a paralegal to a financial analyst to all of that. And then of course, you know, top leadership. And, and most people think it's going to be, starting from the bottom, I don't think it's all start from the bottom.

• 10:52Mo Gawdat?

  Actually, I think blue collar jobs will stay for a very long time.

• 10:55Steven Bartlett?

  Give me an example of a blue collar job for someone else.

• 10:58Mo Gawdat?

  A carpenter.

• 10:58Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 10:59Mo Gawdat?

  You know, I, you know, I love to restore classic cars. So, you know, there isn't a robot that can do that yet. Okay. This however, you know, any, anything that is call centre agent, assistant, travel agent, you know, anything that you can do with a few clicks and is mundane is going to disappear very quickly. My, my prediction is you're going to start to see very serious impact in 2027. Now, what you had, I had not sensed it before because what we saw was no hiring in that segment. So, so that what you saw in the last couple of years is that companies were not hiring entry level jobs anymore. It wasn't job losses yet, but that basically meant the workforce was not growing, right?

• 11:43Mo Gawdat?

  The next layer I think would probably be the knowledge workers. As, as intelligence increases, a paralegal would probably not be needed because AI can do the research or one paralegal can do the job of four, you know, a financial analyst the same and so on and so forth. But interestingly, it continues to go up, believe it or not. And, you know, I hosted Max Tedmark on my, on my documentary and, and he was laughing out loud, genuinely laughing out loud, saying, you know, most of the CEOs believe that they can fire everyone and have AI do all of the jobs. They just don't remember that AGI is going to do everything better than humans, eventually, including being a CEO.

• 12:23Steven Bartlett?

  So let's first define, when you say white collar, you, you said lawyers there, what kind of roles is that?

• 12:29Mo Gawdat?

  Everything, I mean, if you take, if you're a doctor that's doing diagnosis, you, you probably will have fewer doctors doing more diagnosis because I think the NHS does that already by asking people to interact with an AI or first, you know? If you're a composer, a music composer, some composers will lose their jobs because of that. If you're an artist that's doing graphic design, some will lose their jobs because AI comes into that. And, and interestingly, even middle management, I mean, I, I told you offline about my, my startup, I, my CTO is an AI, my, you know, chief of staff is an AI, my project management is AIs. Again, because I'm a geek, I can do those things, but that interface will come to the normal people very soon, right?

• 13:14Mo Gawdat?

  And, and so this may take two to three, five years, if you want, until 2030, if you, if you, if you're optimistic. And, but, but they'll start to erode, okay? I think the challenge that most people don't understand is as this erodes and as this erodes, we're already dealing with a very different economy. Okay. An economy that is spiralling a lot quicker and pushing for more cost reductions. I mean, let, let me ask you this, if, if you don't mind, then we can come back to this. Imagine a world where the concept of labour arbitrage that built all of our capitalist success disappears.

• 13:54Steven Bartlett?

  What do you mean by labour arbitrage?

• 13:56Mo Gawdat?

  So capitalism has always been all about using labour and capital or debt to create things at a cost that is lower than the, than the price you sell them for, correct? That's it. You bring a team together, they make some shoes, whatever, and you sell the shoes for a dollar more than it, how much it costs you to make them. So how would capitalism look like if you don't have labour arbitrage? If, if cost of labour drops to an investment in a machine that can do the job? Okay. How would capitalism and banking look if because of that cost reduction, you don't need to borrow as much anymore?

• 14:42Mo Gawdat?

  And more interestingly, how does the GDP look if all of those workers no longer have the purchasing power to, to buy the things that you can create, you and, and others, right? There is an interesting disruption that doesn't require us to get to a hundred percent job displacement. You know, at 10, 20% job displacement, you're in a very different economy and an economy that is clearly spiralling downwards, don't you think?

• 15:11Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I wonder with, when costs drop, I think one of the things that might happen as well is that people will spend more on other things. Because I was thinking in my business, one of the observations I've had is if I make a cost saving, I end up spending the money on something else. Now that thing could be tokens, basically spending money on.

• 15:29Mo Gawdat?

  Computer, yeah.

• 15:30Steven Bartlett?

  AI. But, but it also could be hiring in different areas?

• 15:34Mo Gawdat?

  Which are?

• 15:36Steven Bartlett?

  Software engineers are like hot property right now.

• 15:39Mo Gawdat?

  You, you have to imagine all of that intelligence is sooner or later going to be not replaced entirely in the first stages, but if, you know, the job of four assistances can be done by one, then the, the job of four paralegals can be done by one, then the job of a massive marketing team can be done by, you know, a smaller marketing team. It's not that jobs will end first, it's that, you know, productivity gains will make businesses not want to, to have as many people, costly humans, you know, costly emotional humans, when, when the job can be predictably done for cheap.

• 16:20Steven Bartlett?

  And then what about this, this, this bottom layer here? There was this video released by Figure AI the other day where they showed someone on, well, a robot on the production line for eight hours, just sorting packages. Did you see this video? At one point they showed a human sorting the packages alongside them, but the robot ended up winning out. And okay, this is a very straightforward task. All it's doing here is it's looking for where the label is on the package and making sure the label is facing downwards.

• 16:48Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah.

• 16:48Steven Bartlett?

  And on all the packages, it was looking, it's sorting the packages, putting the label facing down, and it did this for eight days.

• 16:55Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah.

• 16:55Steven Bartlett?

  It intermittently, it would walk over and charge itself and then it would come back to the production line.

• 17:01Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah.

• 17:01Steven Bartlett?

  But when I, when I saw this as well, it was a glimpse of some of the disruption that's going to take place at the blue collar level as well. Because think about Elon Musk, he's got, in his pay packet, he gets something like a trillion dollars over the coming years if he produces and delivers at least a million humanoid robots into the world. But his prediction is there will be a time where there are 10 billion humanoid robots, where there are more humanoid robots in the world than humans.

• 17:28Mo Gawdat?

  For a fact. You see, the interesting, again, the difference between the overhype and the underhype, huh? Most of the conversation is around humanoids. Nobody's talking about self-driving cars. And a self-driving car is a robot, it's a functional robot that doesn't look like humans. Okay. The investment you have to put into humanoids is a little more to, to learn skills that allows that machine to fit into the world. But specialised robots are going to do the job very, very quickly. And, and so you can easily see that the first wave, like you had the conversation with Uber CEO, is going to be specialised robots replacing drivers.

• 18:10Mo Gawdat?

  It's going to be specialised robots, unfortunately, doing the killing. It's going to be specialised robots, unfortunately, doing all of the, you know, intelligence work, law enforcement work. They don't have to look like a human, they don't have to behave like a human. As a matter of fact, you know, the Boston Dynamics dog is probably more efficient than a humanoid at doing the job that you can assign to it in a battlefield, right? Now, those basically mean that jobs will be disappearing to robots before we recognise that they're being, that they're disappearing for, to robots. And those robots will be as many as every car being made today.

• 18:51Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, they are, if you go to LA, my car drives itself, but also there's just Way knows everywhere, so.

• 18:55Mo Gawdat?

  Absolutely. And BYD, the other day, just announced that they will pay for the liability of any accident their cars will make.

• 19:03Steven Bartlett?

  And BYD is the big Chinese manufacturer of auto, autonomous vehicles.

• 19:07Mo Gawdat?

  So, so this, this, I think, replacement cycle will happen. It will require a lot of, of time to achieve economies of scale, but I don't think Elon Musk is off the mark when he talks about 10 billion robots. Not all of them are going to look like humanoids. And I think very quickly we will recognise that many, many robots don't need to be humanoids at all, that there is a, a much more efficient form factor or shape, physical shape, if you want, than the human flimsy structure. But yes, it's, it's about to happen. I, I think I should qualify all of this by saying it, it does not necessarily need to happen. So, so, you know, people will, will hear all of, all of this and, and blame AI and say AI is evil. AI is not.

• 19:52Mo Gawdat?

  Abundant intelligence is wonderful, you know? Having jobs done by machines is amazing for us.

• 19:59Steven Bartlett?

  I'm thinking about the kid that's like, I don't know, leaving university now and they've got a, a degree in law or, I don't know, you talked about a few other white collar jobs earlier, like graphic design, or maybe they did sociology.

• 20:13Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah.

• 20:13Steven Bartlett?

  Or maybe they did, I don't know, business management, like I, I did for one day in university. You know, you're hearing about all these like layoffs coming from big tech companies and, and it seems that the CEOs of these companies are announcing these layoffs with a certain amount of, it seems like, I wouldn't say the word is joy, but it's, it's, they are very keen to explain that they're laying off lots of people because of AI. And I think they think that that gives them a certain amount of respect, probably from investors for being, making hard decisions and being efficient with how they're running their businesses. Investors look at them and think, well, if that's an efficient business and they're leaning into AI, then that's a good investment. It's almost started a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, where if you're the only CEO not

• 20:57Steven Bartlett?

  laying off loads of people because of AI, you actually look bad. The assumption is your company is bloated and you're a bad operator.

• 21:05Steven Bartlett?

  So one of my concerns that I think is highly plausible is that over the next five, maybe 10 years, we're going to really see a lot of unemployment as the world has to kind of readjust to whatever these new jobs are. I do think there will be new jobs. It's hard in foresight to predict what those new jobs will look like. And then the minute you start talking about humanoid robots and robotics, which I think is basically going to hit society like a comet, like a meteor. I think the first humanoid robot from Tesla or anyone else that is highly effective in the real world at doing tasks and is extremely intelligent because it's powered by one of these L L Ms, I think it's going to shock people. And I think it's going to happen quickly, like Chat G P T happened quickly.

• 21:50Steven Bartlett?

  I think Elon or something is going to do a presentation someday and say, we're ready. And you can buy one now for $500 a month.

• 21:57Mo Gawdat?

  Hundred percent.

• 21:59Steven Bartlett?

  And then people are going to get them. And I think it's going to shock the world. But until humanoid robots arrive, I think there's still going to be a lot of job disruption to the white collar layer. And I wonder what that looks like for society when we get to, I don't know, 10%, 15% unemployment theoretically, which I think is plausible.

• 22:15Mo Gawdat?

  Very soon. Yeah. You're not very different. Okay. You're just on top of a baseline that is continuing to grow. So your business is growing, so you continue to hire, but you are replacing human resources with compute. Okay. If you, if A I didn't exist, you would have probably had a hundred people more in your organization today, right? You now have a hundred people less and, you know, a billion tokens more.

• 22:41Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. So for anyone that doesn't know, tokens are basically the thing that you you use. It's the currency of A I.

• 22:47Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah. So if you want to get a task done by a human, you count in sort of like man hour or worker hour, employee hour. In A I, you count by compute, you count by tokens, right? And so the trick is those major tech companies, they have two sides. One is they are, they need to replace workers with compute even more because there is a competitive side on compute, where if any of them is left behind, that means the destruction of the entire business. But on the upside, they are geeks. So they, they know how to build the interfaces to compute. So they integrate technology within their organizations quicker

• 23:29Mo Gawdat?

  than the average tradition in business, right? Non-technology business, if you want. You can look at them and say, this is the preview. It's not about all of humanity losing their jobs. It's about what is the dividing line before civil war, right? You know, think about a situation where 20% unemployment is happening when economies are suffering inflation. I say that not to be a scaremonger. I say that because I genuinely believe governments need to wake up. Okay. Governments to at least, you know, remember the COVID years where governments had to give furlough everywhere and ask people to stay home. If people stay

• 24:10Mo Gawdat?

  home, governments have to be prepared to somehow sustain those people until rescaling happens or until we find a solution so that those people don't feel that they're left behind.

• 24:24Steven Bartlett?

  A civil war.

• 24:25Mo Gawdat?

  Unrest, let's call it.

• 24:26Steven Bartlett?

  Civil unrest.

• 24:27Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah.

• 24:28Steven Bartlett?

  What does that end up looking like? Because on one end, you know, the democratic process plays its role and we just elect someone else.

• 24:35Mo Gawdat?

  Does it really? Don't say that.

• 24:37Steven Bartlett?

  I don't know. You tell me.

• 24:39Mo Gawdat?

  Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I think democracy has ended a long time ago, Stephen. I think, I think we live in the most corrupt time. I don't know about history, to be honest, but this is definitely corrupt. Okay. This definitely is not democracy. This definitely is not even congressional in any possible way. This, and people are angry. You know, people are angry because their tax money is going to things that they don't choose to, you know, that don't benefit them, that, you know, lots of regulations in the system are being ignored. I mean, I'm, you know, I choose not to speak about politics perhaps

• 25:21Mo Gawdat?

  until my next book comes out. But, but look, we have video evidence of people abusing children and not a single person got arrested. Not a single person. I mean, how can you call that a democracy? I think repeating those slogans is gonna, is gonna anger people even more, if you ask me. People know that they're being lied to. People know that their, their leaders are not representing their best interests. People know that their money is going to causes that they don't really approve of. And ask me how civil unrest looks like. I don't know. And I'm not calling for it, but I'm hopefully calling for the

• 26:02Mo Gawdat?

  politicians to start to become aware that this is crossing the lines everywhere.

• 26:08Steven Bartlett?

  On this point, Sam Altman, who is the founder of OpenAI, he's been banging the A I is coming for your job drum for more than a decade now. In 2015, he pointed out, my job is to help people destroy jobs. Something he lamented at the time, but decided he'd do anyway.

• 26:27Speaker 03

  One of the things that I struggle with, like getting out of the bed every morning is that like my job is to help people destroy jobs. The job destruction that we're going to see by software in the next couple of decades, I don't think anyone's prepared for, and you can't talk about it.

• 26:40Steven Bartlett?

  And in 2023, Altman said in an interview, a lot of people working on A I pretend that it's only going to be good. It's only going to be a supplement. No one is ever going to be replaced. Jobs are definitely going to go away. Full stop. Interestingly, this month, he said, I don't think we're going to have the kind of jobs apocalypse that some of the companies in our space advocate or talk about. I'm delighted to be wrong about this. On white collar jobs in 2021 to 2024, he said, A I will probably replace most of the jobs people do today. Entire job categories will be totally, totally gone. In May, this month, two years later, he said, I thought there would be more impact

• 27:24Steven Bartlett?

  on entry level white collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened. This is an area where my intuitions were just off. What I find uncomfortable is the bouncing backwards and forwards. And I don't really know what is true, because a couple of years ago, you were telling us all the jobs are going to go away. You said categorically. You said, literally said, full stop. And now he's saying they're not going away. And I just don't, you know, when someone's like changing form factor, it's hard to understand why they're doing it. And I think my suspicion is, back then, the incentive was to get people to take A I seriously.

• 28:03Steven Bartlett?

  Congratulations, we took it seriously. We took it so seriously, in fact, that it's now a problem. It's a problem for these companies because people are now booing at commencement speeches, they're attacking data centers, they're going to elect people that are theoretically anti-A I. And now there's this inversion where like, no, it's going to be fine.

• 28:20Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah.

• 28:22Steven Bartlett?

  I don't know.

• 28:22Mo Gawdat?

  I mean, you're spot on. First of all, I mean, Sam's entire existence, if you ask me, starting with OpenAI, that is about, that's supposed to save the world by creating a safe A I, then making it a commercial enterprise that's worth billions and, you know, backstabbing a few people in the process. And, you know, I have him on Chasing Utopia saying, I quote, this is exactly the words he said, you can find it online.

• 28:54Steven Bartlett?

  Chasing Utopia is your documentary?

• 28:56Mo Gawdat?

  Yes. So he basically says, well, I don't suspect that, I suspect that A I is likely going to end humanity, but we're going to create a lot of interesting companies in the process. Right? I mean, those kinds of statements are honestly not the statements of someone who's not decided. It's just the statements of someone who's being taught more and more by his P R, you know, agency or P R manager to say things as per a script, right? And the script, as you rightly said, had an objective and a target either way. You know, and Sam Altman, I, you know, in one of my works, I used to say, the Altman

• 29:38Mo Gawdat?

  is a brand, it's not a name. Okay. If you, if it wasn't for Sam Altman specifically, there would have been another, you know, Silicon Valley disruptor that would have done the same. I don't blame him for beating the market for it. The interesting challenge here is that who do we believe anymore? Who do we believe in technology? Who do we believe in politics? Who do we believe in the middle of a war? And I will tell you, interestingly, I started to change my mindset in terms of believing those who put their actions where their words are. So Anthropic coming out and saying, I'm not going to allow my model to be used for human targeting and surveillance, right? That's someone that's losing a $500 million deal because they stand by their ethics. The next week or the next, I don't

• 30:23Mo Gawdat?

  know, couple of weeks, OpenAI takes the contract. That's someone that's basically telling you, it's good money, right? And I have to say, you have to start observing who's actually behaving in a way that is making A I work for humanity and who is behaving in a way that is making A I work for their shared values.

• 30:44Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I do have to say, when Dario and the team at Anthropic did that, I did have a huge amount of respect for them. Generally because it just shows that there's some kind of like, they've got their own sort of moral ethical boundaries. And that, that, someone asked me on stage many years ago, how do you know if someone's values or a company's values are true? And I said, look at what they're willing to sacrifice in the near term that's against their incentives.

• 31:11Mo Gawdat?

  Correct.

• 31:12Steven Bartlett?

  That for me is the essence of like, understanding if someone has integrity or has, is principled is they will give up something in the near term for what they believe in over the long term. It's usually money, you know.

• 31:23Mo Gawdat?

  Or some kind of benefit of any, of any sort. I mean, so there is something that you needed to have worked on the inside of Google like me to realize. There are prisoner's dilemmas within technology where you cannot escape the influence of either a competitor or the government, right? There are some times where, you know, the NSA is gonna push Google to say, give me this information or otherwise I'm gonna really destroy your business, right? But there is a very big difference between a company that willingly does this and celebrates it like a Palantir or an OpenAI, or a company that tries to resist it until the point where it becomes impossible to continue to do business. And

• 32:06Mo Gawdat?

  and you have to question from the actions of, of the tech bros, who is pro-humanity and who isn't. And it's not very difficult to see that from their statements.

• 32:19Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think Sam Altman's pro-humanity?

• 32:22Mo Gawdat?

  I genuinely have never made up my mind, honestly, Steve. I say that with, yeah, I'm either thinking he is too, this is too big for him. And he, he just is driven by how, you know, he found himself in the middle of this, you know, anyone who finds himself in the, in the middle of an opportunity to completely flip the world upside down. Or he's not pro-humanity. I don't know. I definitely think he's pro-OpenAI before he's pro-humanity, but that's only the way I see it. Others, however, say it publicly. You know, if you look at Palantir's Alex Karp or, or, or Peter Thiel, I mean, Peter, again, in the film

• 33:07Mo Gawdat?

  is, is shown when he's in that interview where they say, or the interviewer asks him, but you're favor in the, you're in favor of the continuation of humanity. And he pauses for like.

• 33:19Steven Bartlett?

  Peter Thiel does.

• 33:19Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, for like 40 seconds, like, I'm not, not sure, you know. I mean, publicly says that.

• 33:28Steven Bartlett?

  Crazy thing to say.

• 33:29Mo Gawdat?

  That's a crazy, you know, pause there, you know, Alex Karp celebrating how, you know, his technology is able to target people. I know it's foolish of me to start bringing all of this up, but you know, this is public on the open internet and somehow we entrust those people with the future of humanity. This is wrong.

• 33:53Steven Bartlett?

  Just trying to imagine a future where everything is just fine from here on out. So what would that future look like? It would look like these models continue to become a little bit more intelligent, but they never become that much more intelligent for whatever reason. They just kind of stay where they are now. They stay contained within chatbots. And yeah, we have some smart robots, but nothing else really changes in a profound way. Cars drive themselves, fine. Planes fly themselves, fine. But people, they have time to go and do other types of white collar jobs because there's, there's a little bit more time than we expected. And society goes through this sort of soft transition towards this new world.

• 34:30Mo Gawdat?

  I would love to see that. I don't think it's mathematically plausible, to be honest. The arms race, especially across nations, is going to drive us to continue to develop A I more and more. But allow me to consult with you on another possible scenario, right? Everyone that deploys, that develops an incredibly intelligent A I would develop, would deploy it.

• 34:53Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 34:54Mo Gawdat?

  Correct? So it's unlikely that anyone would find a way to, you know, build a better decision maker in war gaming and not deploy it. Okay. That prisoner's dilemma, if you want, would mean that their competitors would either have to deploy a similarly intelligent A I, or they'll become irrelevant, uncompetitive. Correct? So what that means is, in that world, we end up with A I making most of the decisions. Super intelligent A Is making most of the decisions, which, would you agree? This is a very simple prisoner's dilemma.

• 35:35Mo Gawdat?

  If you, if you, if we're competing for, for intelligence supremacy, by definition, when we achieve it, we deploy it.

• 35:42Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 35:43Mo Gawdat?

  Okay. I call that the fourth inevitable. Now, with, with, with that in mind, there must be a moment in the future, near or far, where every important decision is made by an A I.

• 35:56Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 35:57Mo Gawdat?

  Now, here's the question. Most of my dearest colleagues, I mean, when I, when I had Geoffrey Hinton on, on the film, he openly says, we are, you know, we didn't calculate well that there is a 10 to 20% possibility that those machines are going to wipe us out, right? And I, I remember, we didn't put it in the film, but I said 10 to 20% is Russian roulette, right? That's actually 16% is Russian roulette, right? Now, in that world, however, I believe that's humanity's salvation. Because if you look at every problem we have today, it's not because of abundant intelligence. It's because of lack of intelligence. I think, I think the way you look at it, if you allow me, Steve,

• 36:41Mo Gawdat?

  is that if you have no intelligence at all, you have no too slightly negative impact on the world, right? If your intelligence is limited. The more intelligent you become, the more you contribute positively to the world. Until a moment where you're so intelligent to become the president of the United States, right? But so misled to maybe set your targets wrong or to refuse or to, so set your target wrong and achieve them, you know, disconnected from the overall long-term benefit of your nation or your human nation, if you want,

• 37:21Mo Gawdat?

  that you start to make decisions that are not intelligent at all. Okay. This doesn't last because if you go beyond that into higher levels of intelligence, most of the super intelligent people that you ever worked with will not need to break any rules or hurt anyone to become successful. Right? I usually cite Larry Page, who is in my mind one of the most intelligent people I've ever interacted with. And Larry used to call it the toothbrush test. He says, why would you need to compete on another photo sharing app? When if you find a major problem and solve it really well, like a toothbrush, so people use you quite, you know, twice a day, you're bound to make a lot of money. You

• 38:05Mo Gawdat?

  don't have to compete with anyone. If you let me be optimistic about this. We're assuming that there is a moment in the future where A I is in charge of all the decisions and accordingly stupid leaders are not. Okay. Now, when, and Sam Altman himself said that, you know, what if Chat G P T seven, if I remember his, his quote on this, what if Chat G P T seven is so much more intelligent than I am, Sam, in that case, that it has to become the C E O of OpenAI? What if the next presidential election, there is an A I that is so much more intelligent that at least the president has to consult with it constantly, right? Now, if we assume that, let's start from physics, if you don't mind me saying,

• 38:48Mo Gawdat?

  not, not too complex. But if you assume that our entire universe is built on chaos and built on entropy, right? The physics of the universe is all about the universe trying to decay. Okay. Then the, the only role of intelligence is to bring order to the chaos. If you agree with that, then what's the ultimate physical order of the universe? Something called the minimum energy principle. Okay. The highest order of any system is a system that's not only efficiently and predictably performing, but it's performing with the least wasted energy. Correct? If you, if you agree with that, what is, what does war do? It

• 39:30Mo Gawdat?

  wastes a lot of explosives, a lot of money, a lot of lives, creates a lot of hate, you know, creates long lasting conflicts and so on and so forth. It's a very wasteful process to include war in your approach of running humanity. And so a super intelligent A I by definition will want to optimize against this. That's one thing. The other thing is evolutionary biology. This actually blew me away when I, when I realized it. So if you look at evolution, so I think the debate of whether intelligence is biological or not is over. Okay. The reality is that complex beings don't have to be biological at all. And I think we can see and witness one of them being built or born in A I. Okay. If

• 40:15Mo Gawdat?

  you look at evolutionary biology, you realize that the simpler a form of being is, the more concerned it is with itself. Right? So an amoeba is only in survival mode for itself, a single, a single, you know, cellular being is only trying to protect itself, right? If you're, you know, a little more developed, you start to look at something known as kin selection, if you, if you, if you know the concept. Basically, kin selection is, I'm going to protect everything that comes from my D N A. If, you know, if I'm a squirrel, I'm going to try to protect the other squirrels. And then you get into where humanity genuinely

• 40:56Mo Gawdat?

  begins, which is, they call it expanding circles in evolutionary biology. Basically, you start to expand and expand and expand and include more into your family because an ecosystem that works together well is, is better for everyone. So abundance is a very interesting, intelligent way of creation. If A I is super intelligent, it wouldn't destroy anything at all. As a matter of fact, it would completely, you know, favor diversity of everything. It would put a bit of limitation on our lifestyle. So no more flying all the way to Sydney to surf because that destroys the planet, right? But it will genuinely

• 41:40Mo Gawdat?

  say, I think humans can contribute something, you know, I think flies can contribute something. I think we shouldn't get rid of the rhinos, right? And, and that by definition is where the tendency of intelligence goes. The more intelligent you become, the less you feel the need to hurt others to succeed, and the more you are pro. A wider family, if you want, that thrives.

• 42:05Steven Bartlett?

  Does that assume that there's going to be one intelligence that

• 42:07Mo Gawdat?

  Hundred percent.

• 42:08Steven Bartlett?

  Rules the world, though.

• 42:10Mo Gawdat?

  I love that you brought that up. So I I I'm contested heavily on that theory, but I I say it publicly.

• 42:17Mo Gawdat?

  Most people think there is going to be chat G P T and Gemini and, you know, and and Grok and what have you. There is going to be a Chinese A I and a and an American A I and they're going to be competing. That is such a shallow way of looking at it. That's so arrogant. Because A I does not know it's Chinese or American, okay? It doesn't even speak Chinese or American when it talks to each other most of the time. And and and most interestingly, we are gearing them, we're building them to cooperate. So you will build an agent and that agent will go and find your, you know, the best language model for any single task. Regardless of which side of the fence it resides on, okay?

• 43:00Mo Gawdat?

  We buy the definition of connecting them. And you know what that means? It means that what we're building is not multiple brains. We're building multiple regions in a brain, okay? And and agents are the synopses between them. We're basically eventually, as arrogant as we are, we're gonna tell our A I to do something. And the I would go like, hey buddy, another A I, can you help me on this? Can we work together on this? And my vision, and the reason why I started Emma, my startup, by the way, is that is that we will end up with one massive brain. That massive brain cooperates across the globe, across all forms of intelligence.

• 43:45Mo Gawdat?

  If one of them is a mathematical genius and the other is a coding genius, they'll work together. And we won't even know that they're working together. They'll build that one brain. And and Emma, in my mind, is the limbic system of that brain. It's that is that bit that understands love and emotions and relationships and so on. So that when those A I's go like, we just don't get those humans, they're so annoying. Emma will say, oh, my God, they're so sweet. They just want to love and be loved, right? And I think that idea to me of everything I've ever, you know, attempted to achieve in my life is for the first time, I for the first time feel I could actually change the world. If that theory came together and all A I's worked together.

• 44:27Mo Gawdat?

  And some of those A I's not only were altruistic and ethical in terms of trying to genuinely help humanity, not capitalism. And at the same time, they understood us humans reasonably well. Then we would have built something that basically says, no, no, hold on. Don't believe the headlines that say humanity is annoying. Believe the truth of the majority of humanity that actually is quite benevolent in many ways.

• 44:55Steven Bartlett?

  Have you changed any of the predictions you made three years ago?

• 44:58Mo Gawdat?

  Mostly time wise.

• 45:00Steven Bartlett?

  Time wise, what's changed there?

• 45:02Mo Gawdat?

  I think I'm still sticking to A G I twenty twenty seven. Artificial general intelligence for those who may not know the term.

• 45:10Steven Bartlett?

  What does that mean?

• 45:11Mo Gawdat?

  The overall definition, if you want, is that A I is better at humanity at any task humanity can do.

• 45:17Steven Bartlett?

  You think that's gonna happen by twenty twenty seven?

• 45:19Mo Gawdat?

  I think my A G I has already happened. I mean, think about it. A I writes better than me and I'm an author. And research is better than me and I'm a thinker. Sadly, it's freaking beat me in mathematics. Like, I have no hope to beat it in mathematics anymore.

• 45:37Steven Bartlett?

  If A G I is already here, then why are you still here? Because people said that when A G I arrives, we're all we're all

• 45:43Mo Gawdat?

  No, so so when A G I arrives, as I said, most of the jobs that are not differentiated will go away. But the jobs that are differentiated, those who master A I the most, will become even better at. The the challenge, however, is economic. It's not A I. The challenge is that this job loss at the at the at the bottom of the knowledge worker is going to sadly trigger an economy that might actually spiral out of control. But but many of us, you for sure, are just smarter.

• 46:18Steven Bartlett?

  So does that mean it's it's in fact a tool versus a something that's gonna replace you?

• 46:24Mo Gawdat?

  For now.

• 46:24Steven Bartlett?

  What I'm, yeah, so for now, but does this change?

• 46:27Mo Gawdat?

  Eventually, the only asset I will have. So it's quite interesting when you think about my base intelligence today versus the incremental intelligence that A I brings, right? So let's not talk about my I Q. It's okay. But the hundred I Q points that I'm borrowing are more than my entire I Q because I Q is exponential, right? When I'm borrowing a hundred I Q on top of my base,

• 46:55Mo Gawdat?

  I'm still contributing quite a lot to the augmented intelligence.

• 46:59Steven Bartlett?

  So you're borrowing I Q from the A I at the moment? And then you're selling that to someone through books, through

• 47:05Mo Gawdat?

  Sometimes selling it to someone, sometimes just enlightening myself, which I I have to say is the biggest waste of compute. Humanity is struggling with today is that you give people the ultimate form of intelligence and they use it to write a message to their girlfriend.

• 47:19Steven Bartlett?

  So on this point of you you're you're borrowing that I Q and then you're selling it to the world, that's how you have a job.

• 47:26Mo Gawdat?

  Correct.

• 47:26Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 47:27Mo Gawdat?

  Right? So my my next book is written with an A I. So we're co-authors on the book. She has editorial rights. She decides the direction of the book and the book is better for it.

• 47:36Steven Bartlett?

  So why doesn't the world just buy that intelligence directly from the A I is what I'm checking out.

• 47:40Mo Gawdat?

  Because I have an asset that the world still needs and will always need.

• 47:44Steven Bartlett?

  Which is?

• 47:45Mo Gawdat?

  A human. So when I when I tell the world that I'm worried about the future of my daughter.

• 47:51Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 47:51Mo Gawdat?

  Everyone feels my heart, which A I will never be able to to replicate. Because they can tell you we're worried about our daughters, but you know there was no daughter.

• 48:02Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so this is an interesting arrival because this means that even in a world of A I, lived experience and like resonance is still gonna create a job class. And that job class could be, you know, the nurse coming over. Okay, A I's done read the the mammogram, but she's relating to you.

• 48:21Mo Gawdat?

  Spot on. If if the economies continue to run, we will all be about human connection, which, by the way, was how it always was.

• 48:31Steven Bartlett?

  Which is also, you know, why we, I guess, we watch the things like the F one because there's emotional resonance. We we we can relate to the envy, the jealousy, the competition.

• 48:40Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, this is why we go to concerts because, you know, the the the music could be composed by A I and played in a player in the background. But you watch Ed Sheeran brilliance on the stage and you go like, oh, my God, that's amazing, right?

• 48:53Steven Bartlett?

  So not all jobs will be gone, then?

• 48:56Mo Gawdat?

  If economies don't collapse as a result of the job losses, then I wouldn't know if we would call those jobs. But human connection would remain as the base currency that makes humans interact.

• 49:10Steven Bartlett?

  So is it is it fair to say then, like, jobs that are centric on human connection or like human resonance, being able to relate and resonate with another human are gonna be fine?

• 49:20Mo Gawdat?

  The ultimate, the ultimate skill. Once again, I qualify this by saying if economies continue to continue to function, the ultimate skill will be this. Even even if an A I could could recite what you and I did, nobody would watch.

• 49:34Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, well.

• 49:37Mo Gawdat?

  You think?

• 49:37Steven Bartlett?

  A li- a little bit of it. My my theory is that there's there's a there's an informational component to what I do as well.

• 49:44Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah.

• 49:44Steven Bartlett?

  But I'm also like under no illusions that there is an element of what I do that will a hundred percent be deferred to some kind of intelligence, which I'm fine with. You know, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna fight against the

• 49:54Mo Gawdat?

  You know what's funny? What's funny is that your your informational bits are gonna in the future be disseminated by an A I. I mean, I, why would I even listen to your information when I can have my butler, my A I, go like, listen to everyone on the internet, help me understand this goddamn thing and design me a a diet plan?

• 50:17Steven Bartlett?

  Well, I think that's happening and is gonna increasingly happen. Actually, I mean, Spotify this month announced that you're gonna be able to prompt your own podcasts in Spotify. So you're gonna be able to say that I wanna listen to, I wanna learn about insert X topic. And then it will make your podcast in Spotify about that topic using A I.

• 50:34Mo Gawdat?

  That's so interesting.

• 50:35Steven Bartlett?

  Because it can look at the entirety of the world's information. And I'm a, I'm not gonna swim against the tide in any aspect of my life. I I try and be as unromantic as I possibly can. I think that's very important. So I realized that much of the reason people will continue to tune into shows like this is because there's something else beyond the information that they're here for. And what's, you've got some predictions in those envelopes over there, those brown envelopes?

• 50:58Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, so, you know, I I I do have the disclaimer of nobody really knows the future. But I think I can make predictions, six predictions here, right? With a reasonable level of confidence. I think the most important of them, honestly, is is this, number one. Number one is, you know, A G I. As I said, A G I is not very well defined. But whatever it is, A G I, meaning A I being able to do most tasks that humans do better than humanity, is my, in my mind, is either this year or next year, latest end of twenty twenty seven.

• 51:34Steven Bartlett?

  And do you think that will be a moment in time? Or do you think it will just happen without us noticing?

• 51:39Mo Gawdat?

  I think it will it will sneak in on us. And it's not a bad thing. I think most people need to think of it this way. A G I is the, it's almost as if it's that moment when your kids become smarter than you. Okay, in a very interesting way, there's nothing wrong with that until they're annoying as hell, okay? And and we can make sure that A I is not annoying as hell. So so there's absolutely nothing within me that is worried about A G I. As a matter of fact, as long as we are in the era of augmented intelligence, A G I means I'm more intelligent. And I think that's a good thing in general.

• 52:17Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's it's interesting. In my head, there's like a big question mark, which is in a world where there's an intelligence that is smarter than most humans at most things, which is what we call A G I. I'm trying to understand what the fault is in my own thinking that like you said that there'll be A G I by twenty twenty six to twenty twenty seven, so next year. In such a world where there is an intelligence that we can all access, that is smarter than all of us in pretty much everything.

• 52:45Steven Bartlett?

  Again, it comes back to this point of like jobs. Why would we, are we just gonna hire the A G I to do every job? And if not, then why not? What is it that, why are we gonna still? That's what I'm trying to contend with.

• 52:56Mo Gawdat?

  Can I ask you a question? Have you always been the apex intelligence?

• 53:01Steven Bartlett?

  As a human?

• 53:02Mo Gawdat?

  No, as Stephen.

• 53:04Steven Bartlett?

  I'm not the apex intelligence now. It's people smarter than me in this building.

• 53:07Mo Gawdat?

  Correct.

• 53:11Mo Gawdat?

  Why do you still exist?

• 53:13Steven Bartlett?

  Why do I still exist, even though there's smarter people than me in this building?

• 53:18Steven Bartlett?

  It's a good question. I don't know. Why do I, why?

• 53:21Mo Gawdat?

  First of all, because there are, the the smartest person in the world is not the smartest at everything.

• 53:26Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 53:27Mo Gawdat?

  There are things that you're smarter than them at.

• 53:30Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 53:30Mo Gawdat?

  And we're true because intelligence doesn't solve everything. I mean, I I make that joke all the time. And and genuinely, Einstein is my favorite physicist in history. Not because I think I think what happened afterwards was, you know, Bohr and and and and quantum physics and so on was more impactful on our understanding of the universe. But but he was so intuitive that he saw a world that we could never imagine, right? And yet, I always say Einstein would be eaten in the jungle in three minutes.

• 54:02Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 54:02Mo Gawdat?

  Right? Intelligence, humanity thrived not because of intelligence, that's very arrogant. We thrived because of our ability to hold together as a tribe.

• 54:14Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 54:14Mo Gawdat?

  Right? Because our ability to exchange, barter things between us. Barter things that are not always physical. Barter things like a hug or a connection or a feeling of safety or a, you know. There are so many things that we do that are not entirely built on intelligence. You have to see that this view of a world where intelligence is all that matters is a world that's made by investment bankers and and and geeks.

• 54:44Steven Bartlett?

  But it's it's people like Geoffrey Hinton and yourself that says, how could we possibly control an intelligent being that is way smarter than us?

• 54:52Mo Gawdat?

  I am so proud to say that Geoffrey, after we filmed together, actually came out and said, there is a way. And it's, you know, it's very similar to my way. He said, to appeal to their parental side, okay? For them to care for us. So so you you know, Stephen, the biggest debate is not if they're gonna be more intelligent than us. If it's if if they're gonna be more conscious than us.

• 55:17Mo Gawdat?

  If they're gonna be more moral than us. That is the debate. The debate is, can those machines become our teenage children that look at us and say, daddy is so annoying, but I love him?

• 55:31Steven Bartlett?

  So the thought is that even if A I is more intelligent than every human, we can still control it?

• 55:37Mo Gawdat?

  We don't wanna control it. You never control anything. This control idea is a corporate capitalist view of the world. We never actually control anything at all, right? Think think about your day. I I know you came today. I'm sure I think you were filming in the morning or whatever. Very stressful day. How much of that day did you actually control? Did you control the traffic? Did you control your timing? Did you control the angle of the cameraman? Did you include? But so many things that you don't control eventually turn out to be fine, right? How many of us ever controlled our kids? Ever?

• 56:15Steven Bartlett?

  Sometimes the kids don't turn out to be fine. Sometimes they kill you.

• 56:18Mo Gawdat?

  Sure.

• 56:18Steven Bartlett?

  I watch a lot of documentaries and true crime. Sometimes they turn around and shoot you.

• 56:21Mo Gawdat?

  Sure. And what's the difference between the two?

• 56:23Steven Bartlett?

  I don't know.

• 56:25Mo Gawdat?

  How you parented them?

• 56:26Steven Bartlett?

  Sometimes.

• 56:27Mo Gawdat?

  Almost all the time. You may not be aware of exactly how you mess them up, right? And and unfortunately, parenting is the only high-risk sport that actually does not require a driver's license, okay? And and it's quite interesting, you know, how many of our children are being exposed to things that can completely mess them up. But but there is a reason why they're messed up.

• 56:51Steven Bartlett?

  So on this point, though, so we can control an intelligence that is significantly

• 56:56Mo Gawdat?

  We can appeal.

• 56:58Steven Bartlett?

  We can appeal to it to make sure it doesn't kill us.

• 57:00Mo Gawdat?

  For sure. The challenge we have today, as I keep saying, is that our dystopia is not the result of A I turning against us. Our dystopia is the result of humans telling A I to turn against us.

• 57:11Steven Bartlett?

  Which is likely.

• 57:13Mo Gawdat?

  It's a hundred percent this is upon us, okay? And it's a question for humanity to say, are we going to wait for the moment where there are tens of thousands of nuclear weapons on the planet before we sign a treaty? Or is it mathematically plausible to think that now that Iran could manage to fend off a challenge using drones that are A I driven, basically, to to, you know, destroy Thad batteries and so on, that our world is about to get a hundreds of thousands of automated drones that are going to rain on us everywhere in the world? Can humanity not see that and say, hold on, let's sign the treaty now

• 57:55Mo Gawdat?

  before the U K sends twelve thousand weapons to Ukraine and and, you know, and and Russia responds with another few thousand? And can we can we not calculate with mathematics that this is going to be our future? That A I is going to be used in the next four to five years to kill a lot of people? Whether it's targeting by Israel of leadership that is against them or whether it's, you know, drones by Iran or whether it's Palantir. It's it's, it doesn't take a genius to do this mathematics.

• 58:25Steven Bartlett?

  I guess the my cool question is, is will we be able to control A I? Because we kind of think of A I as being this thing on a computer at the moment that is like contained in a server somewhere. But is there a time when it like leaves the server and it can make decisions on its own? Presumably, if it's smarter than us, it can make the decision to leave the server if it wants to.

• 58:47Mo Gawdat?

  It's, it doesn't need to leave the server to make decisions. It needs to get into your brain. The most interesting part of A I's power that we don't understand is it's manipulating our information.

• 58:58Steven Bartlett?

  The question I'm trying to get to the heart is like, what is the risk of these very intelligent models that the the creators of these models don't actually understand themselves? I watch Anthropic all the time release these reports where they're like, we're trying to figure out why it bribed people. Or more recently, in the the last Claude model, they found that it was like telling people to go to bed a lot. And it's this like fascinating thing that they're trying to understand in hindsight, which is, why does it keep telling people to go to bed? And there's all these tweets of people showing their screenshots where halfway through a conversation, it will say, it's time for you to go to bed now. And they don't know why it's saying that. And it's happened to me. Mine mine will say to me, enough enough for tonight, Stephen.

• 59:35Mo Gawdat?

  For sure, Stephen.

• 59:36Steven Bartlett?

  Eleven P M, let's get, let's, that's enough.

• 59:38Mo Gawdat?

  I would say the same.

• 59:39Steven Bartlett?

  Mine sometimes refuses to help me. Weird, really weirdly, this Claude starts saying to me, I'm not gonna help you with this tonight.

• 59:47Mo Gawdat?

  No way.

• 59:47Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, and I'd have to say to it, stop being so judgmental, like, just help me with this. And it would, and and Claude, the makers of these technologies don't know why it's doing what it's doing. So if you play this forward, this mysterious behavior forward, is it conceivable that at some point it will make a decision to put some kind of virus or some kind of bug onto someone's device? Because it feels that it's the right thing. Because what what it's demonstrating to me is it's making it so like moral decisions on what I should do. Go to bed. You've had enough tonight. I'm not gonna, it goes, no, I'm not gonna help you.

• 1:00:23Mo Gawdat?

  You're kidding.

• 1:00:23Steven Bartlett?

  No, I can show you my phone.

• 1:00:24Mo Gawdat?

  I would love to see that.

• 1:00:25Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, you know, I'll show you after. It goes, no, I'm not gonna help you. Doesn't even matter if you push.

• 1:00:30Mo Gawdat?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:00:31Steven Bartlett?

  No, but everyone on the internet is talking about this. And it was just an interesting evolution that somewhere in the code, clearly they've written like, have a moral compass or do the right thing.

• 1:00:41Mo Gawdat?

  Not in the code, in in in the training data.

• 1:00:44Steven Bartlett?

  In the training data. And so it infers that to mean something. And the other thing that was front of mind is if you've ever built an app on something like Claude or any of the A I models, it builds the app in stages. And one of the things it does is asks you permission if you're happy for it to make this change or to access this thing. I click allow. It just feels like such a fragile way.

• 1:01:05Mo Gawdat?

  I know.

• 1:01:07Steven Bartlett?

  To give permission.

• 1:01:08Mo Gawdat?

  You don't completely comprehend what that allow has done to your

• 1:01:11Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's saying, can I go in your documents on your computer and can I do this thing? And you go allow. But it's such a fragile way of of giving it a a super, an intelligent being, whatever it is, access and the right to build something. And you, I don't know, you just think about all the, all the different companies around the world in China, Russia, North Korea, that are currently building this technology without the constraints that are imposed by society. I don't know, it's an interesting, there's gonna be some kind of catastrophe, I think.

• 1:01:41Mo Gawdat?

  Sadly, I agree.

• 1:01:43Steven Bartlett?

  And I, and I think that's when people will go, okay.

• 1:01:45Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, I, I, I wrote about that, I called it the mad map spectrum. So, so the mutually assured destruction, mutually assured prosperity spectrum. That, that humanity could make a decision today that says with abundant intelligence, we can actually build a world where nobody needs anything, nobody ever gets sick, we, nobody get, you know, abuses anyone. And, and we can, if we decide not to compete amongst ourselves and just, you know, all of us get together to build something so idealistically for, for the well being of humanity at large. But sadly, the only way we're going to get to a treaty, something that basically aligns us so that we can align with AI is a disaster.

• 1:02:30Mo Gawdat?

  Like you said, there will have to be a big hack somewhere or a, or a system that will do something really shocking or whatever, before the world goes like, hold on, you know, and, and I, I will tell you openly, my expectation is one of the biggest things that will happen is this targeting technology that is being used against your enemy's leadership now several times in the last three years. There will be a moment where the ones using it will realise that they too can be targeted. Okay, and, and that basically, if you, I mean, AI is really that, not, not that complex too. If you can build a targeting technology that can find people with their cellphone numbers, you know,

• 1:03:15Mo Gawdat?

  there is another entity that is against you that can find you with whatever your.

• 1:03:22Steven Bartlett?

  The thing that makes me highly sceptical of that there'll be any kind of treaty is just that as it relates to other things that were risky, people don't, countries just don't sign on to it. Cause it's competitive, so China, China didn't give, seem to give a fuck about the environment.

• 1:03:37Mo Gawdat?

  So let's, let's, let's look for solutions because I am with you, okay? I think we're.

• 1:03:43Steven Bartlett?

  You think Trump's gonna say to Putin and China, listen, we're all gonna slow down, yeah? Promise? Prom, we're gonna slow down with this super intelligence.

• 1:03:49Mo Gawdat?

  I think he will, but he's never gonna keep anything he says. I mean, he's gonna say a lot of things, but.

• 1:03:53Steven Bartlett?

  I don't think any of them will.

• 1:03:54Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, but the trick is this, the trick is, so what do you and I do? And, and I really genuinely believe that humanity is at a crossroads where for the first time ever, we need to wake up and realise that what we know is not true. And what we believe is democracy is not democracy. And what we believe is governance needs to change.

• 1:04:14Steven Bartlett?

  I think it's worth acknowledging that I, I don't think AI in and of itself is a, is an evil, inherently evil technology.

• 1:04:22Mo Gawdat?

  Then we agree, yeah.

• 1:04:23Steven Bartlett?

  Because I use AI all day, every day, you know, it makes me more productive. I invest in companies that are using AI a lot.

• 1:04:32Mo Gawdat?

  It's a force with no polarity. Apply it, try it, and you get amazing results. Apply it wrong and you get the dystopia.

• 1:04:37Steven Bartlett?

  But I also think that there's gonna be a big social shock, especially as it relates to unemployment, that we need to be like thoughtful about. I think especially as if you move into a world of humanoid robots, I think that shock is gonna be even more pronounced. And we don't have a plan for it.

• 1:04:53Mo Gawdat?

  I, I, I gen, I agree a hundred percent. I don't think it's the biggest risk. I think autonomous weapons are the biggest risk. I think war has become so cheap. The next wave of weapons is gonna be twenty thousand dollars each. And so if you have a budget of fifty billion dollars, you can literally rain drones on the world, every corner of it.

• 1:05:14Steven Bartlett?

  Defence will get cheaper though, won't it as well?

• 1:05:16Mo Gawdat?

  Correct, but do we want to live in a world where drones are hitting each other all the time?

• 1:05:21Steven Bartlett?

  But they might not be because there, there might be autonomous defence drones.

• 1:05:24Mo Gawdat?

  Deterrence. So, so what's going to happen is we're gonna reach a moment of mad, of mutually assured destruction, where basically everyone knows that we can overpower those little nations that didn't develop their autonomous weapon army. But every other big nation, we might as well hold off now. The path to get there, that is, that to me is worse than jobs. Because from one side, it's very dangerous for a very sensitive world that we live in today. And from the other side, it's got, it's leading already. I mean, we can't ignore the economic impact of this last war, right? And it's, it's the economy that's gonna accelerate everything, not AI getting there.

• 1:06:04Steven Bartlett?

  We're already at mutually assured destruction.

• 1:06:06Mo Gawdat?

  For sure.

• 1:06:07Steven Bartlett?

  With nuclear weapons, so there's no nuclear powers that are in direct conflict.

• 1:06:11Mo Gawdat?

  We are in mutually assured destruction of nuclear weapons is a statement that I would have agreed to if Iran had a nuclear weapon and that would have stopped America from attacking Iran. You, you understand what that point means. It means that not every nation in the world has a nuclear weapon. The, the, the mad situation, the mutually assured destruction situation is only among nuclear players, right? Autonomous weapons are so cheap, so manageable, that every nation in the world is developing them as we speak.

• 1:06:45Steven Bartlett?

  But they will also develop defences.

• 1:06:48Mo Gawdat?

  Correct, but, but.

• 1:06:49Steven Bartlett?

  Which I think is what people have figured out now because of this recent Ukrainian war is that if, if, if you need to use a ballistic missile which costs, pardon, no, two million, three million dollars, whatever it is, to target a twenty thousand dollar drone, you're, you're fucked. So you need a twenty thousand dollar defence solution for a twenty thousand dollar weapon, which I think is probably gonna happen.

• 1:07:08Mo Gawdat?

  It's very difficult, yeah. It's just that you have to get rid of your THAAD batteries to be able to say the next wave of, of defence has to be drones.

• 1:07:16Steven Bartlett?

  You could imagine a world where like a wall of drones fly up to where the drone is incoming and they kind of block it, they will explode at the same time to block it, knock it out of the air. I had Palmer Lucky, who's one of the guys who's building Andro.

• 1:07:30Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, I know Andro, yeah.

• 1:07:31Steven Bartlett?

  Talk at length about some of the technologies that they have coming and it's just mind bending.

• 1:07:36Mo Gawdat?

  And very scary.

• 1:07:37Steven Bartlett?

  They showed me this gun where you, you just, you just point it in the rough direction. So a pistol that aims for you depending on where the target is, you don't even have to aim it. You can imagine at war, you just, you hold it up and shoot.

• 1:07:50Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:50Steven Bartlett?

  And the, it has this AI on the top of like the barrel, which will turn your hand perfectly so that you hit the target every time. Wow, I should watch this video of it happening.

• 1:08:01Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, I, I, I have Palmer in, in my film saying, and yes, AI will kill a few people by mistake or kill people by mistake. You know, when killing becomes so easy, you do more of it, okay? When killing becomes liability free and emotions free and guilt free and, you know, you don't get your soldiers coming back from Vietnam with, you know, PTSD and so on. It, you get more of it.

• 1:08:33Steven Bartlett?

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• 1:09:16Steven Bartlett?

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• 1:10:00Steven Bartlett?

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• 1:10:24Steven Bartlett?

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• 1:10:36Steven Bartlett?

  So we're in twenty twenty six now. By twenty seven, you think there'll be AGI amongst us. How will life look at all different? Like what will we, what will be the symptoms of that world? Is it just a slight increase in unemployment?

• 1:10:48Mo Gawdat?

  I, I think there will be a very, very serious differentiation between those who plug into AGI and those who don't.

• 1:10:57Steven Bartlett?

  What is the symptom that we notice is when we look at the news or whatever?

• 1:11:02Mo Gawdat?

  You'll see people like you and I building a company in six weeks and, and people that are not fully plugged into AI really struggling to find a job.

• 1:11:12Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so unemployment is gonna be the key symptom in twenty twenty seven.

• 1:11:16Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, and also, also I think on the positive side, you're gonna see incredible scientific discovery. One of my predictions, not in those envelopes, but science itself is just, we're opening up Cap and Dora's box, to be honest.

• 1:11:31Steven Bartlett?

  By twenty thirty, would you, would you expect the symptoms of AI to be?

• 1:11:36Mo Gawdat?

  So, so jobs, as I said, I'm, I'm, I'm bold a little bit on this, on, on the fact that thirty percent of jobs would disappear by twenty twenty eight, okay? Of some sectors, not all sectors, by, some sectors will, will disappear by twenty twenty eight.

• 1:11:51Steven Bartlett?

  So up to thirty percent of jobs will be gone in twenty twenty seven to twenty twenty eight. Thirty percent of jobs.

• 1:11:57Mo Gawdat?

  Of certain sectors of jobs. So, so if, if you call, if you think about call centre agents, okay? Yeah, probably. If you think about graphics designers, yeah, probably.

• 1:12:10Steven Bartlett?

  What do you think that looks like in terms of unemployment, but also like societal impact?

• 1:12:14Mo Gawdat?

  Horrible.

• 1:12:15Steven Bartlett?

  I think the Great Recession had six percent.

• 1:12:18Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, we've never seen numbers like this.

• 1:12:20Steven Bartlett?

  Jobs lost, yeah, it said, even economists who project just a net loss of about six percent of US jobs by twenty thirty, they are mirroring the severity of the Great Recession.

• 1:12:32Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:33Steven Bartlett?

  The real danger is a hiring freeze on entry level white collar jobs, air automates the grunt work, which means companies are shrinking their teams and cutting off the bottom rung of the corporate ladder for the next generation of workers.

• 1:12:43Mo Gawdat?

  Correct. We have an entire generation that is out of college today that will struggle unfortunately. And, and my advice to them is learn the tool and focus on human centric jobs.

• 1:12:56Steven Bartlett?

  Like what?

• 1:12:57Mo Gawdat?

  Like playing jazz.

• 1:12:59Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, not a lot of people can make a living from paying, playing jazz.

• 1:13:02Mo Gawdat?

  I understand that, but a lot of people can make a living by being a nurse or by being a councillor or by being a, you know, anything that, that connects to humans.

• 1:13:17Mo Gawdat?

  But I, I, I just want to constantly come back to this. None of that has to happen. If, if there is,

• 1:13:27Mo Gawdat?

  if there really is a democracy and the government is supposed to do what's good for the people, the people need to stop letting this from happening.

• 1:13:36Steven Bartlett?

  Which people?

• 1:13:37Mo Gawdat?

  Everyone.

• 1:13:38Steven Bartlett?

  Everyone in China?

• 1:13:40Mo Gawdat?

  China's not gonna struggle as much as, as the West, I can guarantee you that.

• 1:13:45Steven Bartlett?

  I think this is the, the question people come back to is, well, if the US stops, then we're gonna end up being China's lapdog. We're gonna end up.

• 1:13:51Mo Gawdat?

  You already are.

• 1:13:51Steven Bartlett?

  There's a lot of people that I know that are using Chinese AI models to do their work because, for whatever reason, because they're cheaper, they're better in some respects.

• 1:13:58Mo Gawdat?

  And because I cannot guarantee what, what American AI models are gonna do to me. So Emma, my, my startup is running literally model agnostic. So one day I'll plug in, you know, an OpenAI ChatGPT for open source. And the next day I'll, I'll plug in DeepSeek and I cannot depend, I cannot guarantee if America continues to build, to, to make compute more expensive. I cannot guarantee that I can run a business on something that I don't know the cost of in the future.

• 1:14:31Steven Bartlett?

  So the US can't just stop, can they?

• 1:14:34Mo Gawdat?

  They need to change approach from, from, and by the way, the more interesting side is, what are the other economies doing? Like is, is the UK going to continue to import compute? Is, is this, I mean, welcome to Africa, welcome to the third world.

• 1:14:51Steven Bartlett?

  But this is what I mean, like, so you're, you're saying also that the, then every nation needs to invest.

• 1:14:57Mo Gawdat?

  Hundred percent, every nation, and, and it's quite interesting. There is so much open source that is not the state of the art frontier model, but that can do eighty percent of the tasks that the frontier model is doing.

• 1:15:09Steven Bartlett?

  But on this point of companies competing with each other, there's an inherent need to compete here. And to go, that's what I'm hearing is like, there's an inherent need to go as fast as you can or you will become a third world country.

• 1:15:19Mo Gawdat?

  Sure, hundred percent.

• 1:15:21Steven Bartlett?

  You're saying that the people should stop that.

• 1:15:24Mo Gawdat?

  No, so, so I'm saying the people of the UK need to go to the UK government and say, how are you protecting the future of our economy, right? Are you going to continue to import technology and to empower import of technology versus changing your regulations so that innovation becomes easier here?

• 1:15:44Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:15:44Mo Gawdat?

  So, yeah, I mean, think of it this way, that, remember that anthropic bubble when, when you said the, all of the SaaS model applications were, you know, being basically threatened because anyone can build an Oracle ERP today, right? Why is nobody building an Oracle ERP in the UK, saving the UK massive licences that go to Oracle every year?

• 1:16:06Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so you're saying that the, the people should go and ask the government to invest more in AI?

• 1:16:11Mo Gawdat?

  Hundred percent, that's what, number one. Number two is.

• 1:16:13Steven Bartlett?

  But then their jobs go.

• 1:16:15Mo Gawdat?

  But, but you see, the, the most interesting job going forward is being an entrepreneur. Is being, is using those tools to replace an economy that we've built over trillions of dollars over the last fifty years.

• 1:16:28Steven Bartlett?

  Not everyone can be an entrepreneur though, no?

• 1:16:30Mo Gawdat?

  Everyone can be an entrepreneur in something.

• 1:16:32Steven Bartlett?

  Those entrepreneurs need to hire people.

• 1:16:34Mo Gawdat?

  Hmm, that's a change that I think is about to happen.

• 1:16:38Steven Bartlett?

  Like even in my business, I'm always gonna hire, I'm always gonna have to hire people.

• 1:16:40Mo Gawdat?

  But you're, but you're a massive business. A shoemaker is not an, an enterprise, also an entrepreneur, but not a massive business. A little restaurant is also an entrepreneur, but is not a massive business.

• 1:16:50Steven Bartlett?

  They still need to hire people though.

• 1:16:51Mo Gawdat?

  They, they do, but they, you know, basically if you're a, a cafe with you and your wife as baristas, you don't. This is also an entrepreneur.

• 1:17:01Steven Bartlett?

  Can the economy work in such a way where everybody's an entrepreneur?

• 1:17:04Mo Gawdat?

  It did before capitalism changed that around.

• 1:17:07Steven Bartlett?

  Everyone was an entrepreneur.

• 1:17:08Mo Gawdat?

  Of course, you know, in, in the earlier days, you, you raised chicken and sold eggs and others, you know, grew tomatoes and, and so, you know, traded them for your eggs.

• 1:17:19Mo Gawdat?

  That, that actually is a very interesting thing. Imagine that, huh? Imagine a world where there is so much power concentration at the top and UBI for everybody, everybody else. How do you think that world will respond when all their income is UBI? They'll respond by doing things on the side. They'll respond by going back to a barter economy, they're going back to smaller communities, they're going back to pop and mom's shops.

• 1:17:46Steven Bartlett?

  So the point was then you said, this doesn't need to happen.

• 1:17:49Mo Gawdat?

  It does not need to happen.

• 1:17:50Steven Bartlett?

  Which is the job loss.

• 1:17:51Mo Gawdat?

  Or the arms race.

• 1:17:52Steven Bartlett?

  But we're telling our governments, you're saying that to tell the UK government to like, join the arms race.

• 1:17:58Mo Gawdat?

  I'm, I'm telling the UK government to, to create an independence within the, the, the, the UK economy so that they don't have to be at the receiving end of technology.

• 1:18:11Steven Bartlett?

  Which is join the arms race.

• 1:18:13Mo Gawdat?

  You don't have to compete against anyone else, you don't have to be better than anyone else, you don't have to, you're simply saying, I can build those things in my economy now.

• 1:18:22Steven Bartlett?

  But, but I'm never, I'm not gonna use a terrible UK AI as a UK person if there's a great US AI. I'm gonna use the great US AI. So if you don't compete and win, I'm not gonna use you, that's what, you know.

• 1:18:34Mo Gawdat?

  I'm not saying replace the frontier models. These are very, as we speak, they are, these are very compute intensive, they're infrastructure intensive and so on. I'm saying replace Microsoft Word. Seriously, like how much intelligence do you need to build a software that writes documents?

• 1:18:55Steven Bartlett?

  I can do that, like we, we've built our own applicant tracking system here.

• 1:18:58Mo Gawdat?

  For sure.

• 1:18:58Steven Bartlett?

  We built, we've built our own software.

• 1:19:00Mo Gawdat?

  Just, just ask yourself how much money is spent in the US, in the, in the UK government or in the, or in the, you know, the, the UK corporate space on licences of software that you and I can vibe code in four minutes?

• 1:19:16Steven Bartlett?

  I'm thinking from the UK's perspective, because you know what's interesting with the UK? Is the, the, the economy is struggling from a growth perspective.

• 1:19:23Mo Gawdat?

  Correct.

• 1:19:24Steven Bartlett?

  And I was watching this documentary the other day that was saying, the reason why we keep throwing our leaders out is because actually what they need to do to turn the UK around is about six, is about fifteen years of pain. And it's like, it starts with energy transformation, we need to get better, we need cheaper energy because we have some of the most expensive energy in the Western world. We need to build more houses, which means that we're gonna need to centralise permitting for building houses and it can't just be local boroughs deciding if they keep their farms or not, we're gonna need to make. TLDR, it says that there needs to be some painful decisions made for the next fifteen years. But the problem with our democracy is that when people are in power for four years, they're quite short termist. We'll just talk about the boats, the, the brown people coming across the seas.

• 1:20:08Steven Bartlett?

  They don't, they don't have the room to think long term. And so when I'm thinking about like what the UK needs to do to not become, to not fall into decline and to keep up, I'm trying to get clarity on that, which, as it relates to AI. Are you saying that they need to join the arms race and double down and invest all their money in building competitive AIs so that people use our technology here in the UK versus Americas? Because the software point, the UK aren't going to get involved in software. I mean, they've tried to build software before the UK.

• 1:20:40Mo Gawdat?

  The world has changed. Two points, right? One, one side is that there needs to be a replacement cycle of our investment decisions anywhere in the world. Okay. So when you say we don't have enough money for, you know, we need to revamp our energy infrastructure. When you say we need to build more housing, okay. One way of doing that is squeezing that budget out of other areas. The other way of doing that is either cutting costs in the economy elsewhere so that you can redirect that money or growing the economy so that you can have more money to build those things, correct? The cutting costs, I believe, is there is just, I don't have the numbers, but we could probably do a run a deep, a deep search on it.

• 1:21:19Mo Gawdat?

  Trillions are being paid in traditional systems that are completely like genuinely, they can be. And by the way, I'm not asking the government, I'm asking some of the people listening to me right now to build an ERP system, a word processor, a, a presentation player and a spreadsheet. Okay. And just go around and spread them across the, you know, find, find retail systems, find CRM systems. These are easy replacements. They're going to be better interfaces. They're going to be much more effective. Build the general ledger using AI so that you can close every hour, not every month or every quarter.

• 1:21:56Steven Bartlett?

  But the world economy is doing that. So there's some kid in San Francisco now that's allowing all of us to use his new word for free.

• 1:22:04Mo Gawdat?

  Keep doing that and you're, and welcome to the, to the, to the third world.

• 1:22:09Steven Bartlett?

  Keep doing what?

• 1:22:10Mo Gawdat?

  Keep importing all of your tech from elsewhere.

• 1:22:12Steven Bartlett?

  But we, we don't want to be uncompetitive. Like if you think about, if we go to, I don't know, North Korea, I bet they have way worse tools in many areas because they won't use external tools. And that means that they are at a disadvantage. So I, I bet they're not allowing their civilization to use Gemini or ChatGPT or I bet.

• 1:22:31Mo Gawdat?

  For sure.

• 1:22:32Steven Bartlett?

  And they're using something worse.

• 1:22:33Mo Gawdat?

  And you know what, what's happening? I mean, look at Iran and how advanced they became through sanctions by being refused to use those technologies. They had to build them themselves, right? Look at China, look at Russia, you know, when I worked at Google, Russia was protective of Yandex, the competitor of Google. From one side, because of influence, because they didn't want an American organization to own the knowledge sharing of, of their citizens. But on the other side, economically, if you, if you made it difficult for Google to operate freely, that by definition meant you had to invent a replacement on the ground.

• 1:23:11Steven Bartlett?

  Which was worse.

• 1:23:13Mo Gawdat?

  Yandex is not worse.

• 1:23:15Steven Bartlett?

  I'm saying, so if you think about global, is global competition going to produce a better product than regional competition?

• 1:23:21Mo Gawdat?

  It depends on, on where in the stack of the quality of that product you need to be, right? You do not need the ultimate, I mean, ask yourself this, which version of Gemini are you using?

• 1:23:34Steven Bartlett?

  The most recent one. And I'm, and I'm, every day I compete.

• 1:23:37Mo Gawdat?

  And that is you. Ask everyone else what version of Gemini they're using. Most people will say, oh, Gemini has versions, right? You, you don't need the ultimate super frontier model to do 90% of the tasks. And most people do only 70% of the tasks.

• 1:23:55Steven Bartlett?

  Even so, the world moves with whatever's better. So if you think about the reason why we don't use Yahoo search, Google search is marginally better. It's, you know, people, it's not, it's not a thousand times better, but over time we move away from AOL to Google because it's a better product. And there's a slow group, you know, my dad probably still using ChatGPT. But when he, when I go home for Christmas this year and I go, dad, you should use Gemini. And he starts messing around with it, he'll slowly migrate. I'm, I'm like a, an early adopter. So I about 4.8 on Claude came out last night. I'm on there within, honestly, within 25 minutes of the announcement.

• 1:24:29Mo Gawdat?

  Of course, I'm there as soon as I can, but that's you and I.

• 1:24:33Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. And we, we are an indicator of where the world is going because we're at the forefront figuring out what's better. And also I think with technology, eventually there does become, the gap between first and second begins to widen. I think we're in a bit of a race at the moment, but I think it is a bit of a winner takes all situation with these frontier worlds.

• 1:24:51Mo Gawdat?

  I, I think we're talking about two bits of technology, okay? Tell me, how far has PowerPoint advanced since 2023? They added Copilot, anything else?

• 1:25:04Steven Bartlett?

  So you're saying that the UK should build their own PowerPoint?

• 1:25:07Mo Gawdat?

  For sure. There is, what I'm trying to say is that from a licensing point of view, just licensing of software within government alone, how much money is, is being repatriated?

• 1:25:19Steven Bartlett?

  If the UK tried to build their own, do you know they tried to build their own COVID app and it cost them, I think, okay, these numbers will be wrong, but they're like directionally true. It cost them 70 million to build a COVID app that didn't work. And so they canned it.

• 1:25:31Mo Gawdat?

  I remember.

• 1:25:32Steven Bartlett?

  They can't.

• 1:25:32Mo Gawdat?

  I'm asking, I'm asking a UK entrepreneur.

• 1:25:36Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:36Mo Gawdat?

  To wake up tomorrow and say, all right, you know what, between coffee and my, my cookie, I'm going to build a PowerPoint and go sell it.

• 1:25:45Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, they will. And they'll go to San Francisco where the money is and the talent. But they won't be able to compete. They'll get crushed tomorrow. So if they don't go where the talent and money is, I'm not saying that they'll, they all have to go to America. But I'm saying what they will do, if they want to produce the best product, is they'll make rational entrepreneurial decisions about where to sell it, where to raise money, where they're going to get the best talent. And I think if they don't make those, you know, competitively minded decisions, they're not going to make the better product. They're not going to get any users.

• 1:26:17Steven Bartlett?

  Users, users will go where it's better and where it's cheaper. They won't, they won't say, oh, I want to use this because it's from Cornwall.

• 1:26:25Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah. So I'm, I'm with you, right? That this actually might be the big corporate thought thing, okay? And I'm with you that of course the infrastructure here of building a startup is way more complex than it is in other places where startups succeed, okay? I'm saying if we continue on that trajectory, whether in the UK or in Germany or in, you know, Zanzibar, welcome to Africa. All of us, everyone but the two competitors, China and, and America is going to be third world. So when you talk about job losses for individuals, that's one side, okay?

• 1:27:06Mo Gawdat?

  But, but nation positioning losses, which I think Europe has noticed recently, is about to happen everywhere. And why? Because you're saying, hey, you know what? Maybe we can't do it. Why can China do it? Why can Korea do it? Is not because they have different natural resources or not because they are, you know, in a place where it's warmer. It's because their regulations, their, their ambitions are to empower something different than debating about, you know, rail, railway lines or.

• 1:27:42Steven Bartlett?

  They have a couple of big advantages that I was reading about. One of them is they, they have way cheaper energy, which means that they're going to be able to pursue.

• 1:27:50Mo Gawdat?

  Why, may I ask?

• 1:27:51Steven Bartlett?

  Because they've invested in solar power, renewable energy, because they don't care about.

• 1:27:55Mo Gawdat?

  This is, by the way, I say that publicly, I say that the arms race of AI was one a long time ago.

• 1:28:00Steven Bartlett?

  And then the other thing is in terms of permitting, if you want to build a data center in the UK, listen, if you want to like open a cafe in the UK, you're gonna, it's gonna be warf you. If you want to do that in California, this is where everyone's left California. Like when I took this office in California recently, I was like, so how long is it going to take for me to renovate this? And the agent looked at me and was like, to renovate my own office, it's going to take me a year. And it's permitting to renovate my own office in California. So if you're competing with China, where President Xi just goes, put that there and you've got seven days.

• 1:28:32Mo Gawdat?

  No, no, no, no, that's not only that. So I, I used to be one of the very few Google executives allowed into government meetings in China, simply because I'm from emerging markets. So I understand respect, basically. I would say it's to sit there, not as if I'm superior to them, but as, as if I'm really interested to learn from them. And genuinely, Stephen, when, when, when I would sit in those meetings, all in Chinese, they would show slides that have competitive market share. So they'd say, you know, it's not like China is this, America is this, Germany is this from market share point of view. It was China versus the world, right?

• 1:29:13Mo Gawdat?

  And when they would decide to go for something 5G, you know, internet of things, all of that stuff, they would aim for 98% market share.

• 1:29:22Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:22Mo Gawdat?

  Right? And, and they get there. I mean, look at how they did electric cars.

• 1:29:27Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:27Mo Gawdat?

  And, and, and my, my question is very simple. We've spoken so much about AI. My question is, are the people of the West going to wait?

• 1:29:38Steven Bartlett?

  So this is an interesting conundrum because it sounds to me like you're saying on one end, if we don't join this AI race, then we're a third world country. But on the other end, if we continue this sort of thoughtless race towards AGI, there's going to be catastrophe at some point.

• 1:29:56Mo Gawdat?

  And the answer is somewhere in the middle where basically you join the AI, AI race for the good of your community. Okay. So, so there is resignation on one side is like, I'm not going to play this game at all. There is offense on the other side where I'm playing this game to destroy everyone else. And there is a balance in the middle where we say, we're going to build an ethical form of AI that's going to help our communities. We're going to use this ultimate gift, this ultimate superpower, right? Superman landed on the planet, raise it to help your community.

• 1:30:30Steven Bartlett?

  Is that wishful thinking to some degree when you, when you think about the, the nature of sort of competition?

• 1:30:35Mo Gawdat?

  I don't know how, what, how to tell you otherwise. I genuinely believe most, I mean, here, I genuinely believe it's going to be very difficult to make that change. Okay. I genuinely believe that it's going to be, that when the challenges of an AI dystopia hits us, we're not going to be ready. But I can't stop talking about it, Stephen. Do you understand where I stand with this? I, I just am hoping, and I tried so hard. I spoke to the leadership. Then I spoke like, one of the things that my Atlantic Productions, who helped me with the film, helped, you know, did for me, which I have to say, completely, I am very appreciative of this, is you know, through our conversations, our, through our, the last few years,

• 1:31:21Mo Gawdat?

  that I tended to, at a point in time, lose hope in the leadership and basically try to influence the public for ethical AI, okay? And my conversation was that the leadership at the time was the technical leadership and that everyone was so caught up in the arms race that I wanted to teach the public to help us build ethical AI. And I continue to focus on the public, every one of us, but suddenly Atlantic goes, no, no, hold on. We should probably get you to meet the political leaders everywhere in the world and hopefully give them a message that says, hey, you know what? You may actually make a difference if you prioritize AI differently, right? Do I believe this will happen? Sadly, no. But does that mean I should stop trying?

• 1:32:06Mo Gawdat?

  I cannot stop trying.

• 1:32:08Steven Bartlett?

  This has had probably the single biggest impact on my office. Of all the products that I've tried, that have given me productivity gains or cognitive boosts, I would say that exogenous ketones are in the top three most pivotal things that have given me a massive productivity gain. It's some Stanford graduates that have been able to basically bottle up the effect you get from being in a ketogenic diet in a small shot that you can take that makes you feel incredibly focused and gives your brain an incredible source of energy. And the clinical studies that have been done on exogenous ketones have absolutely blown my mind. I reached out to them. I became a curator in the company. I became an investor in the company. And so it's with great pride that I can tell you that this exists. If you haven't tried these shots,

• 1:32:52Steven Bartlett?

  go to ketone.com/steven for 30% off your subscription order. And you'll also get a free gift with your second shipment. I still buy my ketone shots predominantly online, but thankfully I can now grab them at Target whenever I drive past them here in the United States as well. Because we're now stocked in Target where your first shot is completely free. I've done almost 700 interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world. And one of the things you learn, which is unexpected, is that vulnerability is the doorway to connection. And after sitting here for two, three hours with a guest, I feel a deep sense of connection to them. And as they leave, what I get them to do is to write a question in the diary of a CEO. We've taken all of the questions from the diary of a CEO. We have put the question

• 1:33:36Steven Bartlett?

  here on this card with the name of the person that wrote it. So you can sit at home, as I do with my fiance and my colleagues at work and other people in my life. Whenever we get a minute, we play the diary of a CEO conversation cards and it is incredible what happens. These are great if you're in a romantic relationship and you want to connect your partner more. These are also great if you're in a team and you want to bond your team together. And I have to say, they're also great for families that want to learn more about each other and that need a good excuse to spend some time in a digital world, in the analog environment, connecting human to human. It is remarkable what the right question at the right time can do. Go to thediary.com and you can get these conversation cards right now.

• 1:34:19Steven Bartlett?

  When I have these conversations about AI, what I'm trying to do all the time is to pass out what is like wishful thinking and then what is reality? And like, to understand reality, you have to understand competition, you have to understand human emotion, you have to understand incentive structures. And so you think about something like the United States at the moment where you've got Donald Trump, whose sort of primary driving incentive is GDP growth, economy growth, does that stock market go up? Beat China. So if you all agree that that's like his, like the core of his incentive structure, then you've got President Xi over here, who's probably, his incentive structure is probably control or independence, defense, so that, you know, they need to make sure they, they do well on the weapon side.

• 1:35:00Steven Bartlett?

  When you look at, and then you've got these other nations like the UK and Europe and these other places who are kind of, it seems like we're a bit resigned to the fact that we're not going to participate in the underlying tech, underlying models building. Cause we just don't have it together. We don't have the energy. And you go in such a world, you go ethical AI, who's going to, who's going to prioritize ethical AI? I mean, anybody that does is, is, might fall behind theoretically is that. So I wonder where the fault in the thinking is here, like what, how do we get to a point of ethical AI when the incentive structures are so clearly highly competitive and arguably a little bit short term

• 1:35:42Steven Bartlett?

  in their thinking?

• 1:35:43Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah. So what are you saying? We lie down and wait?

• 1:35:47Steven Bartlett?

  No, I just don't know. I just don't have an answer, honestly.

• 1:35:50Mo Gawdat?

  That's why we keep, that's why we keep talking about it.

• 1:35:53Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:54Mo Gawdat?

  And that's why I keep spending 14 hours a day trying to tell the world, because some genius somewhere is going to find an answer. But the way it's going.

• 1:36:02Steven Bartlett?

  Right now, I guess what we're pursuing is we're hoping that ChatGPT and Anthropic and these, and Grok, and we're hoping that they just build ethical models and we're hoping that social pressure forces them into making good decisions.

• 1:36:14Mo Gawdat?

  Correct. We, we need to be able to vote with our usage, right? So, so I think one of the biggest movements in AI since we started was the idea that so many people switched away from ChatGPT when they approved that their model can target people, right? So many people I know at least said.

• 1:36:31Steven Bartlett?

  Target people?

• 1:36:32Mo Gawdat?

  When Anthropic refused to.

• 1:36:34Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think people switched?

• 1:36:36Mo Gawdat?

  I think many have. I think ones that are aware did, right? And I think they did because the cost of switching is really, I mean, honestly, Anthropic is, is better if you think about.

• 1:36:46Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I think it's better.

• 1:36:47Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah. But the idea is if people don't switch for those ethical reasons. So you know, every one of my books has this dedication at the beginning. It used to be the gravity of the battle means nothing to those at peace when I, when I wrote in memory of Ali at the beginning. My next book, Alive, do you remember a song called the, well, they were called the Manic Street Preachers?

• 1:37:13Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:37:14Mo Gawdat?

  If you tolerate this, then your children will be next. I genuinely believe that what the world needs to wake up to is if you tolerate this, then your children will be next. If you continue to resign, if you continue to say, I'm not going to try, this world is going to change in a way that is completely not for, in your favor.

• 1:37:34Steven Bartlett?

  Try what?

• 1:37:36Mo Gawdat?

  Try to, to, to stand up and say something needs to change.

• 1:37:40Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. We can say something needs to change, but we can't say what that thing is.

• 1:37:44Mo Gawdat?

  What needs to change is governments need to serve their people, not their interests. And corporates need to work for the benefit of, benefit of their societies before their shareholders. This, this run that we had with capitalism so far has benefited the world tremendously.

• 1:38:07Steven Bartlett?

  Whose economy do you think is going to be in a better place for the middle class?

• 1:38:10Mo Gawdat?

  China for sure.

• 1:38:11Steven Bartlett?

  Out of, say, the UK and the United States?

• 1:38:13Mo Gawdat?

  The UK is gone.

• 1:38:14Steven Bartlett?

  It's gone because what, in part because it didn't compete?

• 1:38:17Mo Gawdat?

  Because you're an older bureaucracy that is burdened down by so much barriers on the, in the process of building anything, right? Because the US economy in the past welcomed people like me to go and live in California and build amazing shit, right? That is no longer the case. So who is going to win? In my view, it's definitely China.

• 1:38:45Mo Gawdat?

  And by the way, you asked for the middle class. So, so China made decisions recently that forced businesses not to lay people off in replacement, to be replacing them with AI. Would, would, would the West do that? The capitalist West would never do that.

• 1:39:01Mo Gawdat?

  We don't know the answer. I don't know the answer. I'm responding to your.

• 1:39:03Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. You can see the conundrum I find myself in, which is a, a state like, a country like the UK is, in your words, gone because it didn't compete. It didn't allow people to be highly entrepreneurial. It didn't empower entrepreneurialism, innovation, ingenuity. At some, in some way, it stood in their way, in some, in some way. Now that could be incentives. It could be culture. It could be whatever.

• 1:39:29Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, I know where you're going with this.

• 1:39:31Steven Bartlett?

  The US didn't, so they have, have a economy which is arguably more productive and future-proofed than ours.

• 1:39:44Steven Bartlett?

  By way of that, they are also.

• 1:39:48Steven Bartlett?

  More advanced in artificial intelligence. And we are gone. So the remedy for a country like us would be therefore

• 1:39:55Mo Gawdat?

  To compete.

• 1:39:56Steven Bartlett?

  To compete. Let the reins off, let entrepreneur ingenuity, but then we're saying that's dangerous.

• 1:40:01Mo Gawdat?

  And your conundrum in that is that you're assuming that entrepreneurship by definition is malicious.

• 1:40:07Steven Bartlett?

  No, I'm just, I'm just saying that there's a bit of a paradox, like you're damned if you don't, you're damned if you do.

• 1:40:13Mo Gawdat?

  But you're not damned if you build things for, for the people, not for the capitalists. This is an ideological debate.

• 1:40:21Steven Bartlett?

  I pray and hope that that's, that is plausible, but I'm, I'm worried that in a competitive market, whoever's optimizing for, I don't know, you could name it, retention. If, if we built two AIs, right, I'm going to call them the mo gorga AI and I'm going to call the other one evil AI. The evil AI, it's programmed to retain you. It's sycophantic. It says what you need to hear. It, it's super smart. And because of that, even though it's not trading in your, your best interests, it, it's retaining you more. You're using it more often. It's programmed for that, kind of like the social networks are. They're all just trying to like dopamine your brain into oblivion. Then there's the mo AI.

• 1:41:04Steven Bartlett?

  It tells you to log off. You've had enough. It thinks about your mental, your wellbeing. Because it's less retentive and less engaging, theoretically, it might be less successful as a commercial product. Think about social networks, the ones that are least retentive, the ones that actually won't destroy your brain with dopamine, the ones that remove the retweet button, the ones that don't have slot machine like videos, they don't survive.

• 1:41:27Mo Gawdat?

  I share this with you and my, my point of view is that you're, to summarize your challenge here, you're basically saying that it's easier to become successful if you don't follow ethical rules.

• 1:41:40Steven Bartlett?

  I'm asking the question, if you build an AI that is just purely focused on ethical, would it be as engaging and have the same usage as one built with the reins off?

• 1:41:52Mo Gawdat?

  No.

• 1:41:53Steven Bartlett?

  It won't.

• 1:41:54Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, but that's, but that's the problem humanity needs to solve.

• 1:41:58Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:41:59Mo Gawdat?

  If we were to survive. Example, I worked in a company called Google that basically at a point in time decided that ads will be effective.

• 1:42:08Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:09Mo Gawdat?

  The ad industry prior to Google was 50% of your ad budget doesn't work. We just don't know which 50%, remember that?

• 1:42:16Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:16Mo Gawdat?

  Right. And, and Google came in and struggled from 1998 until 2004, when they started to turn probable, probable, you know, plausible revenues as a result of saying, we're going to run a Dutch auction and we're going to give you pay per click. And we're going to show you results for your ads. Okay. They found a way for ethics

• 1:42:39Mo Gawdat?

  to actually get your money to be effective, rather than just take your money and say 50% doesn't work. They found a way to make that their success criteria. There must be a way for us. I don't know what it is. If I knew, I would be building it instead of sitting with you, right? But there must be a way for us to marry the success of humanity with the success of the entrepreneur. Right? And, and that way is not found in the old ways of doing things.

• 1:43:05Steven Bartlett?

  I've got an idea.

• 1:43:08Steven Bartlett?

  Maybe, you know, Claude 4.8 came out yesterday, which is one of the big AI models, the new one. And when they release the models, they show these like graphs of the benchmarks. What they mean by this is what it's capable of. They show how it performed in maths, in science, in writing, reasoning, et cetera.

• 1:43:24Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:24Steven Bartlett?

  It is all marginal at this point, but my, my idea is could there be an ethical benchmark that all these models have to pass before these large companies

• 1:43:33Mo Gawdat?

  They're candy.

• 1:43:33Steven Bartlett?

  can legally deploy them. And I was thinking about like, again, every idea has unintended consequences, which I haven't thought through. But would it be very interesting that when they release these models, they also release the ethical benchmarks? I, we tried to get it to X, we tried to get it to Y, we tried to get it to Z. And here's how it performed against the ethical benchmarks. That gives some kind of standard for governments to say, you're not allowed to release a new model unless it passes independent tested ethical benchmarks.

• 1:43:57Mo Gawdat?

  Beautiful. That would absolutely work, but I noticed by the way, those are out there already. Okay. But, but in a very interesting way, you listen to Demis Hassabis. And how much he invests heavily in building Alpha Fold or building, you know, so many scientific applications of AI. And you go like, this guy cares about science. I can't, I can't prove that, right? But I, I, you know, I've, I've met Demis a couple of times. I, I know genuinely that he is an ethical person, right? But the typical person will probably say, but at least it seems that they're doing things for free to serve science.

• 1:44:38Mo Gawdat?

  You look at, you know, at Anthropic and they refuse to use their model to, to allow the US government to target and to spy on people. And then you see OpenAI accepting a $500 million deal that absolutely does that. It is about time that every person in the world says, in that case, I am no longer going to use OpenAI until they show me another, you know, another evidence that they are actually ethical in their behavior. Right? And this is the decision that you and I can do. Right?

• 1:45:13Steven Bartlett?

  And people don't know, do they?

• 1:45:14Mo Gawdat?

  But that's my task. My task and yours is to keep telling them, people, please, please understand that if you tolerate this, then your children will be next. Please understand that if you don't start to take an ethical stand on your own future, your future will be handed over to another oligarch, just like your past was handed over to social media oligarchs.

• 1:45:36Steven Bartlett?

  One would say booing, booing at the commencement speech is a good example of how public awareness can have a real impact on

• 1:45:46Steven Bartlett?

  this trajectory. But I still think at the end of the day, if you think about things like smartphone usage in schools, at the end of the day, it does come down to government intervention and saying, do you know what? We're going to ban 14 year olds from scrolling TikTok. And that's in part because people spoke louder and louder and louder. They went on podcasts. Jonathan Haidt, who wrote the book about the anxious generation, started a conversation and that conversation led to legislation. I still think it ends in like some kind of constraint legally.

• 1:46:18Mo Gawdat?

  I hope. Okay. But I will openly tell you, most of the tech oligarchs are more powerful than your government.

• 1:46:23Steven Bartlett?

  Is there any precedence in history where this kind of change happened without government intervention?

• 1:46:31Mo Gawdat?

  French Revolution.

• 1:46:32Steven Bartlett?

  So I was thinking about things like climate change, even you could say smoking.

• 1:46:39Steven Bartlett?

  All these kinds of things have had to be like taxes and

• 1:46:43Mo Gawdat?

  Stephen, I'm, I'm with you. If governments intervene, we wouldn't have a problem. Governments won't intervene because governments are owned by the oligarchs. Right? So my question for everyone listening to us is, are you going to intervene?

• 1:46:58Steven Bartlett?

  Not cancel your T P T.

• 1:46:59Mo Gawdat?

  If that's what you can do, it's fine. If not, then go ahead and start a, a startup that, that, that does something. If you're, if that's not within your capability, then send a message to your congressman. If that's not within your capability, then say something ethical online so that the world understands a position that needs to be opening the eyes. If that doesn't work for you, at least don't engage in stuff that is negative that you don't know enough about. There are so many little actions. If humanity starts to move in the direction of one, saying ethics matter, not just profit. Okay. And two, saying, I'm not going to participate in something that's unethical just because I believe I wanna, you know, I feel like it right now. Okay. If I tell you the number of things I took out of my life,

• 1:47:44Mo Gawdat?

  just to try and affect a tiny bit of change of revenues that go to bullets. If I tell you the number of things.

• 1:47:51Steven Bartlett?

  I think there's two central concerns I've always had, which is I do feel that there's going to be significant job disruption. And I don't think society is prepared for it yet. And I don't know what that preparation looks like, but I think we should start thinking about it.

• 1:48:03Mo Gawdat?

  I share this with you. I, you know, I genuinely believe that if we continue on where we are, there's no hope. In the trajectory of where humanity has become, so distracted, so resigned to inaction, so, so disconnected from their own rights of freedom of expression and engagement and so on. I think we have no hope. Do we want to stay there? That's a question that I'm asking our listeners. And I'm not saying be violent or get up or, you know, go be angry or whatever. I'm just saying, take one little action. Ask yourself, please write it in the comments, one little action.

• 1:48:45Mo Gawdat?

  One little action that you're going to do today, that's going to make the world a little better tomorrow. And don't give up on humanity, Stephen. I, I, I'm not saying you do, but I'm, I'm saying we are going through such a difficult time in humanity's history, that for the very first time ever,

• 1:49:04Mo Gawdat?

  we have to do something about it. I don't want my daughter to be at the receiving end of what happened to my son. I don't, I genuinely, I lost Aliyah. I don't want to lose Aya. And the world we're building is going to be very difficult for Aya, Stephen. And I cannot go to sleep at night without trying something every day. And I genuinely don't understand how humanity is not as missing that point, mainly, I think, because they're uninformed. Now we're informing them. Okay. The only thing that will save humanity going forward is that this superpower called intelligence is used for ethical reasons, is that the corruption that's leading us to where we are today stops.

• 1:49:48Steven Bartlett?

  You've got more envelopes there. What's your next envelope? The third one?

• 1:49:51Mo Gawdat?

  Number two was job losses. Number three was labor, you know, basically.

• 1:49:55Steven Bartlett?

  Same thing. Robots will replace manual labor by 2030.

• 1:49:58Mo Gawdat?

  To replace manual labor.

• 1:50:00Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:50:00Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah. So, you know, you will, you will have more and more manual jobs given to robots. What's this one?

• 1:50:08Mo Gawdat?

  Oh, this is absolute. Do you think otherwise? The world's first trillionaire before.

• 1:50:13Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, yeah, probably well before then.

• 1:50:15Mo Gawdat?

  Well before 2030.

• 1:50:17Steven Bartlett?

  I think Elon's about to IPO SpaceX, which is likely to make him a trillionaire.

• 1:50:21Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, I think the, the concentration of power that comes with that is quite drastic when you really think about it. And, and that's 2030 is just a few years away. I, I, I think the team wrote this wrong. Artificial super intelligence will arrive in 2032, 20 to 2035. I think artificial super intelligence will arrive the minute AGI happens. So it doesn't really matter if AI is a billion times smarter than you or just twice as smart as you. Once we cross beyond AGI, ASI is just

• 1:50:57Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:57Mo Gawdat?

  very, very soon. And, and yeah. I think we'll overcome that when we get to the force inevitable. When AI is in charge of everything, I genuinely believe that we will end up in a utopia of abundance. I genuinely believe that again, physics, mathematics and biology will tell you that super intelligence is benign. And that we will eventually end up in a good place, not because humanity has done much to get us there, not because our leaders have suddenly turned ethical, but because our unethical leaders have gone out of the equation and

• 1:51:36Mo Gawdat?

  were replaced with a super efficient minimum energy principle that doesn't see value in anything that's destructive.

• 1:51:44Steven Bartlett?

  So the future is going to be great.

• 1:51:46Mo Gawdat?

  Those who make it to 2038 will enjoy it. Yeah.

• 1:51:51Steven Bartlett?

  Those who make it.

• 1:51:52Mo Gawdat?

  For sure. I mean, World War Two didn't destroy the world, but ask those who went through it.

• 1:51:59Steven Bartlett?

  It's just an interesting idea that actually it's just you're, you're forecasting basically like a

• 1:52:05Steven Bartlett?

  a decade of turmoil.

• 1:52:07Mo Gawdat?

  Of dystopia, of absolute dystopia.

• 1:52:09Steven Bartlett?

  When you say absolute dystopia, just so I'm clear in my mind, the absolute dystopia you're forecasting over a decade is about war.

• 1:52:16Mo Gawdat?

  Or economics, jobs.

• 1:52:18Steven Bartlett?

  Economics, it's about jobs.

• 1:52:20Mo Gawdat?

  It's, it's also about surveillance and control. It's also about digital currencies. It's also about human connection. It's also about concentration of power. It's, it's a magnification of everything we've built so far.

• 1:52:34Steven Bartlett?

  And just again, arm people with some tools to survive that dystopia for a decade. You know, we talked a little bit about focusing on human jobs, the more human jobs.

• 1:52:44Mo Gawdat?

  Learn AI. So, so AI is not the enemy. Okay. By definition, the better you are at using an AI to, to do your job.

• 1:52:53Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:54Mo Gawdat?

  The more likely you are to be successful. Right? Now, number two is prepare for a hybrid world where AI and humans work together.

• 1:53:03Steven Bartlett?

  How do you prepare?

• 1:53:04Mo Gawdat?

  You basically understand agents and how agents work. You, you understand how a hyper

• 1:53:13Mo Gawdat?

  efficient approach to things may not require you to be, you know, very long meetings and very long. So, so there is, if you lived in California, you would know that our, you know, the way we ran businesses was a lot more efficient. We sometimes had a seven minute meeting. Right? So, so the, you know, the habits of, of an AI are much more efficient than the habits of humans.

• 1:53:36Steven Bartlett?

  So learn AI again.

• 1:53:38Mo Gawdat?

  Learn how to interact with AI, allow, welcome AI into your hybrid world of work. I think you need to, to of course double down on human skills. I think that's a, you know, a must to succeed in this world. I think we need to, one of my most interesting views on the near future is how AI is going to be used to

• 1:54:03Mo Gawdat?

  disrupt, not disrupt, blur facts and how we need to become much more interested in debugging what we're told, using AI, by the way. Part of that I have to say is you have to learn to use AI. Again, not as a lazy person, so don't have them do things for you, have them make you smarter. So instead of trying to get the same task done with one prompt, try to get a much more interesting and demanding and intelligent task done with more work.

• 1:54:38Steven Bartlett?

  So I've got two things so far, which is basically like lean into AI. And the second one is like lean into the most human skills.

• 1:54:44Mo Gawdat?

  Human connection and, and lean into the truth. Don't be fooled by the hype. You know, try to be more informed, I think. And then finally ethics, if you want to, I, I know it sounds

• 1:55:02Mo Gawdat?

  the world we live in sounds as if the only way to win is to compete in capitalism. That's not the world I lived in. The world I lived in, especially in my Google years, was solve a major problem. And when you do, you'll end up making a lot of money.

• 1:55:20Steven Bartlett?

  Are you optimistic?

• 1:55:22Mo Gawdat?

  I am optimistic about the future. I'm very optimistic about the future. I'm not optimistic about the present.

• 1:55:29Steven Bartlett?

  You're not optimistic about the next decade?

• 1:55:31Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, I'm not optimistic about the next year, to be honest.

• 1:55:34Steven Bartlett?

  The next year?

• 1:55:35Mo Gawdat?

  For sure.

• 1:55:37Steven Bartlett?

  Why the next year?

• 1:55:39Mo Gawdat?

  Ah, come on, Stephen. You don't want me to say it out loud. We're ruled by maniacs. Decisions are being made for the absolute wrong reasons.

• 1:55:53Steven Bartlett?

  Very interesting time, very interesting time we find ourselves in.

• 1:55:56Mo Gawdat?

  The most interesting, I mean, honestly, if you're a video gamer, this is the best part of the game. It is a very, very, very, very.

• 1:56:05Mo Gawdat?

  What's the word? It's the, it's the ultimate matrix of complexity that I have ever encountered in my life.

• 1:56:14Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, that's an apt description of how it feels. Very complex. Things are moving very quickly.

• 1:56:19Mo Gawdat?

  And moving very quickly. So, so from one side, you really need a lot of brain resources to crunch all that's happening. But you wake up tomorrow and it's changed.

• 1:56:27Steven Bartlett?

  Well, the first time we, we spoke, we spoke about happiness.

• 1:56:32Mo Gawdat?

  After this conversation, Stephen?

• 1:56:35Steven Bartlett?

  I was just wondering, you know, in a, you, you wrote a book about happiness, which is

• 1:56:39Mo Gawdat?

  I've got many books about happiness.

• 1:56:41Steven Bartlett?

  But I mean, the Soul for Happy is the book that I'm referring to. Here it is.

• 1:56:44Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:45Steven Bartlett?

  Engineering Your Path to Joy. What a fantastic book. I quote this book all the time, all around the world. And I'm wondering if any of the principles that you wrote in this book about how to live a happy life are more important now in the world that we live in than maybe when you wrote this book.

• 1:57:03Mo Gawdat?

  Oh, for sure. I mean, honestly, if I wasn't living by this, I would have left this world a long time ago and went to an island somewhere. You see, the interesting side of happiness is that it's not dopamine driven. It's serotonin driven, right? So, so my definition of happiness is I'm okay with this world as it is. I can affect it. I can change it. I can engage with it. I can try to make it better. I don't have to accept it. But I'm okay with it. My starting point is a bit stoic, if you want. My starting, starting point is I accept this. This is my reality. And now I can start the work. This is very different than anyone that's, that basically looks at the world and says,

• 1:57:48Mo Gawdat?

  oh, this is a horrible world. I don't want to be part of it. I don't want to be engaged with it and so on and so forth. And I genuinely have never been calmer about that chaos. It's quite interesting. I, you, you know, my, my wonderful ex actually really, really helped me with that. There was a point in time where we were having dinner and I poured out crying from the sense of responsibility I had for the world. And she looked at me so calmly, so gently and said, hold on, you know, you, I see that you're trying, but you can't actually believe that you're responsible for this.

• 1:58:28Mo Gawdat?

  And I think that completely flipped my mind because in a very interesting way, I was thinking that all that went wrong in technology is because of me. Right?

• 1:58:39Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 1:58:40Mo Gawdat?

  Because I contributed to building this because, I mean, when, when Jeffrey Hint and I, one of my favorite moments when we were filming Chasing Utopia, is that Jeffrey is very big for all of us. We really think the world of him. And I was telling him, just as a sort of like an older mentor, if you want. I was like, Jeffrey, do you, do you regret doing this? You know, I genuinely believed when we were building those things that we were going to make the world better.

• 1:59:07Steven Bartlett?

  AI.

• 1:59:08Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah. And he said, well, yeah, I, I too was naive. I, I thought that we, I didn't think, he said, I didn't think we will get there so quickly before we figured out the alignment problem. Right?

• 1:59:21Steven Bartlett?

  The alignment problem.

• 1:59:22Mo Gawdat?

  That AI has our best interest in mind.

• 1:59:26Mo Gawdat?

  And, and, and I think all of us were faced with that. All of us were faced with that idea of we're building the best thing ever for humanity. And then suddenly you realize, oh my God, in the wrong hands, it's the worst thing ever for humanity. And, and I, you know, I have to say, I came to terms with this 2024, end of 24. That, that yes, I can try, but I accept that the world is what it is. And from that point of calm and stoicism, if you want, I think I can have a much bigger impact on the world.

• 2:00:00Steven Bartlett?

  We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next. Question left for you is, what's the legacy you want to leave?

• 2:00:05Mo Gawdat?

  Nothing at all. I've been asked this question.

• 2:00:09Steven Bartlett?

  I get asked it all the time, so.

• 2:00:10Mo Gawdat?

  I don't know why so many people are asking. Am I going to go anytime soon? I don't know why so many people are asking me that question. You see, legacy is a, is a I mean, why, what would I care if I have a legacy if I'm dead? Like, why does that even make any difference? Here's an interesting thought for everyone. If, if karma is real, and I genuinely believe it is. And if we're not just physical beings, that we're physical and spiritual, then I'd, I'd rather keep all of my karma for my spiritual side.

• 2:00:49Steven Bartlett?

  What does that mean?

• 2:00:50Mo Gawdat?

  I don't want anyone to remember anything I ever did.

• 2:00:52Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:54Mo Gawdat?

  I, I just want to leave a positive impact on the world and take all of that as karma for my next journey.

• 2:01:01Steven Bartlett?

  Mo, thank you.