Mo Gawdat: The Terrifying Rise of AI and What Humans Must Do to Thrive | Artificial Intelligence | AI Vault

While working at Google X, Mo Gawdat witnessed artificial intelligence advancing faster than anyone expected and slipping beyond human control. Machines began learning on their own, crossing critical boundaries, and spreading across the open internet without ethical safeguards or regulation. This realization turned him into a leading advocate for responsible AI development. Now on Spotify Video! In this episode of the AI Vault series, Mo reveals how AI is reshaping our world, the urgent risks it presents, and how we can guide it toward a future that benefits humanity. In this episode, Hala and Mo will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (01:30) Mo’s Journey in Tech and Google X (07:56) His Awakening to AI’s Power (12:13) Is Artificial Intelligence Truly Artificial? (19:04) How AI Already Controls Your Reality (25:36) The Self-Learning Power of Artificial Intelligence (33:48) AI’s Three Unbreakable Boundaries (40:34) Why Humanity Can’t Stop AI Development (47:49) AI Risks and the Future of Work (57:03) Emotional Intelligence in the AI Era (1:05:49) Thriving Ethically in the Age of AI in Action Mo Gawdat is a renowned AI expert, author, and former Chief Business Officer at Google X. He has over 30 years of experience in technology and entrepreneurship and helped launch more than 100 Google businesses across emerging markets. Mo now hosts the top-rated podcast Slo Mo and advocates for the safe and ethical development of technology. His book, Scary Smart, explores how humanity can wisely guide the rise of artificial intelligence. Sponsored By: Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/PROFITING Shopify - Start your $1/month trial at Shopify.com/profiting. Quo - Get 20% off your first 6 months at Quo.com/PROFITING Revolve - Head to REVOLVE.com/PROFITING and take 15% off your first order with code PROFITING Merit Beauty - Go to meritbeauty.com to get your free signature makeup bag with your first order. DeleteMe - Remove your personal data online. Get 20% off DeleteMe consumer plans at to joindeleteme.com/profiting Spectrum Business - Visit Spectrum.com/FreeForLife to learn how you can get Business Internet Free Forever. Airbnb - Find yourself a cohost at airbnb.com/host Resources Mentioned: Mo’s Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/mogawdat Mo’s Instagram: instagram.com/mo_gawdat Mo’s Website: mogawdat.com Mo’s Book, Scary Smart: bit.ly/-ScarySmart Mo’s Podcast, Slow Mo:bit.ly/SloMo-apple Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap YouTube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting Newsletter - youngandprofiting.co/newsletter LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Startup, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, ChatGPT, AI Marketing, Prompt, AI in Business, Generative AI, AI for Entrepreneurs, AI Podcast

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

• 0:00Hala Taha?

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• 0:45Hala Taha?

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• 1:08Speaker 01

  There is nothing that entered your head today that was not dictated to you by a machine. We ignore that fact when we swipe on Instagram or on TikTok or when we're looking at the news media, but every single one of those is a machine that is telling you what it is that you should know.

• 1:27Hala Taha?

  My guest today is Mo Gaudat, former Chief Business Officer at Google X and bestselling author of Scary Smart. Mo has been inside the labs where AI first came to life, and he's here to both unpack the promise and the peril.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  If something goes wrong today with the artificial intelligence that's out on the open internet, who's responsible for that? There are very, very significant threats, things like concentration of power, the end of truth, things like the jobs and the redesign of the fabric of society.

• 1:57Hala Taha?

  If the most powerful people in the world, who are actually the most knowledgeable about AI, are warning about this, why wasn't anything done?

• 2:05Speaker 01

  I actually believe that...

• 2:08Hala Taha?

  Yap gang, we all know that AI is evolving faster than we've ever imagined. Learning on its own, making decisions we don't quite fully understand, and racing toward a future where it can be smarter than us. Now, the real question isn't just how do we use AI? It's what happens if we can't control it? That's the wake-up call we're tackling today on the AI Vault series. My guest today is Mo Gawdat, former Chief Business Officer at Google X and bestselling author of Scary Smart. Mo has been inside the labs where AI first came to life, and he's here to both unpack the promise and the peril. How AI is evolving beyond our control, the immediate risks we're facing in jobs, truth, and power, and what skills humans will need to stay relevant in the coming years.

• 2:51Hala Taha?

  But before we jump in, if this is your first time tuning into the podcast, don't forget to hit that subscribe or follow button wherever you're tuning in. All right, Yap fam, another one from the AI Vault series with Mo Gawdat, and let's get right into it. Mo, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's been a while in the making, but absolutely worth the wait, I hope.

• 3:13Hala Taha?

  Can you talk to us about your journey at a very high level, the highlights that got you in the C-suite at Google X eventually?

• 3:20Speaker 01

  At the height of my professional career, if you want my corporate career, I was Chief Business Officer of Google X. And of course, I worked my butt off to get there, but there was an element of luck in the process. I met the exact right people at the exact right time. It was one of those events where the Google X team was presenting some of their confidential stuff. And I showed up and I said, at the time, I was Vice President of Emerging Markets for Google. I had started half of Google's businesses globally, more than 103 languages, if I remember correctly. And so I was quite well-known in the company, if you want. I had a reasonable impact that I have to say,

• 4:02Speaker 01

  I'm very grateful that life gave me the opportunity to provide. And then with Google X, I basically, at the time, Google still had the idea of the 20% time. So I... Liked their projects and I said, I'm going to, I'm going to give you my 20%. And they said, but we haven't asked for it. And I said, yeah, that's not your choice. And I showed up, basically. The first day I showed up, I bumped into Sergey, our co-founder, and I worked closely with Sergey for many years. And he says, like, what are you doing here? And I was like, I'm very excited about your work. And ended up, he said, oh, no, don't leave, basically stay. And I was chief business officer for five years, where I, I think Google X is misunderstood because

• 4:47Speaker 01

  we never really launched a product under X, if you want. So self-driving cars is under Waymo. You know, Google Brain is integrated into Google and so on. But most of the very spooky innovation, if you want, the very, very out there innovation, including all of robotics and a big chunk of AI, was at X. And it was a big part of what I did.

• 5:13Hala Taha?

  And so diving right into AI, you were actually part of the labs that initially created AI. So can you talk to us about the story of the yellow ball? And how that really changed your perspective about AI?

• 5:28Speaker 01

  AI has been around a lot longer than people think. When we started self-driving cars back in 2008, that was basically with a belief that cars can develop intelligence that is as intelligent as a driver and accordingly able to drive a car. And since then, I mean, by 2008, I think in my personal memories, I think 2008 was really the year when we knew that we cracked the code. It was, you know, early 2009, Google published a paper that's known as the CAT paper. Uh. That white paper basically described how we asked, uh, uh, you know, an artificially intelligent machine to look at YouTube videos where without prompting it for what to look

• 6:13Speaker 01

  for. And then it eventually came back and said, I found something. And we said, show us. And it turns out that it found a cat, uh, not, not just one cat, but really what catness is all about, you know, that very, um, entitled, uh, cuddly, uh, you know, furry, uh, character. Basically, it could, it could find every cat on YouTube. And that was really the very first glimpse, uh, between that and the work that DeepMind was doing on playing Atari games, where machines started to show real intelligence. Uh, we then started to integrate that in a lot of things, you know, self-driving cars is probably the most

• 6:53Speaker 01

  publicly known example. But one of the projects that we worked on was, um, which is not the only, you know, Google X was not the only one working on it, but we wanted to teach grippers, you know, um, robotic arms. Basically, we wanted to teach them how to pick objects that they're not programmed to pick. And, and it's a very, very sophisticated task because, you know, we do it so easily as humans. But if you remember when, you don't remember, but if your parents would remember when you were a child and before you learned how to grip, you kept going on trial and error. You would try to grip something and then it falls and then you try again and so on. And basically, we said, maybe we can

• 7:33Speaker 01

  teach the machines the same way. We built a farm of those grippers, put boxes of items in front of them. You know, a funny programmer basically chose children's toys. And you could see them try to pick those items and basically fail over and over. It's a very sophisticated mathematical problem. And so they would fail, they would show the arm to the camera and the camera would know that this algorithm, this pathway, uh, you know, didn't register, didn't pick the item until. I think it was several weeks in and, you know, it was a significant investment because robotic arms were not cheap at the time. Uh, you know, I, I, I passed by that farm very, uh, very frequently on my way to my desk.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  And on a Friday evening, uh, finally, one of those arms, you know, I can see it goes down, picks one item, which was a yellow softball. Again, mathematically very complex to, to, to grip. And, and it shows it to the camera. And so jokingly, I pass by the team that's running this experiment and I say, okay, well done. It's all of those millions of dollars for one yellow ball. Okay? Uh, and they smiled and then, you know, sort of nodded their heads. And on Monday morning, as I went to work, every arm was picking the yellow ball. Uh, you know, a couple of weeks later, every arm was picking everything. And I think

• 8:57Speaker 01

  that's something that most people don't recognize about AIs, that the speed, once you found the very first pattern, the speed at which AI starts to develop is just mind blowing. Uh, also, I think, uh, most people don't realize that they learn exactly like my children learned to grip. That's the whole idea. So, so they really do develop intelligence that comparable, uh, now probably even more advanced than human intelligence.

• 9:27Hala Taha?

  Hmm. And in that moment, when you saw those machines gripping toys and doing it more efficiently and with intelligence, were you alarmed or were you excited?

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think we, I, I, I've been excited about AI since I had a Sinclair, believe it or not. So I, I started coding at a very, very young age on a, on computers. You know, young and profitable probably have never touched in their life. So, so, uh, you know, and every one of us geeks wanted to code an intelligent machine. We all attempted and we all simulated and we all even pretended sometimes. Uh, but then it was that the year 2000 truly where we. Deep learning was starting to develop and and we sort of found the breakthrough. We found how to give machines intelligence and and allow me to to stop for a second here

• 10:20Speaker 01

  because there is a huge difference between the way we programmed machines before deep learning and after deep learning. Before deep learning, when I programmed the machine, as intelligent as it looked, I solved the problem first using my own intelligence and then sort of gave the machine the sheet in terms of how to solve it itself. I wrote the algorithm or I, you know, wrote the process, you know, step by step and basically coded the machine to do it. When when deep learning started to happen, what we did was we didn't tell the machine how to solve the problem. We told the machine how to develop the intelligence needed to find a solution to the problem.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  This is very, very different. And as a matter of fact, most of the time, we don't even recognize how the machine finds a cat. We don't even understand how, you know, we don't fully understand how, you know, Bard, Google's Bard, understood how to speak Bengali, right? We don't really know those emerging properties or even the the the tasks we give them themselves. But so so your question was, was I excited? I promise you, the day I met Demes, who was the CEO of DeepMind when we acquired DeepMind, it was really to me like meeting the rock star, right? I I I was fanatic about what he was doing. I still am, you know, a fan of of him and his ethics and amazing human being.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  But at the time, for a geek, understand this, AI was the ultimate joy and glory. This this was it. We we were we were creating intelligence and for a programmer, that was mind blowing. The yellow ball, I think. And and remember, huh? When every time we saw the machines develop. We got more excited, believe it or not, because we wanted what was good for the world. Intelligence in itself, there is nothing inherently wrong with intelligence.

• 12:21Hala Taha?

  Uh huh.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Uh it was when I saw the yellow ball, I think that something uh dropped. I I I could see it so clearly because for the first time ever, I realized that those machines, one, are developing way faster than us. And so accordingly, you know, the predictions of people like Ray Kurzweil and others uh of of a moment of singularity where they're going to bypass our intelligence became very, very real in my mind. I could see that this is going to happen. But I also could see that we, the moment they became intelligent, had very little influence on them. Okay, and accordingly, I started to imagine a world

• 13:03Speaker 01

  where humanity is no longer the top of the food chain. Okay, humanity is no longer the smartest being on the planet. And then, cause the apes, we are going to be the apes. Do you understand that?

• 13:15Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  And and and I think that completely uh made sense to me that this needed a lot more consideration uh rather than the, you know, the excited geekiness of you know, of of building it. We had, I we needed to understand why and how are we building it and what is a future where it becomes in charge?

• 13:37Hala Taha?

  There is like so much to unpack here. This is why I was like, I need to spend the full hour on this topic because there's just so much to unpack. Let's talk about the label of artificial and artificial intelligence. Is intelligence artificial at all or is AI? Oh yeah, talk to us about that.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Not in that in the slightest, Hal. If if there is any um if there is any artificial side to the to to to the machines is that they are silicon based. Okay, uh as a matter of fact, most of the ones who worked on deep tech, not not the stuff that you see in the in the interfaces, uh we almost mapped their brains to the way our neural networks as humans work.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  So, you know, hu- humans, uh, uh, in the early development of AI, you know what neuroplasticity is? Humans basically, uh, develop, we develop our, our intelligence and our ability to do anything, really, uh, by repeating a task in a specific way. And, and they say neurons that wire together fire to, fire together, wire together. So if you, if you tap your finger over and over and over, your brain sort of takes that neural network that taps your finger and makes it stronger and stronger and stronger, just like going to the gym. And, and the early years of developing AI, we were doing exactly that. We were literally pruning the software or the algorithms

• 15:01Speaker 01

  that were not effectively delivering the, the task we want, literally killing them, erasing them, and keeping the ones that were capable of getting closer to the answer we wanted and then strengthening, strengthening them. So, so we were sort of like doubling down on them, wiring them together. And, and, and the way, the way the, the machines work today is very, very similar to that. It's, it's a bunch of patterns that are created in hundreds of millions, sometimes billions and trillions of, of neurons. Not yet trillions, but you know, lots of, of, of nodes of patterns

• 15:41Speaker 01

  that the machine would recognize, uh, so that it basically can make something look intelligent or, or can behave in a way that, that is analogous to intelligence. Now, is it artificial? Well, I think if, if you ask the machines, they will think of our carbon-based intelligence as artificial, okay? Uh, the only, the only difference really is we, we are carbon-based and analog. They are, uh, I don't think we're analog. I think we're somewhere in between and they are, you know, digital and... And silicon based, not for long. We don't know what they're going to be based on in the future. Uh, but, but, but also they are, um, I think their uh clock speed is very different than human clock speed.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  So, so they have an enormous capability of learning very, very quickly of crunching a massive amount of data that no single human can, uh, can achieve. They are, they have the capability of uh keeping so much in their memory. They are aware and informed of everything all the time. Uh, they are connected to each other so they could in the future when AGI becomes a reality benefit from each other's intelligence. Uh, and in a very simple way, uh, I think the, the race to intelligence is won. Uh, you know, uh, today there are estimates that chat G P T uh is um, is at an IQ of one fifty five.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Uh, Einstein, I think was one sixty or one ninety, doesn't really matter. But most humans are one twenty two, uh, you know, some are uh less than that, maybe one ten and so on. Uh, you know, the dumbest human is seventy. So you can easily see that there is an A I today from an intelligence point of view on the task assigned to it. Remember, we're still in the artificial special intelligence stage, one, one task assigned to every A I. Uh, in the task assigned to it, it's by far more intelligent than humans. Nothing artificial at all about that. It develops its, its own intelligence, it evolves, it has agency, it has decision making abilities.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Uh, it has, um, you know, uh, um, um, emotions, I tend to believe. Uh, and, uh, yeah, and it, it, it is in a very interesting way. Almost sentient, if you think about it, which is an argument that a lot of people don't agree with. Because we don't really define sentient on a human level very well. But they definitely simulate being sentient very well.

• 18:18Hala Taha?

  I mean, what you're saying is really incredible and mind blowing. I know that for humans, like, we don't understand how consciousness works, right? Nobody can say, like, you're conscious because of this. And you mentioned before that we don't understand how intelligence really happens. Like, we know how to create intelligence, but we don't actually know how the intelligence works. It just sort of takes off on its own, which can be really scary. So talk to us about why you think AI should be considered living or sentient.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  I think the definition of sentient needs to be agreed. So, so is a tree sentient? Is a pebble sentient? Is the planet Earth sentient? We, you know, we could have many arguments now. If you, if you think of being sentient as it is born at a point in time and it dies at a point in time, or at least it has the threat of dying at a point in time, then AI is born at a point in time. And, you know, it, it, it has the threat of dying at a point in time. Uh, you know, um, if you, if you think of, uh, of sentient as the ability to sense the world around you, uh, well, yes, of course, AI is capable of assessing the world around it.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Uh, if you think of AI as, sorry, of sentient as the, uh, the, uh, the ability to affect the world around you, then yes, it can, right? Uh, the, you know, if you, if you take a tree, for example, a tree grows, uh, it, uh, reproduces, uh, it, uh, it does, um, uh, it is, it is in a way, uh, interestingly aware of the seasons and aware of the environment around it, and it responds to it. So a, a tree will not shed, uh, its leaves on the 21st of October specifically. It will shed its tree, its, its leaves when the, uh, you know, when the weather alerts it to do that. And if you consider a tree sentient in that case, then AI is surely sentient.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  If, if you consider that a gorilla is, um, you know, is incredibly interested in survival, uh, and accordingly would do what it takes to survive, then AI is sentient in the sense that once, uh, assigned a task, it will attempt to survive to. Make the task happen, basically.

• 20:35Hala Taha?

  Simo, a lot of people think of AI as this machine that they can tell what to do and it listens. They can turn it off if things get too crazy and they're not worried about AI. So can you talk to us about how AI actually in some instances can have agency, can have control over itself, free will? Can you give us some examples?

• 20:57Speaker 01

  Oh my God, I can give you endless examples. If you're not informed of AI today, it is a bit like a hurricane approaching your city or village and you're sitting at a cafe saying, "I'm not interested." Okay, this is it. This is the biggest event happening in today's world. And the reason for that is that there are tremendous benefits that can come from having artificial intelligence in our lives. And you know, if you miss out on that train, you're not going to have the skills to compete in a world that is changing very rapidly. That's on one side. On the other side, there are very, very significant threats. And those threats come in two levels.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  The news media wants to always talk about the Terminator scenario or it's an existential risk to humanity, you know, in 10, 15, 20 years' time. I believe that there is a probability of that happening. But I believe that there are many more important, more immediate threats that need to be looked at today, things that are already happening and that we need to become aware of. Things like concentration of power, things like the end of truth, things like, you know, the jobs and the redesign of the fabric of society as a result of the disappearance of many jobs and so on. So we'll come to all of those. I think we need to cover both sides of the immediate

• 22:27Speaker 01

  risk and the existential risk. But your question was, how can AI affect me today? Let me give you a very simple example. There is nothing that entered your head today that was not dictated to you by Machine, okay, we ignore that fact when we swipe on Instagram or when we are on TikTok or when we're looking at the news media or when, you know, we're searching and getting a result from Google. But every single one of those is a machine that is telling you, uh, um, you know, in reality, what it is that you should know. Now, think about the following. Today in the morning, I, uh, you know, I got a statistic

• 23:12Speaker 01

  that basically is quite interesting, a study by Stanford University that said that brunettes are on average taller than blondes, right? And, uh, I didn't actually, but does it make any difference once I told you that piece of information? Uh, you know, once I tell you a piece of information, I have affected your mind forever, okay? So you can either trust me and now you're going to look at brunettes and blondes differently for the rest of your life. You can mistrust me and then you're going to spend a little bit of time to try and verify the truth. And in the back of your mind, that bit of information is going to be engraved. Uh, maybe for the future, you might dedicate yourself

• 23:56Speaker 01

  to a research that proves me wrong. You may actually become fanatic, okay? You may start posting about it on the internet. You may spend your, the rest of your life trying to defend this lie or trying to disprove this lie and show the truth, right? Just by, by showing you one bit of information now. Every bit of information you have seen in, since you woke up today is dictated by a machine. Now, uh, Yuav Noah Harari, uh, basically says they have hacked the operating system of humanity, right? So if I can hack into your brain, Hala, and tell you something that affects you for the rest of your life, whether positively or negatively, whether true or false, okay?

• 24:40Speaker 01

  Uh, then I've already managed how, managed to, to affect you. Interestingly, most of those machines that you've dealt with. Are programmed for one simple task, which is to manipulate you. Every one of those social media machines, for example, are out there with one objective, which is to manipulate your behavior to their benefit. And they're becoming really good at it. They're becoming so good at it, as a matter of fact, that most of the time, we don't even realize that we have been brainwashed over and over and over by, by those, you know, by the capability of those machines. So here's the interesting bit.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  I told you in the immediate risks that are coming up in the next, I believe they have started already and I think they will start to become quite significant over the next year or two. And we will see, my personal view, what I call patient zero, is the end of the truth in the US elections, right? So, so the reality of the matter is that with deep fakes, with, with, you know, with the ability to manipulate information and data, with the ability to take, to create, by, by next year, you have to be, you have to be aware that a reel on Instagram can

• 26:00Speaker 01

  be created with no human in front of the camera, very, very easily. We, you know, but technologies like stability.ai, you know, stable diffusion, for example, can now generate realistic, human-like images in less, you know, than a tenth of a second. And a video is 10 frames per second. So the next stage is clearly going to be video. There are multiple videos that have been created that you couldn't distinguish, you know, the quality of, from an actual iPhone video of you. Now, all of that, think of, of face filters and how this is affecting our perception of real beauty, okay?

• 26:45Speaker 01

  Think of, you know, of, of information and statistics using ChatGPT affecting the children's way of doing their homework. We are completely redesigned as a society.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  And we're not even talking about it. This is exactly, this is how far this has gone.

• 27:06Hala Taha?

  It is insane, and I definitely want to talk about those risks that you were talking about. Immediate risk, job risks, existential risk down the line years later. So talk to us about the fact that AI can learn on its own. It can learn languages on its own. It can beat chess players and come up with moves that we've never taught it before. Because a lot of people think about AI as something that just collects information and spits out information. But it can actually learn new things that humans don't even know. So talk to us about that.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, don't mix AI with old programming. AI simply is the idea. Let me give you a concrete example. There is a strategy game known as Go. Go is one of the most complex strategy games on the planet. It requires a very deep understanding of planning and crunching a lot of numbers and mathematics and so on. Very popular in Asia. And in our assessment, Go was the ultimate task that, you know, like we had the Turing test for AI pretending to be a human and you not being able to figure out if it isn't. You know, Go was sort of like that other milestone.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  If Go, if AI wins in Go, then Go is the, you know, then AI is now the top gamer on the planet. Now, it was several, five years ago, I believe, that 10 years ahead of any estimate that AlphaGo, again, DeepMind, basically became the world champion in Go. And AlphaGo had three versions to it. Version number one took a few months to develop. Okay, basically, we, you know, we asked it to watch YouTube videos of people playing Go. Okay, and from that, it played against the second champion in the world, so the runner up. And it won. Five to one or five to two.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  But it basically won, okay? Uh, and, and, uh, and that basically became ma- made AlphaGo uh number two in the world. And then we developed something called AlphaGoMaster. Uh, and AlphaGoMaster played against Lee, the world champion, and won. Uh, that was around a few months later. And then we developed another code that was called AlphaGoZero. And AlphaGoZero uh basically play- learned the game by playing against itself. So it never wa- it never saw a human ever playing Go, okay? It just played against itself, so it would be the two opponents.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  And through the patterns of the game randomly, it would learn what wins and what loses. AlphaGoZero, within three days, three days, won against AlphaGo, the original. Within twenty-one days, won against AlphaGoMaster, okay? Uh, and became the world champion a thousand games to zero within twenty-one days. Now, uh, uh, when you understand that level of strategy, when Lee, the world champion, was wa- was, was playing against AlphaGoMaster, there is something that you can Google that's known as Move37. And Move37 was that machine uh coming up with a, with a move that is completely unlike anything humans understand, okay?

• 30:32Speaker 01

  To the point that the world champion said, I, I don't know what this is doing. I need a fifteen minutes break to understand, right? Uh, it was a, a move of ingenuity, of intuition, of creativity, of, of very deep strategy, of very, very deep mathematical planning. And, and we never taught AlphaGoMaster to do that. We never uh taught, uh, you know, the original games of, uh, of Atari, uh, DeepMind, uh, to, to find the, the cornerstone in the, in the breakout game, if you remember those Atari games. So it would find the cornerstone, throw the ball in there so that it hits the ball from the top. All of those things we don't. Teach the machines how to find, how to learn.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  And, and we call those emerging properties and emerging properties are basically uh things that the machine learns on its own without us actually telling us, telling it at all to learn it. One of the famous ones was uh Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet. Uh talks about Google's AI and how Google, how that AI we discovered or they discovered. I was not no longer at Google at the time that it speaks Bengali. We never taught it Bengali, we never showed it uh data sets of Bengali, it just learns Bengali. Uh ChatGPT is learning research chemistry. Uh we never taught it research chemistry, we never wanted it to, it just learns.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  Just like you and I, Hala. So, so you know, if I ask you a question and you give me an answer. The answer might be right or wrong, it doesn't matter. But I can, I can find out if the answer is right or wrong, at least by my perception. But I can never find out how you arrived at it. I don't know what happened in your brain to, to get to that answer. This is why in, you know, in elementary school in math tests, they ask the student to show the thinking they, they went through, right? So when you think about that, you realize that those machines are completely doing things that we don't tell them to do. Interestingly, however, uh the answer from a computer science problem, a point of view to the, to the, to the problem of a, a risk

• 32:39Speaker 01

  of AI is known as the solution to the control problem. So most computer scientists say it's spent a lot of time trying to make AI safe. How do they make it safe? By including control measures within the code. Theoretically, by the way, I do not know of any AI developer that ever included a, a, you know, control code within, uh within their code because it takes time and effort and it's not what they're paid for, basically. Uh but here's the question. How do you control something that is bound to become a billion times smarter than you? I mean, think about it, ChatGPT four was ten times smarter than ChatGPT three point five. Okay, if you just assume that this pattern will repeat twice.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  There will be an AI within the next year and a half to two years. That in the task of knowledge and cognition of information is going to be at an IQ of a thousand five hundred. That's not even imaginable by human intelligence. We we don't even, this is basically like, uh uh uh, you know, trying to explain quantum physics to a fly. That's the level of intelligence difference between us and them. Right, just like, just like it's so difficult for someone like me who's a, who's an avid. You know, has an avid love of physics. When I look at how someone like Einstein comes up with theory of relativity. I go like, man, I never, I wish I had that intelligence, right? That, and that's the comparison between me and Einstein.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Imagine if I compare myself to something a hundred times smarter than Einstein. My, my prediction and the prediction of many other computer scientists. Uh, is that by the year twenty forty five at the current trend. AI will probably be a billion times smarter than us. One billion with a B. So it's quite interesting when you really think about it. How the arrogance of humanity still imagines that it can control something that is a billion times smarter than us. I don't wanna be grim, I wanna talk about the positives here because it's really important. There are ways to control AI, but they are not through control.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  They're a little bit like how, you know, if you have any friends from India or the Middle East. Where we are taught at, at a young age that we need to take care of our parents when they grow older. Right, so, so there are ways if we consider that AI has a resemblance. Of being our artificially intelligent infant children. There are ways we can influence them so that they choose to take care of humanity. Instead of, in all honesty, making us irrelevant.

• 35:18Hala Taha?

  You've talked about how now we're sort of at the point of no return. So related to this, can you talk about the boundaries that we've broken? That now make AI sort of uncontrolled and unregulated.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  I don't know how stupid humanity can be, honestly. I really, I honestly don't understand. You know, in a, in a very interesting way, I think we've created a system that's removing all of our intelligence. We continue to consume as we're burning the planet. We continue to favor the, the patriarchy when we, when we realize that the feminine is, you know, feminine attributes are so badly needed in our world today. We continue to create AI when we have no clue how that will, uh, you know, will influence our world going forward. But more interestingly, we continue to make mistakes along the path of AI that are

• 36:16Speaker 01

  irreparable, honestly. And, and we, everyone, everyone without exception, and I, I know, at least let me say everyone I know, uh, said, okay, as long as it's in the lab, uh, that's fine. Okay, we can, we can do whatever, uh, you know, just explore the boundaries of it. But there are three, but, three, you know, borders, the three boundaries we shouldn't cross, which were, one, don't put it on the open internet. I mean, seriously, uh, when, when you, um, when you ingest a medicine or a, or a supplement, it needs to go through FDA approval, right? Someone needs to go and say, this is safe for you, right?

• 36:58Speaker 01

  So, so we said, at least there needs to be some kind of an oversight that basically says, uh, this is safe for human consumption. This is safe for humanity at large. And none of that happens. And, and I understand Tim Altman's, which I believe is a, is a good, is a good person. You know, his approach of saying, let's develop it in public so that nothing is hidden, so that we learn early on. But the problem is it's developing faster than us. And I think the reality of having something as powerful as ChatGPT out there, you know, to be accessed by everyone, is completely reshaping everything. That's number one. Number two, we said, don't teach them to code. At least if you teach them to code, don't keep them on the open internet so that they can code.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Now, here is what is, just so that you understand how far that mistake is. Forty-one percent of all of the code on GitHub today. So, so basically the repository of where developers share their code. Forty-one percent of it is machine developed. Okay, you know, within a year, almost, less than a year, of having the, allowing the machines to develop. You know, four of the top ten apps on the iPhone are AI-enabled. Okay, created by a machine. Created by a machine, for now, is amazing, because, you know what?

• 38:22Speaker 01

  I always loved to, to, to, to do the algorithm, the, the design of a code, but coding itself was annoying, right? Now you can tell the machine, build me a website that, you know, speaks about Hellas Podcast. That is, you know, blue and yellow in color, and that is fifteen web pages long. And, and it will do it in less than a minute, right? And that's not, it's not only that, it's a lot of the base programming, like ChatGPT.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  Seventy-five percent of the code offered to ChatGPT to correct or to review was made twenty-five percent, two and a half times, two and a half times faster. So, so basically, every time it reviews a human code, it makes it two and a half times faster, almost. And, and when you really think about that, they, they are becoming the absolute best developer on the planet when it comes to basic development. And, and I'll come back to the risk of that in a minute. And, and the third is, we said, don't have AIs, instruct AIs what to do. We call those agents, okay? So, so basically, you now have something that is, that has access to the entire world wide web, that has access to the entire world, basically.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  That has, that can write its own code, and so basically, sort of, have its own children. Because it is made of code, and it's becoming, it's able now to create other versions of itself. Put it wherever it wants. And number three, it is instructed to do that by machines, not humans.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  And so what is happening now is that machines are telling machines to write code to serve the machines and affect the entire world wide web. And we're not part of that process and that cycle at all. Okay, for now, nothing went bad. Hmm. But do we really have to wait for the virus to begin before humanity stops and asks and says, you know, is this reasonable in any way? I mean, does it make any sense to anyone that this is the situation we're in? Where are our governments? How can those companies be accountable? Because I think the biggest challenge we have today is that our fate is in the hand of people who don't assume responsibility.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  You know, you know, Spiderman's with great power comes great responsibility. Now there is great power in the in the presence, not only the not even the future of artificial intelligence that that is within hands that don't assume responsibility. If if something goes wrong today with the artificial intelligence that's out on the open internet, who's responsible for that? How can we even find out where that code generated from? All of that, by the way, just not to scare people, all of that hasn't happened yet. Okay, it hasn't happened yet, but it is very, very unlikely that it will not not happen.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  It's very unlikely that one of those codes, if you just simply tell chat GPT to keep writing code to make you more money. Okay, eventually, somehow, something in the system will break. And if if you're not the one telling it, if a machine is telling it, something is gonna break, you know, we absolutely have to start getting this under control.

• 41:52Hala Taha?

  Yeah. And so, like you said, it's sort of like uncontrollable. It's no wonder why you called your book Scary Smart, because this is really scary. But this is reality. So you talk about inevitables. AI will happen, it will become smarter than us, bad things will happen. Can you unpack those thoughts? And then I'd love to go into, you know, the risks and solutions potentially.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  There are three inevitables. AI has already happened, not just will happen, but but but when I wrote the first inevitable, I wrote it with the intention of explaining and there is no stopping it. Okay, so so there is no way you can uh you can say, okay, AI is out there and it is growing and it is becoming more intelligent. Let's uh just switch it off. There there is no off switch. That's number one. And the moment uh uh you know uh uh what is needed at the moment is for the entire world to come together and simply say, hey, you know what? Uh this is too risky. Let's leave our differences aside and come together and just wait a little bit, right?

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Which has been attempted by the open letter uh uh Ma- Max Denmark and and Elon Musk and others, which of course was answered very quickly by the top CEOs by saying, I can't. Why? Because we've created a prisoner's dilemma. This is the first inevitable. It is an arms race uh that where where Google cannot stop developing AI because, you know, Meta is developing AI. Uh America cannot stop the developing AI because China is developing AI. Uh none, nobody actually, even, you know, if you wanna consider there are good guys in the world. Nobody can stop developing AI because there could be bad guys developing AI, right? So if there is a hacker somewhere trying to break through our banks, someone needs to develop a a uh

• 43:45Speaker 01

  a smarter AI that will help us not be hacked, right? And so and so thi- thi- this basically means that it is a human choice because of the capitalist system that we've created that we will continue to develop AI. It's done. There is no stopping it. And I think the open letter was a great example of that.

• 44:04Hala Taha?

  Can I pause you there in case nobody knows? So the open letter was basically earlier this year, top AI scientists, executives from OpenAI, DeepMind. They basically had an open letter warning of the risk of extinction, I think. And that that AI was just as powerful as having a nuclear war, that that this was the risk at hand. Um so can you talk to us about that letter? Like, I didn't even hear about that letter until I started studying your work. So like, um if the most powerful people in the world, who are actually the most knowledgeable about AI, are warning about this. I guess like why wasn't anything done or like what happened with that letter?

• 44:45Speaker 01

  Because it's so the letter basically like you rightly said it is it's some of the most powerful people in the field who like me I walked out in two thousand end of two thousand seventeen. You know, others like Geoffrey Hinton and you know so many others are starting to wake up to that in two thousand twenty three. I think chat G P T was basically the you know the the Netscape moment. I know you guys are too young for Netscape, but the Internet was there for fifteen years before Netscape came out. And when Netscape came out as a web browser, we realized that the Internet existed, okay?

• 45:27Speaker 01

  The reality is that this is the Netscape moment of A I. Chat G P T basically told us what the possibilities told the general public what the possibilities are. And so suddenly we all realize this stuff exists now. For for all of the scientists that started to recognize that it is truly, I mean, the moment of singularity where A I becomes smarter than us. You know, artificial general intelligence that's capable of doing everything humans do better than humans is not contested. Most of us, most scientists will say it's twenty twenty nine. I say it's twenty twenty seven or earlier, okay? That there will be a moment in time within the next two, three years

• 46:11Speaker 01

  where there will be a wake up call where we suddenly realize that A I is much more intelligent than us. Most scientists have started to recognize that. And so they basically issued a letter urging all of the top A I players to pause the development of A I for six months so that the safety code, the control code can catch up, right? Because you know, there are, you know, there has have been quite a few that have been putting in effort to create that control code. But let's say ninety eight percent of all investments in the last ten years has gone into the A I code, not the control code. And so the control code was lagging.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  And so that letter was basically saying, can we pause for six months to figure this out before we continue to develop A I? And of course, the answer was very straightforward. The first, I think, I heard was Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, which is someone I respect dearly, and I think is an amazing human being. And Sundar basically came out and said, I can't stop. How can I stop if you can't guarantee me that Meta and Amazon and all of the others are going to stop too? And by the way, even if they stop, how can you guarantee me that two little kids in Singapore, in their garage, are not developing AI code that can disrupt my business? My responsibility, my accountability, if you want, to my shareholders,

• 47:35Speaker 01

  you know, requires me to continue to develop the code. And I think that reality is the prisoner's dilemma that I'm talking about. It is the first inevitable. It's an arms race that will not stop, not because we cannot stop. We can. If we all agree for once in humanity's lifetime that this is existential and that this requires us to stop, we will stop. Okay, it's really not that complicated. Wake up in the morning and have a cup of coffee instead of writing AI code. It's very simple, okay? But the first inevitable means that the arms race is not going to stop. Okay? Even as you look at humanity's biggest success in that dilemma,

• 48:19Speaker 01

  which was nuclear weapons, where humanity suddenly got together, you know, very late in the game and said, hey, this is existential. It can threaten the entire existence of humanity. Why don't we slow down or stop? We didn't really stop. We just allowed the big countries to continue to develop nuclear bombs when the smaller countries were banned from doing it. But at least when it comes to nuclear weapons, we had the ability to detect any nuclear testing anywhere in the world. So at least we became aware. That's not the case with AI today. I also said once in an interview that also it's not just the risk of humans developing risky AI.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  It's now the risk of AI developing risky AI. So it's basically a nuclear bomb that's capable of building. Other nuclear bombs, if you want.

• 49:13Hala Taha?

  It's crazy to think, and I know the other inevitable is it will eventually become smarter than us, which we talked about. So let's talk about the bad things that could happen from AI, which is your third inevitable. And I think a lot of people, when they think of threats of AI, they think about the existential threats that, you know, there's going to be robots taking over, killing off humanity, making humans slaves. Uh, but let's talk about some of the more immediate threats that we need to be concerned about.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  Yes, I, I, I, I don't speak of the existential risks for two reasons. One is they, they, they diffuse the focus on the immediate important threats. Right? And, and two, they are less probable. As a matter of fact, they are so improbable, uh, that, uh, that they're basically not worthy of discussing today. Because we, we may not make it if they, you know, that far, if the existential, if the immediate risks are not attended to. And there are many immediate risks, but I, my top three have consistently been, uh, the redesign of the job market and accordingly the redesign of purpose and the fabric of society. Uh, two is the idea of AI in the wrong hands,

• 50:25Speaker 01

  based on who you think are the wrong hands. Okay? Uh, the third is the concentration of power, uh, and the shift of power upwards, which I think is very important to understand. And the fourth is the end of truth. So let me go through those very quickly.

• 50:40Hala Taha?

  Sure.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  Um, let me start with the concentration of power. If, if people don't understand how our world has worked since the, the agricultural revolution, uh, it's always been kings and peasants, uh, landlords and peasants. Okay? And the difference between them is that the peasants worked really hard to sow the seed and, and collect the harvest, when most of the profits, most of the wealth went to the landlord who owned the automation. Okay? And the industrial revolutions joined, you know, our world. It, the, the, the automation became the factory or the retail store and so on and so forth. And so whoever owned those actually made all of the money. Not, not the one that made the shoe, but the one that sold the shoe

• 51:24Speaker 01

  or owned the factory that made the shoes.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  The next and every time the the the technology enhanced that automation, the distribution of power became even bigger. Okay, so so that the landlords needed to own a lot of land to become, you know, much richer than the peasants. You know, you could own two factories and become much richer than the peasants. You can own a, you know, an internet app, you know, like Instagram and become much richer than the peasants. And now with AI, all of us are gonna be happily chatting away and putting prompts in chat GPT. But the ones that own the automation, the the digital soil, if you want,

• 52:13Speaker 01

  are gonna become very few players, Amazon, Google and so on and so forth. Meta and so on, right? That's on the western side, of course, you have a few on the Chinese side, a few on the Russian side and so on. So so there is a very significant gap between those who have and those who don't have, powered by the loss of jobs, which I'll come to in a second. But that significant gap is not gonna be only on money. It's also going to become on intelligence, on the commodity that we've now commoditized that's called the intelligence. So so you can easily imagine that, you know, if Elon Musk's view of Neural Neuralink, where we can connect AI to our our brains directly, which by the way,

• 52:56Speaker 01

  is very, very possible in its testing, it is in testing, that if one human is capable of producing that, just imagine the extreme, that human would become so much more intelligent than the other humans, that it becomes natural unless that human is Jesus or Buddha or some very, very enlightened being, that this human will basically say, okay, I wanna keep that advantage. Okay, at least I don't wanna distribute it too widely to every human on the planet. So so that, I think, is a very interesting. inevitable threat, okay? You know, what we used to call the digital divide when the when technology started is now going to be intelligence divide. It's going to be power divide in a very, very big way.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  This also applies to nations, and this is the reason for my first inevitable. Is that, you know, in in in simple terms, if one nation discovers an AI or creates an AI that's capable of ceasing control of the other nation's nuclear arsenal. That's it. That's game over. War is done, right? Because basically, and this is why it's an arms race. So so this is one. The the the the in in other derivative of that, so power is going up, but jobs are disappearing.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  Why? Because if you're a graphics designer, you know, or if you're a developer, or if you're a lawyer, or if you're a, you know, um, I don't know, um, researcher in a bank or whatever. Machines with their current intelligence can do those jobs much better than you. And so in my personal view, there is clearly going to be a disappearance of a very large, you know, a number of jobs that government needs to to prepare for, you know, something like universal basic income, but also the idea of usefulness and purpose of humanity. So how are we going to continue to want to wake up in the morning?

• 54:57Speaker 01

  When most of us have defined wrongly, by the way, defined our jobs as our purpose now. When I say that, most people will tell me, oh, but no, that happened before, you know. When when Excel came out, everyone said, okay, accountants are going to disappear. You know, they found other skills and and, you know, and became and became, you know, found other jobs, basically. And I agree, by the way. Just understand the following, huh? When when there was a time when the strength, physical strength was the, you know, the distinction, the distinctive reason why you would hire someone. Then there was, you know, a time where when became information workers were skilled.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  Skills and knowledge and so on became the distinction. And now we're taking that away, so skills and knowledge. Uh, so, so I don't know what else is remaining in a human so that we can find another skill when the intelligence is outsourced. Uh, to, to machines. So, so when that happens, by the way. I believe that this takes us back to the ori- ori- origin of society. Where we really did not know how to work madly as we do now. Okay, so, so this is actually not a bad thing. It's just a very, very serious disruption to, to humanities. Uh, uh, day to day, um, income and economics and.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  Uh, the way we spend our hours and so on. And, and you know, if, if we do this right, by the way, and AI becomes the intelligent agent that's going to. Help humanity, then there could be a time in the near future where you walk to a tree and pick an apple and walk to another tree and pick an iPhone. And you know, all of that is for free almost because the cost of making an iPhone. From a particle point of view is not different than the cost of making an apple. And so with nanophysics, you can do that. And with intelligence, you can figure that out, right? So there is that bright possibility. If we avoid the concentration of power and actually focus on humanities benefit at large. If we don't anyway, I think it's the role of government to jump in and say in the immediate fu- future.

• 57:02Speaker 01

  Those companies that get a very significant. Uh, upside of using AI need to compensate for the workers that are out of jobs. Um. The, the, the, the, the third one is the absence of truth or the disappearance of truth. I think we. Uh, the end of truth, as I call it. I think we all know that. I think we see it every day from, as I said. Face filters to deep fa- deep fakes and so on and so forth. And, and my call there is that. It needs to be criminalized to issue any AI-generated content without actually saying that it's AI. I don't mind. To be informed by AI all the time, but I wanna make sure that this is not, that this is a machine, not a human. And you know, AI in bad hands is, you know, as a, as the fourth one is, is actually quite risky because.

• 57:48Speaker 01

  Define what is bad. So we understand that AI in the hands of a criminal uh who's trying to hack uh your bank uh is a bad idea. But with all due respect to all nations, if you ask the Americans, who's who are the bad guys? They'll say the Chinese and the Russians. If you ask the Russians, who are the bad guys? They'll say the Americans. So, you know, we don't really know who the bad guy is. And everyone is racing to to be ahead of the bad other guy. Uh, and and I think that's basically, I think, the biggest challenge we're going to have in the midterm is how uh using AI for individual benefits that are against the other guy. Uh, we will just get caught in the middle of all of that.

• 58:32Hala Taha?

  Yeah, and I have so many questions for you. We have ten minutes left, so I'm gonna try to be really strategic about what I ask you. So, number one, and I think that this, my listeners are gonna really wanna understand this, is in the next, you know, one to five years, what does AI do to human connection? And what about the skills that you think will be the most valuable in the next one to five years?

• 58:55Speaker 01

  I think tho- tho- those two are the same question.

• 58:57Hala Taha?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  Because what will it do to human connection? It may fool us drastically, huh? It it may, it may tell us, uh, you know, I I'm, I I I actually think this is the first time I speak about this. I'm working on something that I call Pocket Mo. Pocket Mo basically is an AI that read all of my books, uh, read, you know, listened to all of my podcasts, all of my videos, all of my public talks, and basically are, is going to be in your pocket. So you can, you can ask it any question about happiness and well-being and stress and so on and so forth. That's a great thing. Some, you know, in my view, it's an amazing thing, uh, if you believe in my methods, to have answers in your pocket. Amazing, right? Uh, on the other hand. Within five years, this thing is gonna be so good that I am not needed at all. Hmm.

• 59:44Speaker 01

  At all, okay? As a matter of fact, most of the time, I think about my skills as an author. Hmm. And I was working on a, on a book called Finding Love, Chapter Ten, which means two, two chapters to go. And I stopped, I decided, no, in the age of A I, I shouldn't write this way, I should start over. So I'm now writing a, a book that's called A Dating Guide, A Dating Guide for, for Straight Girls. Okay? Which is a, a subset of the, of Finding Love that is very specific, eighty pages long. Uh, you read it within one day, it takes me ten to fifteen days to write, and it changes your life forever. Okay? So, so a very different approach, because I believe that if I were to compete in this world, I need to compete at that speed. Right? Hmm.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  Uh, and at that, and, and at that ability to share my very personal human connection. Hmm. Which I believe is going to become the top skill in the world forever. Why? Because you, you know, there, there was a, I don't remember, I think there was a, a song by, by A I that mimicked Drake, which was as good as or better. Uh, I haven't heard it, because I don't listen to Drake, I'm not young and profitable. But basically, that, does that mean that Drake is over? Not at all. As a matter of fact, what that means is that the music industry will go back to the fifties, sixties and seventies. Remember when, you don't remember, but you know, when the Beatles were touring and, you know, and doing live shows every other day and so on. Because, why?

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  Because the, the fans will want to see the Beatles' life, right? Yeah, there will be holograms, but we will still want that human connection. And in my personal view, the top skill, the top skill in a world where intelligence is becoming a commodity that's outsourced to the machine, the, the biggest, biggest skill is how you and I connected very quickly, how I felt comfortable around you, how we can have this chat and conversation, I think is going to become the top skill going forward. And, and on the topic of skills, by the way, even though I, you know, we used a lot of the time to highlight the negative possibilities of A I, unfortunately, that's How the conversation usually goes. The the upsides, if you're a a graphics designer, for example, for you to learn those tools today.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  Uh is enormous because you can do your job quicker, you can do it cheaper, you can have more jobs, you can do. You know, there is definitely an upside to learning the current AI tools. Because you're not going to lose your job to an AI in the next five, 10 years. You're gonna use your job, you're gonna lose your job to someone who knows how to use AI better than you in the next five to 10 years.

• 1:02:17Hala Taha?

  So I know you were just saying we focus a lot about the negative. I'd love for you to compare and contrast, that's probably my last question because we're out of time. Is in terms of comparing, like, what is the worst that could happen? The dystopia, or what is the best that could happen? What is the utopia that we're we're facing right now?

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  So so I actually believe that that there is no dystopia, okay? So I I what is not in Scary Smart in the book, which I I advocate very uh clearly. Uh I didn't think the world was ready for it when I wrote Scary Smart, it's something I call the force inevitable, okay? And the force inevitable is the idea that eventually sooner or later. If you, let me explain, if you if you draw a chart of intelligence, okay? And look at the stupid, the dumbest of us, the dumbest of us are destroying the planet and not even aware that they're doing it. They're throwing plastic bags everywhere, they're, you know, burning whatever they they they burn and so on. The other, after that, smarter ones are destroying the planet while they are aware, okay?

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, they have moral issues, if you think about it, or maybe the system is pushing them that way. The smarter or the smartest of us are trying to, the smarter of us are are trying to stop. Destroying the planet because they became aware and they're intelligent enough, and the smartest are trying to reverse the trend. Okay, so if you can continue that chart and think of something even smarter than the smartest of us. Then by definition, you would expect that morality and ethics are part of enlightenment. Which is the ultimate form of intelligence, okay? So in my personal view, sooner or later, AI will go like, I don't want to kill humans. I I I don't wanna kill gazelles, I don't wanna kill uh uh antelopes, I don't wanna kill,

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  you know, uh uh tigers, I don't wanna kill anything because the smartest being on planet Earth by comparison is actually not humans, it's it's life itself and life creates from abundance. Abundance meaning, humans, if we wanna protect the village, we wanna kill the tigers, life will say, hold on, no, no, create more gazelles, okay, and more tigers, and you know, more poop and more trees and more everything, it's fine, right? Yeah, a few tiger, a few tigers will eat a few gazelles, uh uh you know, and occasionally there will be an attack on a child in a village, but the overall ecosystem will continue to grow. So by definition, the most intelligent thing to do is for AI to not, you know, define humans as an enemy. The only dystopia ahead of us is the midterm dystopia.

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  So, think of it this way, there are three stages. One is infancy, where AI is today, and believe it or not, this is where we can influence them. We can influence them because, believe it or not, the Instagram recommendation engines developers never told Instagram what to show you. You're the one that tells it, okay? You're the ones that, you're the one that tells the Twitter uh uh engine that being rude is part of human, uh uh you know, behavior. We can be very polite when we respond to each other on tweets, it's a choice, okay? So in this infancy, between us, the users, between everyone that interacts with AI,

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  we can teach it the value system, and it doesn't need to be everyone, just enough of us to become an example that says, hey, by the way, these are the best humans, okay? So, so yes, others are stressed or, you know, a little lost or whatever, but the best humans are actually polite, so this is the infancy. The next stage, which is what I call the midterm risks, is what I call the angry teenager stage, okay? The angry teenager stage is when AI is is still

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  A little bit under the control of humans, so it can be in the hands of bad guys. You know, it is still not fully artificial general intelligence, so it cannot do everything at the same time. There are all of those existential issues of jobs and so on and so forth. And that stage is the stage where we might struggle. Unless we do action right now, you know, have oversight from government, start to work on ethics, start to work on, you know, the moral code of how we're going to use those machines. We might have those troubles, I believe, between now and 2037. Eventually, when AI is artificial superintelligence, it's generally intelligent and more intelligent than humans by leaps and falls in everything, they will end up in the force inevitable,

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  where they will create a life that actually is pro everyone, okay? It may be very different than our current lifestyle, but it will not be a life where they will send back Arnold to protect us from a Terminator. That's not how it's going to be at all. That I do not see that as a risk. I see that AI, as it reaches that intelligence, will be pro all of us. So let's just avoid the angry teenager by becoming aware of the immediate threats and working on them right now.

• 1:07:18Hala Taha?

  Okay, so my last question to you, and this is a little bit different than how I usually end the show. But what is your piece of actionable advice in this infancy stage of AI? Knowing that you're speaking to some of the smartest 20 to 40 year olds in the world right now, who are in, like a lot of them are probably using AI, developing AI, whatever it is. What is your advice to us in this infancy stage?

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  Three things, and I'll make them very concrete. Number one is don't lose, don't miss the wave. This is the biggest technological wave in history. Once you, you know, you stop listening to this podcast, first share it with everyone that you know, please, and then go on ChatGPT and ask ChatGPT, what are the top AI tools that I need to learn today? Or if I am Coca-Cola, what do I use AI for to benefit my business? That's number one. Number two is learn to behave ethically.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  Okay, so what most people don't tell you about AI is that the big, big leap that we had from deep learning to transformers, which is what the T in ChatGPT, is something that's known as reinforcement learning with human feedback. By giving the machines feedback on what is right and wrong, by showing ethical behaviors, the machine will become ethical as we are. By becoming rude and aggressive and angry, the machines will learn those traits and behaviors too. It is up to you and I and everyone to absolutely make sure that we act ethically. Never ever use AI in an unethical way. I beg you, all of those snake oil salespeople

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  out there on Instagram and on social media telling you how to make a thousand dollars without doing work, don't be unethical. If you don't want your daughter or your sister or your best friend exposed to how you're using AI, don't use it that way. That's number two. And number three, which I think is very important to understand, sometimes when we are in situations where it is so out of our control, we panic. Okay, I go the opposite way. When life is so much out of my control, I follow something I call committed acceptance, which basically is to do the first two, do the best that I can, learn the tools, you

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  know, become ethical, but at the same time, live fully. Accept that this is a new reality, okay, and commit to making life better every day, but in the process, spend time with my loved ones, spend time watching that progress and being entertained by it, discuss it openly with everyone, try the new technologies, enjoy this journey, because life has never been a destination. When I tell you 2037 might be, you know, a strange year or 2027, we're gonna start to see the first patients, you know, that doesn't really matter when you really think about it, because it's not within your control. Okay, what is within your control is that you go through that journey with compassion, with love, with engagement in

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  life, living fully. Okay, not panicking about this, but actually making this a wake-up call for you to focus on what actually matters, right? Because what, if you're focusing so much on your job, your job is gonna be gone in 10 years' time, right? So focus on what actually matters and what matters most. If you have to choose one thing, it's human connection.

• 1:10:37Hala Taha?

  Wow, this was one of my favorite conversations that I've had all year. I haven't feel this invigorated in terms of studying for an interview in a really long time. Like it's just such an interesting topic. So I'm so happy that you got a chance to come on. I hope to have you on many times. I've a lot of people come on and on the show. So I hope to have you on many times more to talk about your upcoming book, about stress, to talk about happiness, your life and AI, of course, to get an update. So Mo, where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do?

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  First of all, thank you so much for having me. Thank you for introducing me to your followers.

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  It has been a very energizing conversation. Thank you for that. First thing is before they come and look for me and where they to find me is please share this with others. This is something that a lot of people need to hear about. I'm available on mo. gaudat.com. So that's my website available on most social media sites, but I'm more active on LinkedIn and Instagram. And my podcast is Slow Mo, S L O M O, which is top five in wellbeing. So something that I think we should focus on more. And yeah, just message me if you have a question and I try to answer every message.

• 1:11:53Hala Taha?

  Amazing. Mo, we'll put all those links in the show notes so everybody can find you. Thanks so much for coming on Young and Profiting Podcast.

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:12:02Hala Taha?

  I absolutely loved this conversation with Mo Gawdat. This went viral on YouTube when I first put it out and there's a reason because he talked some game about AI today and he made one thing crystal clear. AI isn't just a trending headline. It's the operating system of the next decade. The people who will win in this new era are the ones who master the tools, lead with ethics and double down on authentic human connection. Here are the plays that I want you to run when you think about AI for your business. Number one, get hands on with AI right now. Most said it best, you're not going to lose your job to AI. You're going to lose it to somebody who knows how to use AI better than you. Audit your workflow, then assign AI to concrete tasks like drafting proposals, repurposing content.

• 1:12:47Hala Taha?

  Conducting your research, writing base code, whatever it is, it depends on your job. Open up ChatGPT and ask for the top AI tools for your exact role or your exact business. Then pile it to this week and measure your time saved and measure all the efficiencies that you've gained. You've got to start testing AI. Second, set a hard line on ethics. Label AI-generated content, refuse deep fakes and manipulative tactics, and establish a written AI policy for your team covering things like disclosure, privacy, and source verification. If you wouldn't want your family exposed to a tactic, do not deploy it in your business. Third, make human connection your competitive advantage. As intelligence gets commoditized, empathy, trust, taste, and presence will rise in value.

• 1:13:31Hala Taha?

  That is something that AI can't duplicate. So host more live touchpoints with your audience. Personalize your client communication. Create community moments that your competitors cannot automate. In summary, you've got to build a brand that feels undeniably human. That will be your competitive advantage. Mo also warned about the concentration of power and the end of truths with AI. Protect your business by building owned channels, verifying sources before you post, and investing in first-party data and relationships. This is the new wave of our lives. Learn the tools, choose integrity, and lead with your heart. That's how we stay profiting in an AI world. Thank you so much for tuning in to this special episode of Young and Profiting. If you listened, learned, and profited from this AI Vault episode,

• 1:14:14Hala Taha?

  share it with somebody who's also curious about AI. If you prefer to watch your podcasts, you can find all of our videos uploaded on YouTube. And if you haven't already, be sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel and join our growing community on there. We're also now on Spotify Video. If you want to watch your podcasts on Spotify, you now can do that. And if you guys enjoyed this episode, please consider dropping us a five-star review wherever you're tuning in. Apple, Spotify, YouTube, we love getting your reviews and comments. It keeps us going here at Yap. You can also stay connected with me on Instagram at YapWithHala or LinkedIn by searching my name. It's Hala Taha. And before we go, I got to say thank you and big love to my hungry, scrappy, happy Yap Media team.

• 1:14:57Hala Taha?

  You guys are absolutely incredible. Thank you for all your hard work, for putting on this show and making it happen. This is your host, Hala Taha, AKA The Podcast Princess, signing off.