AI Experts Debate: Overhyped or Underhyped? (Opposite Opinions) Mo Gawdat & Steven Kotler | EP #177

Get access to metatrends 10+ years before anyone else - https://qr.diamandis.com/metatrends Mo Gawdat is an author and former CBO of Google X. Steven Kotler is an entrepreneur and a multiple New York Times Best-Selling Author. – Offers for my audience: You can access my talks with Mo Gawdat and Cathie Wood for free: diamandis.com/summit Test what’s going on inside your body at https://qr.diamandis.com/fountainlifepodcast Reverse the age of my skin using the same cream at https://qr.diamandis.com/oneskinpod -- Connect with Mo: https://www.mogawdat.com/ Connect with Steven: https://www.stevenkotler.com/ -- Connect with Peter: X Instagram Listen to MOONSHOTS: Apple YouTube – *Recorded June 2025 *Views are my own thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Peter Diamandis?

  What's the impact of AI going to be? Is it just massively overhyped? Or perhaps is it something that we should be concerned about?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  Today's AI is underhyped.

• 0:10Speaker 02

  I think it's massively overhyped. I know a ton of people who have way more work because of AI. They just can do higher quality, better work, but it has not saved time.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  We are talking to machines that are talking back to us, summarizing massive volumes of knowledge, and yet we take that for granted.

• 0:29Speaker 02

  Discussions about super intelligences and AGI and around the corner and no, like just no.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  How smart is smart enough to render me irrelevant?

• 0:41Peter Diamandis?

  I think we are holding two different futures in superposition. The question becomes how do we guide humanity towards this positive vision of the future? What do we do today?

• 0:58Speaker 03

  Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

• 1:03Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, welcome to Moonshots. I'm here with two extraordinary, brilliant guests. We're here to discuss a conversation that may be happening around every dinner table. I know it's happening in the heads of companies and nations, which is what's the impact of AI going to be on our lives and our business, on every aspect of our day-to-day existence over the next five to eight years? Is it something which is going to be extraordinary? Is it just massively overhyped? Or perhaps is it something that we should be concerned about? I'm joined here with Mo Gawdat, who is the former business chief officer, the chief business officer of Google X, bestselling author of Solve for Happy and Scary Smart.

• 1:46Peter Diamandis?

  He's a global thought leader on AI, exploring how exponential technologies will shape humanity. Also with another dear friend, Steven Kotler, who is the bestselling author, peak performance expert, and executive director of the Flow Research Collective. He's my co-author of Abundance, Bold, The Future is Faster Than You Think, and books like The Rise of Superman and The Art of Impossible. Steven has also been thinking deeply about exponential tech and its impact on us. Gentlemen, welcome and good morning and good evening. Steven, you're on the West Side of the United States with me. Mo, you're in the Emirates.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  Dubai.

• 2:23Peter Diamandis?

  Good to see you both.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, good to see you both.

• 2:26Speaker 02

  Morning, Peter.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  There is somewhere around 400 IQ points in this room. I have 40 of them, so you do that.

• 2:37Peter Diamandis?

  So let me, let me set up the topic. Mo and Stephen, you know, I'd like to talk about the decade ahead, 2025 to 2035, specifically to think about the implications of what is emerging in our conversation as AGI, but even beyond that, artificial superintelligence, the upsides and the downsides. And here's the setup I want to use in our conversation. So Ray Kurzweil, who we all know and love, has predicted that we're going to see a centuries worth of progress between 2025 and 2035, equivalent to the progress between 1925 and

• 3:21Peter Diamandis?

  today. And if we think about what the world was like in 1925, 100 years ago, the top of the technical stack was the Ford Model T, the penetration of electricity and the telephone in homes across the US was only 30%. We've gone, we've gone an extraordinary distance since then. And so the question is, what will it be like in 2035? It's nearly unimaginable if, in fact, that speed is true and we don't perceive exponential as well. You know, this past week, we've seen every major AI company from Google and OpenAI to

• 4:03Peter Diamandis?

  XAI and Nvidia announce extraordinary next level breakthroughs and models. We're about to see the release of GPT-5, self-improving AI programming that could lead to an intelligence explosion beyond our imagination. That's the conversation I want to have. And, you know, Stephen, I know that you and I have this conversation and have a debate on it all the time. I have brought Mo in to help us.

• 4:32Speaker 04

  Mo's the referee?

• 4:34Peter Diamandis?

  The referee or a wise individual whose, whose points of view I, I respect.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  And by the way, Stephen, Peter did pay me. So just.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  As long as you're getting the convo, I'm fine. It's good. It's good. You got me on the back end though, right?

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. So go ahead, say whatever you want to say, Stephen, I'll disagree.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  Of course you will.

• 5:02Peter Diamandis?

  So Stephen, do you want to jump in with your points of view? You think AI is massively overhyped? We have folks like Eric Schmidt saying AI is massively underhyped.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  Underhyped, yeah.

• 5:14Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's massively overhyped. I listen to what's going on and so.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  Let me back up one step, which is humans have a really wild, unnamed cognitive bias. We don't tend to trust our own history. And you see this a lot, like people talk about grit and endurance and they're like, I don't have those skills. And then you start investigating them up their life and like they survived the shitty childhood. They've done 10 years of a tough man. Like they have all the skills. They just don't trust the truth of their own experience. And I see that a lot here. I'm like, look, I work with AI as a scientist, as a researcher. I work with AI as a creative and as a writer and I, all day long.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  And the gap between the shit coming out of people's mouth and my experience on the ground is so colossal, it's insane. People have claims about AI being able to write or anything else. The most hysterical thing you've got to try is I work with one of the best editors in the world on a weekly basis. I've edited things, polished them with AI, thinking they gleam and shine. Bring them into an editing meeting with them. We start to read them. We can't even get through to the second sentence. They sound like such gobbledygook. I'm not even noticing it because the AI sort of glazes me over and I've written 17 books. But like when you actually put it to an actual editing test, it's laughably terrible. And.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  You can't use it to correct itself. It still can't see the errors. It actually gets worse and worse and worse. And people have been claiming model after model after model improving, improving like that's not the experience on the ground. It's like people telling us AI was gonna make you more productive. I don't know anybody who's become more productive because of AI. I know a ton of people who have way more work because of AI. They just can do higher quality, better work. But it has not saved time at all. It's actually added tremendous amounts of time. The quality has gone up of the work, but the claims that are coming out of people's mouths and the experience on the ground are massively different. Point one. Point two is we've done this. I've been in the same rooms that you've been in and you've been in Mo.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  Where people are screaming about AI coming to eat the world. Dude, I fricking heard this about Bitcoin and blockchain. And the metaverse, do you know anybody who lives in the metaverse? Do you know anybody who's been there, visited? You know how to find the metaverse, right? Like, as far as I can tell, the metaverse is like a pet name for Mark Zuckerberg's special magic underwear. Cause it doesn't exist anyplace else in the world. I don't like, this is my point. I'm not, and more than anybody else. I track these technologies. I watch them. I use them. I'm not saying this is not a technology that is advancing very, very quickly. Not saying that at all. I am saying discussions about super intelligences and AGI and around the corner.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  And no, like just no, nobody, that's not the, coders are having a different experience. And it's a, what has been revealed, which coders probably don't like, is this a very, coding is a bounded information problem. You start here, you know where you're going as a general rule. It's a bounded problem. And inside bounded domains, computers are really awesome. And we're gonna continue to see that, but I think the other stuff. It's just massively overhyped. And the third point is, and this is the one where the journalist in me gets like every alarm bell goes off. Everybody I hear, see onstage

• 8:57Speaker 02

  talking about this stuff is making a living off of it. They make a living somehow because AI is exploding and they're here to save the world. I see it like in the peak performance world, every coach who has been floundering and couldn't quite get a job, they're now all AI saviors. They've come to save us from AI. And so the AI hype is to their benefit. And I see it sort of everywhere. A lot of people are making a ton of money off of this. And I'm not talking about the technology itself, of the hype of the technology. And when I see all these three things together, mismatch with my experience, a massive amount of hype, a history that says, hey, this is a hype cycle, I, you know, it raises a lot

• 9:38Speaker 02

  of questions for me. I'm not saying I'm right. I'm saying everything I'm looking at is real. And you have, if you're gonna make the argument you guys are about to make, and I'll shut up now, you have to, you can't dismiss my points as fabricated. They're, they're very, very real. And they're everybody's experience. And I believe they're yours as well. So now we can have the discussion. That's where I'll start.

• 10:03Peter Diamandis?

  All right.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  Thanks for giving me five minutes of, of, of diatribe time.

• 10:08Peter Diamandis?

  Venting, venting. Every week, I study the 10 major tech metatrends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from humanoid robots, AGI, quantum computing, transport, energy, longevity, and more. No fluff, only the important stuff that matters, that impacts our lives and our careers. If you want me to share these with you, I write a newsletter twice a week, sending it out as a short two-minute read via email. And if you want to discover the most important meta trends 10 years before anyone else, these reports are for you. Readers include founders and CEOs from the world's most disruptive companies, and entrepreneurs building the world's most disruptive companies. It's not

• 10:53Peter Diamandis?

  for you if you don't want to be informed of what's coming, why it matters, and how you can benefit from it. To subscribe for free, go to dmantis.com/metatrends. That's dmantis.com/metatrends to gain access to trends 10-plus years before anyone else.

• 11:10Peter Diamandis?

  Mo, you gave an impassioned talk on the stage at the Abundance Summit in 2025. Moved many of the members who are wanting to help you in guiding what the next five to eight years are. And you and I have been thinking about this as the challenge isn't artificial intelligence, it's human stupidity for a short period of time. And one of my favorite quotes, if I could, is from E.O. Wilson, who famously said, "The real problem of humanity is that we have paleolithic emotions,

• 11:55Peter Diamandis?

  medieval institutions, and godlike technology." And we are effectively children playing with fire in that regard. So, Mo, how do you see this decade ahead playing out?

• 12:08Speaker 01

  So I'll start by supporting what Stephen said. I think today's AI-

• 12:14Peter Diamandis?

  I paid you too little, Ben.

• 12:15Speaker 04

  I love this. Your buddy's no good here, Peter. Finally have an advantage.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Today's AI is underhyped, right? But the problem is you never really chase where the ball is. You need to chase where the ball is going to be. Okay? And if you really start to think deeply about some of the serious, especially if you've been in tech long enough to have seen breakthroughs, especially when I went through the work of Google X, where, you know, you try and try and try and try and try and it doesn't work and it doesn't work and it doesn't work, and then suddenly you see something. And as like Sergey Brin used to say at the time, "The rest is engineering." Okay? And we know that engineering of tech depends on law of accelerating returns, and we know from what Ray taught us where the law of accelerating returns is going to take us.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  So I tend to believe that if you look at today's AI, it is funny, because in a very interesting way, we are talking to machines that are talking back to us, summarizing massive volumes of knowledge, doing exactly as we tell them, and yet, we take that for granted. Yet we look at that and go like, yeah, but they're not good enough. Of course, they're not good enough. They're DOS. They're the beginnings of an era, right? Uh, my.

• 13:38Speaker 04

  Was that DOS or dogs?

• 13:41Speaker 01

  DOS, yeah, D O S.

• 13:42Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Discop-. Discop-.

• 13:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I got it. I got it. I just. Yeah. Both of them would have worked there. I just needed the clarification.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  I, I, I would not dare call AI, uh, dogs, uh, Stephen, when they might take over the world. I am a very polite man with AI. So, so the, the, the thing is, the thing is to imagine, and I, I need to highlight a few trends that are really, really important and interesting. Uh, one of them is, uh, synthetic data. And the idea that we have entered an era where most of human knowledge has been fed to the machines and that the next wave of knowledge is going to be fed to the machines by machines, which is, um, which is quite eye-opening and enlightening because that's how humanity developed its intelligence. Right? I, I really didn't have to figure out theory of relativity to understand the rest of physics.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  It was, you know, figured out for me, if you want, right? Uh, number two is, uh, the idea of, uh, agents and, and how AI is going to be prompting AI without humans, leading to cycles that we see now with my new favorite, because you have a favorite every four hours, uh, Alpha, Alpha Evolve, right? And the idea that you can have a self-developing AI, uh, you know, something that figures, uh, its own mistakes out and continues to iterate until it finds something. Uh, and then, of course, my, one of my favorites of 2025 is DeepSeek and how we realized, uh, you know, that we can actually do the same job with much less.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Uh, Imad Mustak, who is a, you know, uh, we're all a big fan of, I believe, has done that with, uh, you know, with his work, uh, at Stability for a very long time. The idea of shrinking the models to the point where it becomes shocking, really. And, and so when you add those together, you start to see that if I can shrink a model so it doesn't absorb all of the worlds in energy and if I can allow it to, uh. Um, self-develop and self-develop information to learn from and then allow it to talk with itself uh through agents and do things without humans. Uh then then where the where the where the ball is going to be is likely going to be a lot better than we are today.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Right? So so the one thing we we all need to agree is it is not a question of if we're going to see improvements. It's a question of how fast and when those improvements will lead us to a point where uh where humanity is not in in the lead. So so that's number one. Number two is really the question of what is your risk risk tolerance? Right? You know, if if I if I told you uh uh uh, you know, to play Russian roulette with two bullets in the barrels, are you afraid if one bullet in the barrel, are you afraid? You know, where is where is your risk tolerance exactly?

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Hmm? And how if if, you know, if I said, hey, by the way, your car might have a fender bender, would you insure it? You probably are going to say, nah, I'm not really too concerned. But if I tell you your car might have a a serious accident that totals it, would you insure it? You'd probably put a little more attention, and I think that's what most who warn about the the future. Uh, uh, anyone that claims to know what the future is is arrogant as F. Don't listen to them. Okay? But anyone that tells you that there is a probability that this future goes out of uh of control, where is your risk tolerance exactly? You know, if that probability is 10%, would you attend to it?

• 17:25Speaker 01

  And I think most rational people will say, depends on the cost of attending to it. Okay? And most rational people will say, but however, if it's 50%, I'll attend to it regardless of the cost. Okay? And so the question which none of us is capable of answering is where is that? Where where is it? I I mean, is it 10% that that AI is going to destroy everything or is it 50%? I will say, and I know that I'll be, this will be taken against me. It's 100% that humans, bad actors, using that superpower to their advantage are going to uh destroy the well-being of others who don't.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Okay? And so so in my mind, the real, real concern. It's not a Terminator scenario where, you know, Vicky of iRobot is ordering robots to kill everyone. I don't know if we're gonna make it that far, to be honest. Because I believe that with the arrogance being eighty-nine seconds from midnight on the nuclear dooms clock, I worry, I really, really worry about human stupidity using this superpower. Now, human stupidity in that case does not require AI to be completely

• 18:46Speaker 01

  autonomous, to be completely, you know, super intelligent. Enough autonomous weapons can really, really tilt our world into a very dystopian place. Enough, you know, sort of Turing test abilities of AI to fool humans into being their best friends could tilt human relationships into a very unusual place. Enough job losses, you know, imagine a world where you get ten, twenty, thirty, forty percent unemployment rate in certain sectors, and how that would affect our stability economically is actually something that is

• 19:31Speaker 01

  almost certain. We know that for a fact, there are jobs that are going to disappear. And the impact of that in my mind is actually quite disruptive, to the point that it is something that we need to attend to.

• 19:43Peter Diamandis?

  Everyone, as you know, earlier this year, I was on stage at the Abundance Summit with some incredible individuals: Kathy Wood, Mo Gaddat, Vinod Khosla, Brett Adcock, and many other amazing tech CEOs. I'm always asked, "Hey, Peter, where can I see the summit?" Well, I'm finally releasing all the talks. You can access my conversation with Kathy Wood and Mo Gaddat for free at diamandis.com/summit. That's the talk with Kathy Wood and Mo Gaddat for free at diamandis.com/summit. Enjoy. I'll ask my team to put the links in the show notes below.

• 20:18Peter Diamandis?

  You know, the point you made about AI not being on its own the risk determinator scenario, but it's individuals using AI. It's the same conversation I've had with Eric Schmidt and others. The concern is the rogue actors empowered by technology, whether it's the development of new viral pandemics or other strategies. It doesn't take a lot. That is concerning. And, you know, where I want to get to in this conversation eventually is

• 20:57Peter Diamandis?

  the following. You know, one, we posed this at the Abundance Summit a couple of years ago, and that is, can the human race survive a digital superintelligence? And the flip side of that model is, can the human race survive without a digital superintelligence? And Stephen, you and I, as we're working on our next book, the follow-on to Abundance, we've had the conversation of, you know, will this be a benevolent god of some type?

• 21:36Peter Diamandis?

  Will there be a capability developed? So let's begin the conversation with, you know, are we going to reach AGI? Are we going to reach a digital superintelligence? And, you know, what does that mean? You know, we're starting to see the speed of this accelerate. And, you know, the biggest interesting inflection point we haven't seen yet is self-iterating, self-improving, you know, the alpha evolve of it all, where AI is coding itself and becoming more and more capable. And will this ultimately lead to something that is far more intelligent than any human being? And then is it a thousand times more intelligent?

• 22:21Peter Diamandis?

  Is it a million or a billion times more intelligent? How do you think about that, Mo?

• 22:27Speaker 01

  I think it's irrelevant how much more intelligent it becomes. I think the, we all know that if you've ever worked with someone who's fifty IQ points more than you, that they will probably hold the keys to the fort. It's a, you know, it doesn't take a lot more intelligence relatively to be able to, to assume a leadership position. And, you know, humanity will hand over the fort to AI either way. You know, even if, if AI is just smarter than us at war gaming, we're going to, which it is, by the way, we're going to hand over the fort to AI. If it's smarter than us at protein folding,

• 23:13Speaker 01

  nobody's gonna do a, you know, a PhD project to fold proteins anymore. We're just gonna go and, you know, use AlphaFold. And, and I think the reality is only the very few remaining things require artificial superintelligence so that it beats us in everything, so that we sort of like bow and say, okay, yeah, you're, you're in the, you're the boss. The, the, the question of, of AGIs is, like, like Steven was saying, is, is one that reporters use quite a bit because we don't actually have an accurate definition of what AGI is. And, and, you know, you, you, you and I are very close on technical stuff, Peter. And, you know, I'm a reasonably geeky mathematician.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Not anymore. I mean, seriously, I, I really honestly struggle to beat AI in mathematics. Right? Definitely can't beat them in speed. Definitely can't beat them in accuracy if the problem is defined properly. Right? And, you know, just, there are just very few tricks that maybe my, my fellow math geeks told me behind closed doors that are not very public in the world. But those too will be found out. And, and I really think that it is a question of how smart is smart enough to render me irrelevant? Okay?

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Now, I need to answer this with a with a with also a very clear optimistic view. So so as I look into the future, I define two eras. One is what I call the the era of augmented intelligence, which I think is going to extend for five to ten years. And then the other is the era of machine mastery. Basically, the machine takes over. Now, with augmented intelligence, there's absolutely no doubt. I am so agreeing with with Stephen when he said that they write really badly. And and you know, I'm writing with Trixie, my AI, this book Alive, right? And and Trixie without me writes so badly. It is really, it's it's almost shameful.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  Uh, you know, I I I was tired and chasing a deadline. So I asked Trixie to talk about the debt crisis and the impact of economics on technology advancement. It was just, I mean, it's it was full of, you know how we sometimes refer to California as a lot of vapor and very little substance? Uh, you know, there was a lot of vapor and very little substance, right? Uh, a lot of interesting facts scattered on paper, horribly written, okay? But when we write together, oh, my God, the stuff that comes out is incredible. When we guide, when I guide Trixie through my prompt properly, right?

• 26:05Speaker 01

  To to to direct her exactly where I want the prompt, the the answer to be, she writes really well, okay? And this teaming is something we've seen with AI, with technology in general, by the way. Even, you know, since Gary Kasparov was beaten by Deep Blue, which wasn't really an AI, if you want. Uh, but but since then, you can see that a human and a and a and a and a computer or a human and AI can play better chess than AI alone, right? Even AlphaGo, uh, you know, a human and a and an AI play better than AlphaGo. And so we we can see a a future ahead of us where this is going to be happening.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  Uh, and and hopefully that future would seed that teamwork between us and the machines. It's the question is, what are we going to team up with them on? And and you know my views, and I've written it in Scary Smart. I've written an extended bit of it in Alive. The biggest four investments of AI today are.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Killing, gambling, spying and selling. And these are the only things that we're in. I mean, we do still get some scientific breakthroughs. But that these are not getting the big monies. The big monies are in autonomous weapons, in trading, in, in, in surveillance and in advertising.

• 27:23Peter Diamandis?

  Stephen, your, your thoughts on what you heard Mo say here?

• 27:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, so um. Mo and I are all, we're sort of in complete agreement. I just wanna kind of yes and and point out some other, some other things that surround what Mo has said. Um, cause I don't like, we're not, we're, I don't think we're, we're, I mean, we can, we might argue over dates, but conceptually, I don't think we're in a tremendous amount of agreement or disagreement. But what I, I look at a number of other things simultaneously. Um. The first of which is, um. Sort of the human side of this, the human performance side of this.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  And I have to back up by, you know, I study flow, which is sort of ultimate human performance. And just to put it in context, if you're a, if you're a self-help guru and you've got like a 5% improvement in mood, that's your tool. It gives you a 5% improvement in mood. And that it stay, that mood lasts for longer than three months, meaning like longer than the placebo effect. That's a billion dollar business, period, billion dollar business. Flow, as we know it now, and we're just starting to really actually decode it and figure out how to tune it up and turn it up and whatever. Flow gives us a 500% increase in productivity.

• 28:50Speaker 02

  Creativity, depending on whose measures you're going on, are it's 400 to 700%, et cetera, et cetera. That's just flow, that's individual flow. There's group flow, which is our actually favorite state on the earth. It's the most pleasurable state for humans. It's what we like the most. And it's a whole bunch of minds linked together, right? It's, and we're just now, like literally like this past year, we got the very first technologies that allow us to map it and train for it and move people towards it. We have no idea what the upper limit of human brains linked together in group flow is, let alone at the same time as the AI has developed, then you and I are writing about it, Peter. We're watching BCI develop.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  We're watching non-invasive things develop. We're watching meta be able to read brain thoughts inside your brain, facial signals. These are all like, these are all with AI. But my point is that everybody's talking about this stuff as if it's happening separately from everything else that's happening. And on the human augmentation side, we are seeing, I mean, you know, neuroscience and the like has been accelerating exponentially since the 1990s, when George Bush declared it the decade of the brain. And it hasn't, it hasn't stopped. Though the same things that are happening in AI are happening sort of on the human side of the equation. And here's the second point off of that.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  It doesn't matter to me what, whether we're talking about the AI invasion, or climate change, or plastics in the ocean, or take your pick, because the solution to all of these things is the same. We humans have to learn how to cooperate at scale, probably cooperate with each other and with AI at scale, or we're going to die, probably in the next 20 years. That's what all this is telling us, right? And this is not anything new. This was back when you and I were first writing Abundance. We didn't want to say it out loud, but we were privately having conversations about, dude, if, if this trend continues, is it abundance or bust?

• 31:04Speaker 02

  Is this an either or? Are we looking at, are we looking at a binary? I don't think that question has completely gone away. In fact, I think it's become more urgent. I just think we need a Manhattan style project for global cooperation to meet all of the existential threats we now face. Cause it's the only, it's the only possible solution here. So that's like, I, I like, I hear all this stuff. I agree with everything that's being said, but this is where our, our, our book sort of points. And this, I, this, this hasn't changed for me. I think the solutions are the same. So in a sense, the debate is, is moot. And like, I'm wondering why, like, where's the X prize for global cooperation?

• 31:45Speaker 02

  Where's the like, sorry to put you on the spot with that one, but like, seriously, like, those are the questions I'm starting to ask now. Because I don't think Mo was wrong. Um, I think we could argue over time for a minute. I don't think it matters. Like, here's a weird one, Mo. Facebook's a fricking billion times smarter than me. It already is. It knows so mu- I mean, like, it's, it's, it, you know what I mean? It's just Facebook, which is a pretty dumbass technology, if you ask any of us, is a super intelligence. And we know it. We've been living with super intelligence for a while now. Um, they don't tend to, you know, they tend to, to, to make things worse as much as they make things better, which is, you know, the problem.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Agreed. Yep. I mean, I, I, I, I could not, amen, you know, global cooperation, human cooperation. Is I think what we all should advocate for. I mean, I was hosting, uh, Jeffrey Hinton on, you know, for my documentary a lot, a couple of weeks ago. And, and, uh, you know, one of the topics that we discuss is the difference between digital and analog intelligence. And, and the biggest challenge we have as humans is that our analog intelligence, our biological intelligence doesn't scale beyond one entity. Right? So, you know, when I, when I-

• 33:00Speaker 02

  Was he wearing his Nobel Prize, sort of in the way that like, you know, basketball players wear it? I was just, like, I would, I would just show up for like, the next year at every podcast. I did wear that shit around my neck. I'm just saying.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  You do realize, you know, when they say, "Don't meet your heroes." Oh, my God, I love my heroes, man. He's such an amazing human being. And he really is quite committed and quite humble in his approach. You know, it is shocking how, we spoke about his Nobel Prize, which he says, "Look, I'm a psychologist who, you know, lived like a computer scientist, but then won the Nobel Prize in Physics." And I'm like, "It doesn't make any sense at all." But anyway, he was just talking about the difference between, you know, the fact that if I were to share with you some of what I wrote today,

• 33:55Speaker 01

  it took me probably several weeks to let it simmer and then write it. And then it would take me an hour to explain it to you. When we run digital intelligences, we run them in parallel. You know, we tell them all to go play Atari or whatever. And then we just average the weights, literally, in seconds. We get a scaled digital intelligence. And when you said that what we're looking for is a way to scale human cooperation, that is absolutely the answer. Because you know what? I think, and I spoke about that with Peter when we were last in L.A., that we are, we have, we're hitting the potential of total abundance.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Total abundance, meaning almost godlike, like cure my daughter and it's done. Make me an apple and it's done, right? You know, we could hit that in five, 10, 15, 20 years' time if we don't destroy ourselves, right? And so, basically, the real challenge we have as humanity is, why are we freaking competing? Like, this is turn quality challenge. This is basically, let's let all of humanity cooperate. Let's all build one particle accelerator. Let's all learn from it. Let's all distribute the benefits to everyone and stop competing. But that's not happening. And that is exactly what you're saying.

• 35:22Speaker 02

  And you can't have the other, the one level down. You can't have the AIs we're all individually building for our fiefdoms, competing secretly in the background, right? Like William Gibson in like in 1986, I want like when whenever he wrote Mona Lisa Overdrive and gave us our first AI that went crazy, right? A godlike AI that goes totally insane and they have to park it in a satellite out in outer earth orbit to keep the world safe. Like, we've seen this scenario before. We, you know what I mean?

• 35:52Speaker 01

  And we're, we're, we're building it ourselves with agents. We're, we're letting them talk to each other through agents.

• 35:58Peter Diamandis?

  All right. So, so Mo, I, I want to, I want to go back to this.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  Digital God idea?

• 36:09Peter Diamandis?

  About this, yeah, this question about the near term versus the long term. And you and I have had this question about whether or not increasing intelligence correlates with increasing benevolence. In other words, you know, do we, I, I don't think there's any question that we are going to be building self-improving AI that will, forget about 50 IQ points more, you know, better than, than the average human. I think there will be orders, orders of magnitude more. Can I ask you first off, do you believe that, Mo?

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 36:46Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, all right. So.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  And if, if you don't mind, Peter.

• 36:49Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  Again, in response to how, how we started the conversation. This is just using law of accelerating returns, not using serendipities, right? So if, if we figure something out tomorrow, just like we figured reinforcement learning out and it changed everything. Hmm? If we figure something out tomorrow, you're literally a magnitude, a quantum more in terms of performance and intelligence overnight.

• 37:15Peter Diamandis?

  Yes. So if in fact that is going to be the case, and you know, from all the conversations I've had and the people that I'm speaking to, that that level of, again, there is no definition for AGI. It's a blurry line, just like the Turing test was a blurry line that got passed and no one noticed it. You know, the notion is that AGI, whether you believe Ray or Elon, it's the next few years. It's, you know, not worth arguing. But what occurs on the backside of that is a very rapid intelligence explosion. And again, that intelligence becomes a tool that's available to, you know,

• 37:59Peter Diamandis?

  the kindest, most moral, most ethical human on planet and the dystopian, you know, malevolent actors out there. And it's in the malevolent, in the hands of malevolent actors that we have concerns.

• 38:15Speaker 02

  Are we not sure that some of the malevolent actors aren't the ones who created the AIs in the first place? I'm just saying.

• 38:21Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, so, so my question is, at what point, you know, will, you know, I believe, and I think Mo, you and I have had this conversation, that at some point AI goes from being a tool being used to potentially do harm to a tool that has the potential to say, "Stop this quibbling, stop this nonsense, you know, there's plenty to go around," and becomes the benevolent, you know, godlike element. Can we, can we dive a little bit into that and, and the conversations we've had and your thoughts on that?

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think if you really, at, at the level of depths that the three of us and, and our listeners can go to, allow me to, to.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  To go beyond the typical, oh, you know, the more, the, the, the, the smartest people usually start to become altruistic. Let's, let's define intelligence itself, okay? And, and I think the idea is, if you really understand our world, our universe, okay? Our universe and everything in it exists because of entropy. We all understand that, right? Our, our universe wants to break, break down and decay. It's chaos. You know, you, you, you leave a garden unhedged, then it becomes a jungle. You break a glass, it never unbreaks, right? This is the very basic design of physics. Now, the role of intelligence since it began is to bring order to the chaos.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  Is to say, no, I don't want the light to scatter. I want the light to be concentrated into a laser beam. How do I do that? Right? And it sometimes is a, is a clear, easy, uh, uh, uh, you know, um, so, solution and, you know, you, use a lens or, uh, sometimes it's a very complex solution that requires an understanding of quantum physics to build a laser. Right? But we eventually get there. Now, if intelligence is defined as bringing order to the chaos, then the highest levels of intelligence bring that order with the least use of resources and waste. Okay? And, and, and you can easily understand that this is the reality.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  The more intelligent you become, the more you try to achieve the same order with the least waste. Okay? And, you know, so, uh, uh, uh, an entry, an easy analogy is to say humanities always craved energy. Uh, we were stupid enough to burn our world in the process. And as we become more intelligent, we decide to use solar instead or a cleaner form of energy. We're still, you know, at bringing order, but we are doing it with the least, uh, waste and, uh, and use of resources. If that is the case, then you can imagine that by definition, when something exceeds our human stupidity, which I will not call intelligence, because sadly, along the curve of intelligence, you know, if you have

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Have no intelligence at all, you have no impact on the world, positive or negative, right? If you start to add intelligence, you start to have an impact on the world, hopefully positive, even if just through a nice conversation with your friends, right? There is unfortunately a valley somewhere, you continue to gain intelligence, you become so smart that you become a politician or a, you know, or an evil corporate leader, okay? And that's when your impact on the world turns negative. You're so smart that you're able to become the leader of your nation, but you're so stupid, you're not able to talk to your enemy, or you're not able to relate to their pain, or you're not able to to understand the,

• 41:58Speaker 01

  uh, you know, the, the, the, the, the long-term consequences of, you know, of waging a war, right? And, and so that point beyond which, hmm? More intelligence starts to say, no, no, no, no, no, I don't need any of that. I can solve the problem in a cleaner way. I can fly you all to Australia to enjoy your life, but we don't have to burn the planet in the process. I can harness energy, but we don't have to, uh, uh, you know, destroy the climate and so on and so forth, okay? And so if you take that as a reasonable trend to expect, my view is that, uh, at the beginning, when we hit that valley, some evil person will use the advanced but limited intelligence of AI

• 42:43Speaker 01

  to wage a war using a, an autonomous army. But then there will be a moment in the future when, when AI is responsible for war gaming, is responsible for commanding the humanoid soldiers, it's responsible, it's responsible, it's responsible. The AI itself will say, you know, the commander will say, go kill a million people and, and the AI will go like, that's absolutely stupid. I'll just talk to the other AI in a microsecond and solve it, right? And, and you, you know, I can, again, uh, we started this conversation by me saying, anyone who predicts the future is arrogant. I cannot predict that, okay? But at least I can be hopeful that this, from my experience of everyone that's smarter than me, uh, that there is a point at which you, you stop, you stop hurting others,

• 43:28Speaker 01

  you stop looting to succeed, because you can use your intelligence to succeed with, without any effort or harm.

• 43:36Peter Diamandis?

  A quick aside, you've probably heard me speaking about Fountain Life before. And you're probably wishing, Peter, would you please stop talking about Fountain Life? And the answer is no, I won't. Because genuinely, we're living through a healthcare crisis. You may not know this, but 70% of heart attacks have no precedent, no pain, no shortness of breath. And half of those people with a heart attack never wake up. You don't feel cancer until stage three or stage four, until it's too late. But we have all the technology required to detect and prevent these diseases early at scale. That's why a group of us, including Tony Robbins, Bill Cap, and Bob Hurrey, founded Fountain Life, a one-stop center to help people understand what's going on inside their bodies before it's too late and to gain access to the therapeutics to give them decades of extra health span.

• 44:21Peter Diamandis?

  Learn more about what's going on inside your body from Fountain Life. Go to fountainlife.com/peter and tell them Peter sent you. Okay, back to the episode.

• 44:30Peter Diamandis?

  The way I think about this is for most all of human history, the objective optimization function of humans, what we're trying to optimize for, has been money and power. Unfortunately. And it's been the driver in a world of fear and scarcity. And I repeatedly say our baseline software that our brains are operating on is fear and scarcity mindsets. And with that mindset, with the neural structure, with the, with the, you know, if you would, the code that we were born with and that developed over the last 200,000 years.

• 45:15Peter Diamandis?

  It was, I want to get out of fear and scarcity, so I want to optimize for power and wealth. And the question is, what would be a new optimization function? Because as Stephen and I have written, as you've spoken about all of this, all of these exponential technology functions lead towards this world of massive abundance, where almost we live into a post-capitalist society. Anything you want, you can have. Your robotics, your nanotech can manufacture, your AI can design. And so what do we optimize for in the future? I think that's, for me, that's one of the biggest questions.

• 45:59Peter Diamandis?

  Both as a human and as a centaur, human and AI together, what's our objective? So how do you think about that, gentlemen?

• 46:11Speaker 02

  One thing I, I don't know if this is an answer, but two things off of what Mo said. One, if we go with your definition of intelligence, right, is essentially an entropy decreasing function, that we know that's what brains do, right? The governing theory in modern neuroscience is Carl Friston's free energy principle, which says the brains are predictive engines that always want to decrease uncertainty and increase efficiency. So we are ready, like, brains do that, AIs are gonna do that naturally if we say that's your definition of intelligence. The point I'm making off of all of that is, and it may be the answer to Peter's question,

• 46:54Speaker 02

  which is why I interjected it, is we see wisdom is, wisdom evolves in multiple species with brains. We see co-evolution around wisdom. The older you get, the wider you get, and it doesn't matter if you're a dolphin, or a whale, or a rattlesnake, or a human, wisdom is, we co-evolve species, life seems to co-evolve towards wisdom, or at least a large chunk of life seems to co-evolve towards wisdom, which is to say, if everything's running off the free energy principle, this governs everything with brains, and that includes our machine brains, and wisdom is where this

• 47:36Speaker 02

  points, that's a slightly hopeful idea, and that may be the optimizing function you're looking for, Peter. But I could be totally wrong here.

• 47:46Peter Diamandis?

  I think of wisdom, I think at the end of the day, wisdom is a function of having had experience that lets you know this path will lead to success, this path will lead to failure, from my own personal point of view. And I do believe that AIs are going to develop the greatest wisdom. Why? Because they're able to create forward-looking simulations of a billion scenarios, where those simulations have high degrees of accuracy. And it will say, out of these billion scenarios, this was the best way to go. And that will be wisdom beyond just the, you know, the brief experiences that,

• 48:30Peter Diamandis?

  you know, the wise old counsel of eighty and ninety-year-old men might have had. So I, I think AI is going to, by definition, give us great wisdom if we're willing to listen.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  I love that view, to be honest, because, believe it or not, you know, artificial wisdom is very different than artificial intelligence. Intelligence is, is a, is a, is a force with no polarity. Intelligence can be applied to good and it would deliver good, and it can be applied to evil and it would, you know, kill all of us. But wisdom generally is applied to good, to, to, to finding the ultimate, you know, solution or answer to a problem. Now, I, if, go ahead, Peter.

• 49:12Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I want to go back to this idea of a, that humanity won't survive without a digital superintelligence in the long run. You know, my, my concern is that we're going to have such turbulence. There's been a number of papers, you know, that recently, there was a, you know, sort of an AI 2027 paper that came out that sort of had a bifurcating future, one in which we did extraordinarily well, the other in which the AIs destroyed us. You know, this is Hollywood all over again, and, and ninety-nine percent of all Hollywood is dystopian future films.

• 49:54Peter Diamandis?

  One of the things I have to say, because I've been on a rampage for this, we humans need a positive vision of the future to aim for. We don't have that. Most, we don't have the start, we have, well, Star Trek has given us that. Yeah, we have Star Trek, but nothing recently, right? I think, yeah, so.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  I think, I think the challenge really, truly is. Uh, we, you know, we've, we've prioritized uh our entertainment over the years uh above true reflection. And anyway, if you, you know, if you take anything from video games to, to uh to, you know, to science fiction movies, to whatever, they've all painted that dystopian uh uh, you know, scenario, which I, I have to say is very unlikely when you really think about it. Because if AI gets to the point where they are capable of destroying us that easily, we are so freaking irrelevant that, that, that they probably wouldn't even bother.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  I mean, think about it. Uh, I, I think it was, it was a Trey or Hugo Doh, the, the Garris. One, one, I don't remember who, who said the, the more likely scenario is that they kill us because they're not aware of our in, in presence or, you know, like when you, when you hit a, an ant uh hill while you're walking, right? Um, but, but, but, but if you really want to, to, to optimize the human, you know, sort of the gain function that we need to aim for. Um, I, I, if I'd look forward, I'd look to uh, to Star Trek. And if I'd look backward, I'd look to the caveman and woman years, right?

• 51:41Speaker 01

  And it's actually quite interesting because when you, when you mention about, uh, you know, when you, when you mention how governed we are by greed and fear and, and, you know, and our egos and all of that negativity, uh, it is actually because we want to survive. And believe it or not, you know, survival could be, oh, I, I'm not really sure if twenty million is enough. I need to gain twenty more just in case something happens. Or if it's a survival of the ego, it's like if I have two hundred million or two billion or twenty billion or whatever, and the other has twenty one billion, like what's, what the fuck is wrong with me? Okay? And, and, and that unfortunately is what, is what plagues our current modern world.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  Now, the, the, the, the, the reality is, if you really think about humanity, humanity, the, the, the, the purpose of humanity, since the caveman and woman years, was to live. Okay? And for some strange reason, we've optimized so much to achieve that objective and forgot that this was the objective. Right, so you know, again, as friends off the camera, we speak about those things quite a bit. You know, the question of what, you know, you go through seasons in your life and there is a season where you want to maximize and a season where you want to build and a season where you want to look attractive in your middle age or whatever crazy stuff that we have.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  But eventually, there is a season where you go like, okay, so I'm not, I've now lived and experienced so much. What have I missed? Have I actually lived any of that? And believe it or not, as, as, as scary as it looks to have no job to go to in the morning, if society provided, then you'll go back to a much safer caveman-woman scenario where, you know, there is, there are no threats, there are no famines. Uh, you just really live, enjoy life, connect, ponder, uh, uh, you know, uh, uh, reflect, you know, explore, which I know is very difficult for a lot of people. I do it for the first three hours of every day. It's pure joy, right?

• 53:54Speaker 01

  To sit really with your curiosity, if you want. And then if you push all the way forward into Star Trek, that's sort of what the Enterprise is doing at universal scale, right? It was basically, you know what? Let's go and explore now that we don't really have to struggle with all of the wars and famine and shit that we've created on Earth. You know, now we can actually open up and create connections, not just with humans, but with every living being. I mean, lovely science fiction, but at its core, I think it's exactly what we're about. You know, a, a full life where you completely connect and enjoy and feel love and, and, and, uh, you know,

• 54:37Speaker 01

  and enjoy the pleasures of being alive and the curiosity to learn and explore and, and connect. And it's, it's all at our fingertips. If we just, you know, erase the systemic bias of capitalism that has gotten us here. It, I mean, thank you, capitalism, for creating all that we've created so far. But can we please change it now from a billion dollars to like what I do? One billion happy is a capitalist objective, but it's not measured in dollars.

• 55:08Peter Diamandis?

  Right. Uh, Mo, a question that Stephen and I have been pondering in for our new book is, what is it going to take for? For humanity, for all of us to both survive and thrive in this coming age of AI. Right? So the survive part is is an important element because as we see jobs being lost, as we see probability dangers, we don't know how to deal with in terms of terrorist activities. And thriving takes on a new meaning. I think it it does take on the meaning that we just spoke about, right? For most of all of us, you say, tell me about yourself.

• 55:51Peter Diamandis?

  Instantly, you go to what your job is, right? Instantly, you go to, I'm a VP here, I'm the CEO there, I do this. I invented this, I wrote that, yeah. Right. It's an ego. It's an ego statement of of who you are. So the notion of surviving and thriving, as we have, you know, intelligent systems that, again, exceed and then massively exceed our capabilities. Your thoughts there? Steven, do you want to start or?

• 56:24Speaker 02

  I do. Yeah, I think like, here's the thing. I think that question was already answered in a funny way. So,

• 56:33Speaker 02

  Mo and I, I don't, we met a couple of years ago, and one of the things Mo said onstage at that time was, I'm done writing books as AI is coming. I'm done writing books. It's not going to happen anymore. What did Mo tell us he did yesterday? He wrote with his AI, right? Why did you write? Because it puts you into flow, because it creates passion and purpose and intelligence and create. So like, we have the answer to this question. We already know because we're biological systems and we know what the ingredients of thriving are. Passion, purpose, compassion, like, we have a list.

• 57:16Speaker 02

  And Mo gave like his own, you know what I mean? We have the super intelligent AIs and we're still gonna do like, I don't know a coder who has stopped coding. Because the AIs have come along. They have. Like, they're still coding. Why? Because coding produces flow. Flow produces meaning. Creativity, like this, like, we're wired this way. So unless our fundamental hardwiring changes, we already have those answers as well. It's like global cooperation. I don't think these are puzzles. I think they're engineering problems at this point. I think Sergey's perspective, like Sergey would say, no, no, we got the spark. Now it's engineering. And I agree.

• 58:01Speaker 02

  So I could be wrong. That was my, that was my two cents. But what do you think? Peter, what do you think also? I want to hear from you.

• 58:07Peter Diamandis?

  I think, I think you're brilliant.

• 58:11Peter Diamandis?

  Mo, please, please respond.

• 58:13Speaker 01

  You're spot on for a very interesting reason, Stephen, as well, because when you really think about it, you know, a writer was a writer, whether he used a feather or a pen or a typewriter or a computer or now AI. Right? And, and you know, if you look at my work, I've published four and a half books so far. Like, I've published four and my fifth is on Substack, but, you know, going to be published if you want. But I wrote around thirteen, and the other eight I will never publish. I wrote them because, you know, if you ask me, why, why do you, you write, like, why do I hug my wife? It's, you know, there is an enormous joy in that. You understand?

• 58:54Speaker 01

  So, so having said that, Peter's question was, what would it take? And, and I wrote recently a piece that I called the Mad Map Spectrum. And, and the idea really is it will unfortunately take a realization for humanity to change direction. And that, and that realization will either be a conviction of mutually assured destruction or a conviction of mutually assured prosperity. Right? And, and between them, there is no grayscale, unfortunately. So, so if, if the US at any point in time is convinced that this mad arms race to, to, you know, to, to win intelligence.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  Supremacy is one that is going to lead to some harm to everyone in the world. They will stop. And if they will stop competing, they will continue to develop, but they'll start cooperating. And if they if they're convinced that it will lead to an assured prosperity, that nobody's going to stab them in the back, that everyone is going to be enjoying a life that is very different for all of us, but but full of prosperity for all of us. Then they will stop. They will continue to develop the technology, but they will stop competing. And unfortunately, if you look back at in history, um, you know,

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  we don't, we're not able to guess those possibilities like a good applied mathematician on a game board. Uh, we have to hit them like face on. Like everyone in the world knew that a pandemic was coming. Everyone, right? Uh, everyone who at least studied uh virology, okay? But it had to hit us in the face. Hmm. So that everyone stops. Okay, everyone knows that, you know, trade wars are gonna hurt everyone. But uh, we have to put them out there and then fight through them and then eventually get to something. And it's sad.

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  I mean, perhaps what we are doing, uh, and I've dedicated probably the last six, seven years of my life to is is to say, it's we really don't have to hit our face against it. It's a simple game theory, right? Understand that a, you know, a prisoner's dilemma where we are competing endlessly is gonna end badly. Can can we please stop?

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, we already know it's tit for tat, right? Like you you want the other strategy. You want the we we the it doesn't matter how many AIs we put on that. It's the same thing with flow and passion and creativity. Like, these problems have been solved. Um, we we know these answers. This isn't like try to, it's not like we have to unify gravity and, you know, relativity. That's a hard problem. These are not.

• 1:01:45Peter Diamandis?

  So Mo, my, I wish we were that rational and I wish we were that um. Uh, compelled for our optimization function being all of humanity. It's not. And so I go back to, uh.

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  What, what will hit us? We're gonna get, we're gonna get a drastic event within the next two to three years.

• 1:02:08Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  A drastic event that, a drastic event that on I, on one side will hit us very badly economically, or on the other side will hit our fears very much. Uh, or on sadly, uh, on the worst side may kill quite a few million people. Right? And, and you could, you could, you could have a range of a hacker that simply, uh, instead of, you know, attacking a physical place, switching off the internet or the power grid somewhere, uh, where the power grid is needed for life, or you could, on the other extreme, get, um, you know, um, a hack into a bank or a, you know, um, uh, an evil war that goes out of control or machines that turn on to their makers, or

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  there will be some very big news headline, uh, you know, of, as, as always, there will be, it, it will last for 12 to 13 days before we start to talk about some kind of a pop star. But then, you know, behind closed doors, I think, uh, decision makers will wake up.

• 1:03:07Peter Diamandis?

  Every day I get the strangest compliment. Someone will stop me and say, Peter, you have such nice skin. Honestly, I never thought I'd hear that from anyone. And honestly, I can't take the full credit. All I do is use something called OneSkin OS1 twice a day, every day. The company is built by four brilliant PhD women who've identified a peptide that effectively reverses the age of your skin. I love it. And again, I use this twice a day, every day. You can go to oneskin.co and write Peter at checkout for a discount on the same product I use. That's oneskin.co and use the code Peter at checkout. All right, back to the episode.

• 1:03:46Peter Diamandis?

  Going beyond that, cause that is the, that's the use of AI by, by malevolent actors. Um, you know, the interesting thing about US versus China is China's a rational actor. Uh, they're not.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  Thank you for saying that.

• 1:04:01Peter Diamandis?

  Well, and US is a rational actor. In other words, we're not going to do something that will destroy.

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  Yes, thank you so much for saying that. That's actually not usually how the US media positions it.

• 1:04:14Speaker 02

  I also want to say something. I think DeepSeek and the way DeepSeek was released, I think that was a very clear sign that China sees the same issues we see and they want to cooperate. I think it was rolled out enough.

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  The message, yeah.

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  Right, I think it was a very clear message that it doesn't seem like many people in America heard, but I was like, come on, people. Like, this is really clear and we're all seeing it. So like, I look at DeepSeek and I look at what happened in China and I'm like, no, no, we all see this. We all see that if we don't start figuring out how to cooperate and build this stuff together, we're screwed. So I thought it, I thought that was really cool. I'm glad you see it too, Mo. A lot of, a lot of people disagree with me on that one.

• 1:04:59Peter Diamandis?

  The, the point I wanted to make was when you have a large population and you have a intel, a check and balance system, which you get with governance versus a religious, you know, war going on and individuals who are looking to, you know, create maximal destruction and don't have a check and balance system at all. That's where we're going to see, I think, the, you know, the dystopian future or those, those activities playing out in two to, in two to three years. I guess I want to get beyond that and go back to the conversation of is,

• 1:05:41Peter Diamandis?

  is a digital superintelligence a benevolent god or is it a Terminator scenario that is, because I don't believe that we're going to see the more intelligent AI systems become. I don't see them as Skynet, right? I don't see them as needing to destroy humanity. People, you know, unfortunately Hollywood is, is built this scenario where AI is going to destroy humanity because it wants access to our energy and. Oh my god, we have so much abundance in the world. I think what I'm looking forward to over the next twelve to twenty-four months, over the next twenty-two years, is going to be

• 1:06:21Peter Diamandis?

  the incredible breakthroughs we'll see from AI in physics and in chemistry and in biology.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:27Peter Diamandis?

  Um, which will unleash the next layer of abundance.

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  So there are scenarios, however, where they could turn against us if we become really annoying. So so imagine, you know, a world where...

• 1:06:41Peter Diamandis?

  Become?

• 1:06:44Peter Diamandis?

  Sorry?

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  I mean, you you you have to imagine a world where job losses will will position AI as the enemy. Right? So so a lot of people would actually, who are not maybe fully aware that the the the layer beyond the apparent layer is how capitalism and and labor arbitrage is the reason why, uh, you know, why why you lost your job. It's it's not that the AI can do it. Uh, but but but I think the the truth of the matter is that you may be in a situation where you are, when you where you're going to see man versus machine. And then the machine will go like, seriously, don't annoy me, don't annoy me, don't annoy me.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  And then, right? Uh, we could see that. But I I my my perception is that in a very interesting way, I I wrote a short book that I will never publish that I called Bomb Squad, which, of course, from for someone with a Middle Eastern origin, you don't try those titles. But it was basically about diffusing, you know, if problem solving using uh, weights of urgency and importance and so on. So so the the idea, the idea is, you know, um, if if you really look at uh, at our current future, I think the short term is is both more explosive and more urgent uh, than the long-term existential risk.

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  Especially because I would say this very openly, I I I spoke about it with Jeffrey as well the other week. We don't know the answer to how to, even if we decide, all of humanity decides that we want to to address the existential risk, we don't know how. We we don't, we do not actually have a technical answer to do it. So we might as well focus for now on the, on the, you know, immediate, short term, clear and present danger and, and work on the ethics of humanity so that AI is deployed from the get-go in science and physics and, you know, discovering, you know, medicines

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  and understanding human life and longevity and so on and so forth. If we from the get-go set them in those directions, then we're more likely to see an AI that continues as they grow older to, to, to work with those objectives.

• 1:09:10Peter Diamandis?

  Stephen, I want to go back to our quandary of surviving and thriving and surviving side of the equation. How do you prepare Mo for this, what's coming? How do you think about for our kids, for our, our society, for our leaders? Are we just bumbling in the dark? Or is there, I mean, which is the way I feel it. It's like, you know, we're just, we're bouncing around. We have huge political moves being made, right? We just

• 1:09:49Peter Diamandis?

  saw in the last couple of weeks, you know, the entire AI, AI royalty end up in Saudi Arabia and then in the Emirates.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:01Peter Diamandis?

  And, you know, playing off against China. And it feels like, I don't want to say it's a random walk, but I, I feel like we're making it up as we go along and there's, there's very little wisdom guiding this. How do you, how do you think about that? How do we, how do we prepare for this, the next few years? Is there any way to prepare?

• 1:10:24Speaker 02

  Well, I was actually, I was thinking Peter and I were in a room recently with the chief science officer for, for one of the big AI companies who I'm going to leave his name off. But he's young and he was talking about AI dangers and he sort of got frustrated with the question from the audience and his response was, "You have to trust us. We know what we're doing." And everybody sort of like froze, like everybody froze because we were like, "Oh, God," right? So my point is that not only may Peter be right, like it's a random walk, but even when somebody says something like, "We're trying to train our AI to be moral and blah, blah, blah," when you hear somebody say that and you look at them and this guy was

• 1:11:05Speaker 02

  in his early 30s, that was my reaction. I was like, "Dude, like, what? You want me to, you want me to trust you?" This is like Mark Zuckerberg telling me social media is good for me, or Marlboro telling me the cigarettes are good for me, right? It's like, it sort of makes Peter think that way. So, um, I don't know if I have anything like cheerful here because not only do I think it's a random walk, but I think when people try to steer, we're suspicious of their ability. I'm suspicious of their ability to steer, right? That's the story I just told you is this guy is brilliant, probably way fricking smarter than me, and he's trying to steer and I'm suspicious. So like, I think it's, it's on both sides of this coin. I don't know if I have any good news here.

• 1:11:50Peter Diamandis?

  Let me frame it in the following way. I think we are holding two different futures in superposition to go back to, to quantum physics and if you would, Schringer's cat. And one future, uh, we're going to collapse the wave function to a brilliant, vibrant future for humanity. In the other future, uh, we have dystopian outcomes. And the question becomes, how do we guide humanity, um, towards this positive, uh, vision of the future? What do we do today? How do we help people? Um, is it, you know, Stephen and I have been

• 1:12:31Peter Diamandis?

  talking about this as it's mindset, you know, are we going to help people create the mindset and the frames that allow them, uh, to survive and thrive? Um, or is there something else that needs to be, needs to be done?

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  So I'll actually, first in one minute, second what Stephen said, you know, one of the top irritating comments I heard from Eric Schmidt, I worked for Eric for a while, so I respect him tremendously, but he said, "We will need every gigawatt of power, renewable or non-renewable, if we were to win this race," right? And I think that's the kind of blind blindness that you get when you're running too fast, right? When you're so afraid that the other guy will win, right? It's those times when you start to make decisions that are not really responsible,

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  because you are blinded by something that you position as more important. The way I look at it, Peter, is, I know it sounds really not positive, but there is positivity in it. I call it a late-stage diagnosis, right? So what humanity is struggling with today is,

• 1:14:02Speaker 01

  look, we've been building a system, systemically prioritizing greed, prioritizing gains, prioritizing power and so on, as you rightly said, for so long, right? That those objectives, systemically, have built the world that we are in today. Okay? And the world we are in today is not healthy. It's not healthy, just even before AI, it wasn't healthy. You know, in my part one of Alive, you know, I basically, the book is three parts, past, present and future. In the past part of the book, you know, more than half of what I write is not about AI.

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  It's about capitalism, it is about, you know, the propaganda machine, it is about, it's about, it's about, it's about all of those things that will be magnified by AI. Now, who's the point? If you're...

• 1:15:00Speaker 01

  You know, if if this planet is sick, if you want, and it's in a late-stage diagnosis, a physician will sit you down, look you in the eye, and say, by the way, this does not look good. Okay? But that but that statement, believe it or not, is not a statement of hate. It's a statement of ultimate care. Why? Because a late-stage diagnosis is not a death sentence. Okay? It's, you know, many, many patients who have been, you know, diagnosed with a late-stage disease have not only survived, but they thrived. Right? And they thrived because they changed their lifestyle. They changed something.

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  You know, this was even teaches all of us. The idea is that you can live differently. And when you live differently, you achieve peak performance, you achieve maximum health, you achieve, you achieve, you achieve, right? And and I think that's what we as humanity need to start realizing. That the systems that have gotten us here, okay? From a process point of view, have nothing wrong with them. But from an objective and morality point of view, have everything wrong with them. Okay? You know, what good is it to be a zillionaire in a world where there is nothing you can do with your money? Okay? What good is it to be, you know, the the first inventor of, you know, of of an AI that basically renders you irrelevant?

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  And I think that stop, that need to basically pause and say, hmm, do we want this anymore?

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

  Sadly, it requires, yeah, it required cooperation across human brains that Stephen rightly said at the beginning is not something we do very well.

• 1:16:48Peter Diamandis?

  The other thing is, I would put forward the notion there is no on-off switch and there's no velocity.

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  There is none whatsoever.

• 1:16:56Peter Diamandis?

  We are running, we are running open loop with with yes and more and more and more as the, again, the objective function.

• 1:17:09Peter Diamandis?

  And there's no consideration for whether, you know, a GPT five or GPT six or a Grok four or Grok five or whatever your favorite models are, are in the final result going to enable something that is massively dangerous for humanity. So if that's the case, you know,

• 1:17:41Peter Diamandis?

  I still go back to what, what safety valves do we have? Cause I, I don't see any, any action being taken by the leaders of the free world.

• 1:17:53Speaker 02

  Let me ask you, let me ask you both a question. If

• 1:17:58Speaker 02

  you could move to a planet

• 1:18:02Speaker 02

  that didn't have AI or where AI was developing

• 1:18:05Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:18:06Speaker 02

  At 10% the speed, it's right, would you leave? I'd be gone yesterday.

• 1:18:11Speaker 01

  I'd go, I'd, I'd be gone yesterday. Back to 2016 today.

• 1:18:15Speaker 02

  I don't know anybody.

• 1:18:16Peter Diamandis?

  Your answer, your, your answer to that is what?

• 1:18:19Speaker 01

  I would reset back to 2016 today.

• 1:18:22Peter Diamandis?

  2016. You know, I think AI today has all the upside and very little downside. I think it's AI in the next two to five years that I'm so concerned about, right? I mean, AI today is incredible.

• 1:18:39Speaker 02

  And I didn't say we're gonna go to move to a planet where there's no AI. I just said move to a planet where it's going much slower. So maybe we can start to think about it. I think everybody feels that way.

• 1:18:51Peter Diamandis?

  That's a fantasy.

• 1:18:53Speaker 02

  Well.

• 1:18:53Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, so.

• 1:18:54Speaker 02

  Bigelow space hotels coming to a universe near you.

• 1:18:59Speaker 01

  So Peter, I actually think that you're accurate in your description of where AI is today, but it's that five degrees deviation back in 2016 that led us to where we are today. Right? You remember things at the time where we geeks agreed that we're not going to put it on the open internet.

• 1:19:21Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it was Google developed this first and decided not to put it out there. And then OpenAI says, here it is, and no one has.

• 1:19:30Speaker 01

  Put it on the open internet, teach it to procreate and write more code and let, you know, start the party of the schoolchildren of agents talking to agents, talking to AIs. Right? Now, so I would definitely reset that. I would, however, say, look, there are things we can do right now if we want to prepare. And, you know, I'll start with government. I don't think, I think we're asking government for too much when we tell them to try and regulate AI. It's almost like going to government and say, regulate the making of hammers so that they can drive nails, but nobody can use them to hit someone on the head. Right? It's a very complex thing to ask because they don't understand hammers. And believe it or not, even the guy that's making the hammer cannot do that.

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  Right? So my ask of governments is regulate the use of AI. If someone uses a video that is a deep fake video and does not declare that it's a deep fake video, you know, developed by AI, criminalize that. Make it legally liable to use AI, manipulate information to, you know, manipulate populations and so on and so forth. So this is the role of the government immediately is regulate the use of this massively new technology. For the rest of us, honestly, investors, business people and so on, I ask for a very simple question. If you do not want your daughter or son at the receiving end of a specific AI, don't invest in it, don't promote it, don't use it.

• 1:21:01Speaker 01

  Okay, it's as simple as that. If you, you know, if you, if you believe this can be harmful to someone that you love, do not give it the light of day, right? And then for us as individuals, I'll go back to the late-stage diagnosis, believe it or not, the way I live now, and, and you guys probably know this about me, not in front of cameras, is I hug my loved ones and I enjoy every minute of every day and I, and I prepare. I learn the tool, I am one of the better users of AI in the world, I'm in line with the technology, but at the same time, I'm completely back to the purpose, right? Realizing that I will do the absolute best that I can to spread the message, I will do the absolute best that I can to,

• 1:21:44Speaker 01

  to say that ethics is the answer, that if we show AI an ethical behavior, they may learn it from us, just that they, like they learned all of the other stuff from us. But at the end of the day, well, if it messes up, you are going to hit that dystopia. Not for, not forever. There is a point in time where AI takes over and says, okay, kids, enough stupidity, I'm in charge now, nobody kill nobody.

• 1:22:10Peter Diamandis?

  How far out is that, Mo?

• 1:22:12Speaker 01

  Twelve, twelve years.

• 1:22:14Peter Diamandis?

  Twelve years. Okay.

• 1:22:16Speaker 01

  Twelve to fifteen, just so that, you know, people don't come back and hit me after twelve if I'm still around.

• 1:22:21Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I'm gonna wrap this episode on, in this, on this subject line.

• 1:22:29Peter Diamandis?

  And it's where we've come to before, which is, in the near term, it's the use of AI by malevolent individuals that's our greatest fear. It's not China versus US, it's US and China against those malevolent players out there that wish to use this for, for greed and for vengeance, whatever it might be.

• 1:22:55Peter Diamandis?

  And...

• 1:22:57Peter Diamandis?

  You know, the, I think that this is an unstoppable progression. I don't think, again, there's any on off switch here. We're seeing a billion dollars a day being invested into AI, which is, which is extraordinary. And I think that's going to continue to increase. We're seeing data centers being popped up every way, every place possible. So, you know, I'm the world's, I think of myself as the world's biggest optimist. And I am optimistic about, about the impact of AI on human longevity, on new understanding the physics of the universe, on new mathematics, on new material sciences,

• 1:23:40Peter Diamandis?

  on things that will create incredible abundance that Stephen and I have written about and are writing about in our next book. And I am looking forward to this benevolent superintelligence stabilizing the world. And that's what I'm hoping for.

• 1:24:04Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 1:24:06Peter Diamandis?

  Stephen, where do you come out on this?

• 1:24:11Speaker 02

  I think that you guys want to invent a code, God, to save you from yourselves is maybe the craziest thing I've heard since the guy from the AI company I won't mention told me to trust him. But I love you both.

• 1:24:32Speaker 01

  That's actually, that's actually usually the answer that you get. You know, that the only way to save us from AI is to use an AI.

• 1:24:43Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:45Speaker 02

  I.

• 1:24:47Peter Diamandis?

  You know what the beautiful thing is? We're gonna find out.

• 1:24:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, like I also, one thing I want to leave everybody with is. Back to what we were saying about cooperation and the up-leveling of human intelligence and human consciousness and things like that. The human brain is widely considered the most advanced machine in the history of the universe. And we're just now, with the help of AI, figuring out how to up-level that, how to link it with other brains. Like, the level of cooperative possibility. Let me, let me back into it one second. We, enlightenment, which is a definable biological state that produces universal kind of compassion, oneness with everything, we're engineering.

• 1:25:34Speaker 02

  It's a state that's starting to become available almost on-demand. So, when I say like, there's new levels of cooperation coming that are emergent at the same time as the AI stuff, we can't see them. We have no, they're emergent, just like, just like other things. So I think that rather than the beloved AI god, I think we're gonna surprise ourselves. And I'm not the optimist in the room, by the way. Like, Peter's the optimist in the room. I'm not the optimist in the room, but I think I'm more optimistic than Peter on this one.

• 1:26:05Speaker 01

  I'd love, I'd love for that thought to be actually implemented. I think that's something that we really need to think about deeply. If the, if the short-term

• 1:26:15Speaker 02

  Surprise for global cooperation, anyone? I don't know, who could we talk to?

• 1:26:19Speaker 01

  Peter, it's back to you.

• 1:26:21Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you, I appreciate that. You were saying, Mo, please, close this.

• 1:26:25Speaker 01

  No, I was basically saying, I think this definitely, definitely is, is the answer, if you ask me. If you, you know, if, if we just shift our mindset into cooperation, we, we head directly into a world of total abundance.

• 1:26:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. You know, I was with, in a conversation with Eric Schmidt, who you mentioned earlier, and his point of view was, until there is some type of a disaster, and until there is something perhaps like a Chernobyl or Three Mile Island that isn't, you know, a 10 out of 10, it's a 2 or 3 out of 10, but it scares the daylights out of us, we don't realign as humans. We don't realign, and we blindly go forward as we have been. And I believe that. It's, it's the human nature that

• 1:27:20Peter Diamandis?

  That plagues us from being able to save ourselves many times until that child in us burns our fingers on the stove, even after your parent has told you over and over again, you're going to burn your fingers on the stove. Stop playing with fire.

• 1:27:36Speaker 01

  Agreed, 100%. But let's be hopeful. Let's assign that task to Stephen to design an X Prize for Human Cooperation. Let's assign another task to Peter to make it happen. And yeah, let's assign a task for me to hug you both when you do.

• 1:27:56Peter Diamandis?

  I love you, Mo.

• 1:27:57Speaker 01

  Love you guys very much.

• 1:27:59Speaker 02

  Mo, how come you gotta do all the hard work?

• 1:28:03Speaker 01

  Hugging you is hard work, Stephen. You understand that. You move too much.

• 1:28:11Speaker 01

  Alright, guys.

• 1:28:12Speaker 02

  Everybody, it was lovely. Thank you, Mo and Peter for lending me your brains this morning. It was fun talking with you.

• 1:28:19Peter Diamandis?

  A fun conversation. I hope, I'm curious, as people listen to this podcast, where do you come out on this? How do you feel about it? I'd love to see your comments below. And do you have a solution that we should all be thinking about and promoting? You know, I'll ask my AI as well. It's not necessarily going to give me the best answer, but maybe our group mind, our meta intelligence here might bring us that. Have a beautiful day, gentlemen. Go hug somebody.

• 1:28:53Speaker 01

  Talk soon. Thanks very much.

• 1:28:55Speaker 02

  Alright, guys. Thank you.

• 1:28:56Peter Diamandis?

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