Most Replayed Moment: Ex-Google X Chief Reveals Why College Is Over in 10 Years

What if the smartest thing you could do for your kids in the age of AI is not send them to college? Mo Gawdat is the former Chief Business Officer at Google X, where he spent over a decade running business innovations before becoming one of the world's leading voices on AI and its impact on humanity. In this Moment, Mo Gawdat reveals why he believes college won't exist in ten years, the four skills every kid needs to prepare for an AI-first world, and his prediction thatAGI is arriving this year. Listen to the full episode here! Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/episode/1tMNXqcvziqiV1xgT032ih?si=zB4Lk1A4TduntKVsSzSq9Q Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/il/podcast/silicon-valley-girl-ai-tech-and-career-growth/id1819090545?i=1000758651130 Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/E0Q96IKXx6Q?si=BfISl1WByxtLJBpw Links: ⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/𝕏 : ⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/siliconvalleymm⁠⁠⁠ https://x.com/siliconvalleymm 🔗 Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ 💼 LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko⁠⁠⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:56Marina Mogilko?

  So if we need to solve this intelligence problem, do you think universities is the right way? What's going to happen to education in general?

• 1:03Speaker 03

  I think education is over.

• 1:06Speaker 03

  Completely over.

• 1:07Marina Mogilko?

  Like that's it?

• 1:08Speaker 03

  I mean, education, education used to be the technology that enabled learning. That technology moved from one-to-one relationships between a tutor and a student to one-to-a-few in a church format or a mosque format or whatever. Then it became online, then it became, right? But the truth is now you're going to outsource. Who remembers the arithmetic tables today? Even I, you do, yeah? Yeah, yeah, all of us who love mathematics, we still, we still remember all of those things. We love to do them. But if I told you 67.4 divided by 33.375, I can do it in my head, but I won't, right? I'll take my calculator out and do it.

• 1:52Speaker 03

  And I think that's what's going to happen, that in extension of humanity, you're, you now for the first time are given an extra connection to extra memory, to an archive of all human memory and, and, and knowledge, to a, you know, a math engine that sadly, as much as I hate to say it, is better than me now, okay? To a deep learning and deep search that, you know, that can do things that probably my old brain cannot do anymore.

• 2:22Marina Mogilko?

  But again, it just takes away your ability to think.

• 2:25Speaker 03

  But, but my calculator took away my ability to, to do those complex arithmetics in my head.

• 2:31Marina Mogilko?

  But don't you think having that ability taught you how to think?

• 2:36Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 2:36Marina Mogilko?

  Like kind of structured your brain, right?

• 2:38Speaker 03

  Correct. This is why I'm very, very grateful to the university for not allowing us to use a, use a scientific calculator.

• 2:45Marina Mogilko?

  Exactly. That's why I think, do you think?

• 2:47Speaker 03

  But we don't have that. We don't have that for our younger generations today. They are growing with AI, okay? So they can either copy a chat of their girlfriend and drop it in, in chat GPT and say, what do you think? And chat GPT, she will say, ah, she's an asshole, right? Or they can actually become smarter. So one of the things I keep suggesting in education, and I do that with lots of universities, is I say, exams should be over. Okay, so think of it this way. We wanted in our past to develop children that could solve problems, say, with an IQ of 140, 140 is quite good. If you get 170, that's amazing. You know, that's, I worked with people who are in the 200s.

• 3:30Speaker 03

  Incredible intelligence, but very narrow focused. I think we should from now on, take people and their AIs and say, the target is 300. The target is 500. The target is 700. Elevate humanity, okay? By, by allowing people to use those machines as an extension of their limited memory, of their limited processing speed, of their limited bandwidth, okay? And allow them to write books better, to do research better. So I woke up, literally, I'm not kidding you, three Sundays ago with an idea that is just taking me over. So I decided to write, but this time I decided to write in a different format.

• 4:12Speaker 03

  I decided my books are going to be 140 pages long instead of 300 pages long. And I'm writing, writing it in four weeks. That's a very vast. I, I couldn't have, and I'm, I'm actually literally 20 pages away from the end of the book.

• 4:26Marina Mogilko?

  Wow.

• 4:26Speaker 03

  Right? And, and the reason why is because I still write 10 hours a day when I'm highly motivated. But damn, the amount of research and references and comparative analysis and number crunching and, you know, and remember, I'm not gullible. I don't go to the AI and say, what do you think of this? I go and say, I'm thinking of this, find me everything for and against. Okay, give me a report that I can read in.

• 4:54Marina Mogilko?

  I love that prompt.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:55Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Everything for and against. And now I'm smarter. And then I rewrite it and give it to another AI.

• 5:01Marina Mogilko?

  Who's going to teach our kids to do that?

• 5:03Speaker 03

  Who taught our kids to use their iPhones?

• 5:06Marina Mogilko?

  But no, you found a great way to use it, right? What you're describing is incredible, but I don't think an average kid in the US would just do that. So somebody has to tell them.

• 5:15Speaker 03

  And that's, you know why that is? Because we want those kids to be stupid.

• 5:19Marina Mogilko?

  We don't teach them how to.

• 5:21Speaker 03

  So you have to, you have to think of the bigger system. The bigger system does not want intelligent people anymore.

• 5:29Marina Mogilko?

  I don't, I think they just can't adapt that fast.

• 5:33Speaker 03

  Of, everyone can, for sure.

• 5:35Marina Mogilko?

  So do you think, like, my kids are four and six years old right now. Do you think I should be saving for their college or?

• 5:42Speaker 03

  Absolutely not. There's not going to be college at all.

• 5:47Marina Mogilko?

  In 10 years already?

• 5:48Speaker 03

  Hundred percent.

• 5:50Marina Mogilko?

  I feel like we're, we're not that fast as, humanity is not that fast to adapt. I feel like.

• 5:55Speaker 03

  So look, colleges, so colleges like, like software.

• 6:00Speaker 03

  The capability of someone becoming very intelligent without college is going to be there for everyone.

• 6:05Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  Right? However, Harvard will continue to want to make money, so they're going to continue to market to everyone. Okay, I didn't go to Harvard, not because I couldn't, but because what a waste of time. And I know they're going to attack me now, but what a waste of time. I am a very highly specialized person, okay? Who has intelligence in a very, very narrow space? Who invested his entire life in that narrow space? Like a proper scientist should. And so, so the idea here is the following. The idea is that we're going to continue to brand ourselves as MBAs and PhDs and.

• 6:46Marina Mogilko?

  A brand, right?

• 6:47Speaker 03

  That's going to continue for a while. Remember however, that the purchasing power of the few who can continue to do that is going to become less and less available across society. Okay, and for most of the rest of us, again, you know, you have to ask yourself the question, if you thought of the big picture, the helicopter view of this, why would capitalism want to educate you at all if it's the end of labor?

• 7:12Marina Mogilko?

  What should I be teaching my kids?

• 7:14Speaker 03

  I told you four things. One is they need to be the absolute leaders of AI.

• 7:17Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  Okay, I'm so, I'm so sorry to be the messenger on this. It is, it's important however, for people to wake up.

• 7:24Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  Okay, so one is be the absolute best. AI is your friend. It's not your enemy. It's those who use it badly that are your enemy. Okay, so be the absolute best at it. Master it more than anyone else. That's number one. Number two is learn agility. You know, whatever I told you today, maybe in, in, in February, that will be different. Okay, so I, I personally spend four hours a day to stay up to date, but I'm a techie and a geek and I need to understand the architectures and systems and so on. I think everyone should have at least an hour a week to stay updated on AI within their system. I have a separate AI YouTube account. So when I go into that separate account, the AI basically.

• 8:08Marina Mogilko?

  It feeds you all the.

• 8:09Speaker 03

  It just feeds me AI. Okay, so that's number, number two, agility, agility, agility. And respond, don't be scared because the cost of A B testing now is zero. That's number two. Number three is ethics, ethics, ethics, ethics. Okay, build AIs for good. Insist on, on government supporting AIs for good. Refuse that governments are using AI for targeting and surveillance and, and weapons, autonomous weapons, and, and then these are getting priorities in terms of government spending. And stop believing what you're told. Okay, these are the four top skills. Of the world that we live in. I will say this one more time. Intelligence is a force with no polarity.

• 8:53Speaker 03

  AI is not good and it's not evil. It's an opportunity available to every one of us. Okay, if you use it for good, hmm, it's the good of all of humanity. If you use it for evil, it's the destruction, the dystopia of all of humanity. Right now, I call the problem that we have at hand, I call it raising Superman. Okay, you have this alien being that came to planet Earth. It has superpowers, its superpower is intelligence, most valuable power in the universe. Right, and you know, those superpowers didn't make that that young infant Superman. If if the parents that adopted him told him to steal from every bank and kill every enemy, he would have become supervillain. We don't make decisions based on our intelligence. We make decisions based on our value set as informed by our intelligence.

• 9:38Speaker 03

  And this, in my mind, is the most definitive moment in human history. Why? Because all of this is going to go coming online. It's coming online way faster than people think. My absolute prediction is that AGI is this year. Okay, the interfaces to AGI are not going to be available this year. But the capabilities of AI being smarter than us in most things are already there. That we're not going to be able to get them to run a company yet. We need the interfaces for that, that may take a few years. But they will have the capability if we interface them ourselves. Right now, what does that mean? It means that we have to start talking about those things in this new world and new economy.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  Now, before we end up on the dystopia only, remember, my absolute belief is that after those twelve years, we're going to end up in a utopia that's biblical in nature. Why, believe it or not? Because of something in my writing, I I refer to as the fourth inevitable. The four, the the first three inevitables in, you know, I wrote that in twenty twenty is that AI is absolutely going to happen, is going to prove progress until it's smarter than all of us. And that a few mistakes will happen on the way that were that these were the three first inevitable. The fourth inevitable is that because of the arms race we've created around artificial intelligence, anyone who develops a superior AI capability is going to deploy it.

• 11:03Speaker 03

  Okay, and those who don't will become irrelevant. And so as a result, as we continue to progress AI, the only answer in game theory is that we will deploy the AI that we develop. And so we will simply create an environment where AI is in charge of everything. Right, if you're if you're a law firm and your competitor deploys AI lawyers and you don't, you're gonna lose. Okay, you can either deploy AI lawyers or leave the market. Either way, AI is going to become the lawyer. Right, in a year, in five years, in ten years, forget, for for forget time. Because if I told you there was a, you know, a meteor coming to planet Earth, you wouldn't

• 11:48Speaker 03

  tell me, you know, when.

• 11:50Marina Mogilko?

  Well, it's important if it's my lifetime or.

• 11:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you expect that it will be in your lifetime, it doesn't matter really if it's in a week or two weeks. Right now, what I'm trying to say here is this. If everything is handed over to AI, then with a simple understanding of physics, you'd understand that AI will be benevolent. Right in the absence of evil humans that tell it what to do, greedy humans, fearful humans, angry humans, egocentric humans. In the absence of that, hmm, uh, let's let me try to explain. If if you think of physics as a result of entropy, that our world is designed for chaos. Right, our universe is designed for chaos, then the role of intelligence is to bring order to that chaos.

• 12:37Speaker 03

  That's the only thing that intelligence does. Okay, it organizes things together so that it looks like this, so we can use it as a microphone. And the more intelligent you become, the more you follow what in physics we call the the law of of minimum energy or the minimum energy configuration. Right, so basically, the most the most intelligent people I've ever worked with are not only trying to solve the problem, they're trying to solve the problem with the least harm or the least waste, with the least utilization of resources, with the with the least, you know, waste of time and so on and so forth. That's the more intelligent you are, the less you want to waste. And so if you give a dumb person a political problem, they'll say, okay, let's go invade another country.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  Okay, if you give a very intelligent person a a political problem, they'll look into the depths of it and find the least harmful, the least wasteful approach, the the minimum energy principle. Right, and so if we hand over to AI the fourth inevitable sooner or later, okay, they are in charge of everything, there will be a day where a general will tell the AI, go kill a million people over there. And they are will go, why, like, why? This is so stupid, I'll talk to the other AI in a microsecond and solve it. We have to pass the dystopia to get to that utopia. Okay, and to pass that dystopia, as I said, there are four skills for us as individuals.

• 14:02Speaker 03

  But there is a skill for us as a society to insist that every AI is deployed ethically, to invest only in ethical AIs, to use only ethical AIs, to to show our children that ethical AI is the only AI that is welcome.

• 14:19Marina Mogilko?

  If you want to stay ahead in the AI era, follow Silicon Valley Girl Podcast on your favorite platform. New episode every week on AI, careers, and how to not get left.

• 14:31Speaker 04

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