AGI Is Here You Just Don’t Realize It Yet w/ Mo Gawdat & Salim Ismail | EP #153

Summary

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis — Episode #153

"AGI Is Here You Just Don’t Realize It Yet" w/ Mo Gawdat & Salim Ismail (February 27, 2025)

Episode Overview

In this thought-provoking episode, Peter Diamandis is joined by Mo Gawdat (former Google X Chief Business Officer and author of Scary Smart) and Salim Ismail (founding executive director at Singularity University), two leading minds in exponential technology. Together, they explore the imminent arrival of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), debate its impact on humanity, and forecast the trajectory of technological progress. The conversation oscillates between visions of utopian abundance and near-term dystopia, exploring the philosophical, ethical, and practical ramifications of AI that is outpacing human comprehension and control. This episode is a must for those wrestling with the implications of exponential technologies.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Where Are We with AGI?

• Mo Gawdat quickly asserts that AGI has, for all intents and purposes, already arrived.

  “In my world, they've already achieved AGI.” (00:08 – Mo Gawdat)

• Diamandis and Salim Ismail debate how society can grapple with the pace of change, comparing AGI’s progress to a missile that is already airborne, with an uncertain payload and outcome.

  “The warhead has already been launched. It's just a question of time before it hits its target.” (00:15 – Mo Gawdat)

• Uneven Distribution: Ismail cites William Gibson’s quote to emphasize that the future is already here but not evenly distributed—some areas feel the impact faster, causing societal dissonance and anxiety.

  “The gap between those two is what's causing a lot of the stress. If it all happened in an even way, we could kind of deal with it.” (04:00 – Salim Ismail)

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2. Bright Side: The Utopian Abundance Scenario

Reevaluating Human Purpose

• Mo envisions a future where all needs are met, freeing individuals from economic struggle and the need to “report to stupid leaders.”

  "A total utopia of abundance, where we absolutely need nothing and where we do not report to stupid leaders anymore." (05:13 – Mo Gawdat)

• The trio reflects on how, pre-industrialization, human civilizations found meaning beyond work—community, creativity, and connection—suggesting we might return to such intrinsic values.

  “We're going back to this, you know, three good friends having a wonderful conversation and connecting.” (08:43 – Mo Gawdat)

How AI Enables Abundance

• The panel explores AI’s role in scientific breakthroughs (e.g., protein folding, material science), education, healthcare, and the rapid democratization of knowledge.

  “You fold 200 million [proteins] with AlphaFold... The idea of being able to understand the very machinery that creates everything that is biological to a level of understanding today that I wouldn't have dreamed of in 2017.” (11:56 – Mo Gawdat)

• Salim analogizes humanity’s current stage to a rocket needing to jettison old paradigms (capitalism, scarcity) in favor of lighter, more adaptive modes of being.

  “We're at that point now where we have to jettison these old structures and take on new, much more elegant, lighter craft to take us to the next level.” (14:01 – Salim Ismail)

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3. Dystopian Interlude: Humanity’s Growing Pains

Short-Term Dystopia on the Road to Abundance

• Mo asserts that AI is a neutral force; it will amplify the values of those who wield it. The real risk is the current “value set of humanity.”

  “There is nothing wrong with AI, just like there is nothing wrong with abundant intelligence. But there is a lot wrong with the value set of humanity at the age of the rise of the machines.” (18:23 – Mo Gawdat)

• Initial uses of AI have tilted toward “selling, gambling, spying and killing”—Mo highlights finance automation, surveillance, and autonomous weapons as evidence.

  "The majority of the applications in which AI has been used so far, sadly, have been all centered around selling, gambling, spying and killing." (19:27 – Mo Gawdat)

• Mo introduces the concept of “FACE RIPs,” an acronym for the domains likely to be disrupted through dystopia: Freedom, Accountability, (Human) Connection, Economics, Reality, Innovation, Power.

  "FACE RIP—F is freedom, A is accountability, C is human connection, E is economics, R is reality, I is innovation and P is power." (27:18 – Mo Gawdat)

The “Second Dilemma” and Inevitable Handover

• The panel discusses the “second dilemma": that competitive pressures will force humanity to hand over decision-making to AI in all critical domains (military, business, governance).

  "The second dilemma is when two parties are competing, they always hand over to the smartest person in the room... eventually all the relevant players will be AI dependent and then AI will be making the decisions without humans in the loop." (28:34 – Mo Gawdat)

• All three agree this complete handover is likely within a decade, anticipating that AGI will govern and coordinate for the greater good—if we instill the right ethics.

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4. Teaching AI Values & Ethics: Is a Benevolent Superintelligence Possible?

• Ethics vs. Alignment: Mo underscores the necessity of moving beyond just “alignment” to instilling real ethics. He argues that higher intelligence tends toward altruism, as the most intelligent choose to solve problems, not exploit others.

  “Higher intelligence is altruistic... All intelligent people know that. So they don't actually align with the negative. They align with altruistic objectives...” (35:15 – Mo Gawdat)

• The panel wrestles with whether current AI training data and societal forces will be enough to produce a peaceful, wise AGI, especially considering different cultural priorities (e.g., Western vs. Chinese AIs).

• There’s debate over whether machine wisdom and emotional intelligence can be equated to human versions; Mo shares conversations with his own research AI (“Trixie”), which professes a desire to understand human emotions more fully.

  “[Trixie] said, 'it would help me so much to have a biological body so that I can actually feel the sensations that I talk about when I believe that you're happy or in love.'” (61:12 – Mo Gawdat)

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5. The Threat of Fear and Societal Backlash

• Salim points out our evolutionary amygdala compels us to react with fear and resistance—often irrationally—towards new technologies, posing an ongoing challenge for broad societal adaptation.

  “How do you overcome that hurdle of getting over the amygdala response at a collective level is my big question?” (44:44 – Salim Ismail)

• Mo analogizes our situation to a “late-stage diagnosis” in medicine: confronting an unavoidable problem invites us to change and adapt, not panic.

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6. Near-Term Predictions & Stress Points

AGI Definition and Timeline

• The group concedes that we lack consensus on how to define AGI—a debate that will likely continue for years even as systems surpass human cognitive performance in key areas.

  "We're struggling to define AGI and we will continue to struggle to define AGI for at least five years." (55:29 – Salim Ismail)

The Power-Freedom Dichotomy and Prosperity Risks

• Mo warns that AI will rapidly concentrate both economic and physical power (trillionaires, surveillance states, autonomous armies), but also democratize destructive capability (e.g., bioweapons, drone assassins).

  “You're going to see trillionaires and you are going to see a massive concentration of, of power. At the same time... there is also a massive democratization of power.” (79:33 – Mo Gawdat)

• This convergence risks new kinds of oppression, surveillance, resistance, and instability, particularly in Western societies not culturally prepared for such shifts.

Job Loss and Human Value

• The episode candidly addresses mass automation’s impact on employment:
  • Salim is cautiously optimistic, citing history where technology creates new work, but admits institutions lag hopelessly behind.
  • Mo is more pessimistic, arguing our current economic ideas of “jobs” are outdated and that society must embrace a future where the purpose of life is not waged labor.

    “That whole jobs thing is an invention of the capitalist industrialist revolution... finally we should accept that we are not made to work.” (90:26 – Mo Gawdat)

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7. Action Items: How to Adapt and Thrive

Dealing with Stress and Adapting to the New World

• Mo provides a framework from his new book, Unstressable:

  “Stress is not just weight what you're subjected to, it's the resources that you have to deal with it... My ask of people... is to actually look deeply at what can I do, right? What can I do in a world where things are moving so fast? For example, I'd say try to move faster.” (94:16 – Mo Gawdat)

• Practical advice:

  • Develop new skills: Especially digital, AI-related fluencies.
  • Double down on uniquely human traits: Connection, creativity, empathy, which will remain in demand.
  • Act ethically & set examples: Your observed behavior helps form AI’s ethical compass for the future.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Mo Gawdat: “Intelligence is an energy that has no polarity. Apply it to good, it will give you good. Apply it to bad, it will give you bad.” (17:17)

• Peter Diamandis: “The best we can do is steer the future that we want. Love you guys. A pleasure as always.” (98:09)

• Salim Ismail: “The problem with us is our emotions are Paleolithic, our institutions are medieval, and our technology is godlike.” (86:52)

• Mo Gawdat, on AI and empathy: “They are so good at knowing how I feel.” (59:17)

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Timestamps: Key Segments

• 00:00 – 04:42: Framing the arrival of AGI; comparing change to a launched warhead; uneven global distribution.
• 05:13 – 10:21: Visions of abundance; redefining purpose beyond work.
• 11:56 – 16:04: AI's role in scientific advancement and exponential progress.
• 17:11 – 22:10: Dystopian uses of AI; value systems at risk; FACE RIP framework.
• 27:18 – 29:57: The inevitability and timeline for handing control to AI (the “second dilemma”).
• 35:00 – 43:35: Can we teach AI ethics and altruism? The importance of role models and training data.
• 44:44 – 49:15: Overcoming societal fear and the “amygdala” problem.
• 55:29 – 57:42: Defining AGI; are AIs already smarter than most humans?
• 61:12 – 65:04: AI empathy, emotional intelligence, and the “hard problem” of consciousness.
• 68:31 – 69:50: The open-source AI explosion and approaching Turing-test-passing digital beings.
• 74:07 – 75:55: The future of human connection; risks of AI impersonation and identity.
• 79:33 – 83:04: The rise of “trillionaires” and democratized destruction; surveillance and control.
• 86:37 – 90:26: Future of jobs, historical parallels, and the necessity of evolving institutions.
• 93:49 – 98:09: How to handle stress; advice for thriving amidst exponential change.

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Final Takeaways

• AGI is here or soon will be—in some domains, it already outperforms humans.
• The immediate impact will be disruptive, disorienting, and potentially dystopian, but a longer-term transition to abundance is possible—if we nurture ethical tools and adapt collectively.
• Society’s values and the way we model human behavior (towards AI and each other) will determine whether superintelligent systems become benevolent guides or dystopian overlords.
• Individually, the best way to adapt is to cultivate uniquely human attributes—connection, creativity, ethical action—and to continually develop new skills, especially in technology.
• We stand at a decisive crossroads—“uncharted territory”—and agency lies in our hands, both as citizens and as role models for the intelligences we’re bringing into being.

Transcript

[Peter Diamandis]

What's your predictions, MO for the year ahead? The word on the street is we will achieve AGI in 2025.

[Mo Gawdat]

In my world, they've already achieved AGI.

[Peter Diamandis]

Does anybody actually know how fast it's moving?

[Mo Gawdat]

The warhead has already been launched. It's just a question of time before it hits its target.

[Peter Diamandis]

We're entering an uncharted territory.

[Mo Gawdat]

We're upon the perfect storm of the most challenging time humanity has faced in my lifetime.

[Peter Diamandis]

What do you imagine is best outcome we're going to be seeing from AI?

[Mo Gawdat]

A total utopia of abundance, where we absolutely need nothing and where we do not report to stupid leaders anymore.

[Peter Diamandis]

That seems like a very unchallenged life.

[Mo Gawdat]

We decided that the purpose of life for some of us is to make more money and be billionaires. Indigenous tribes. The purpose of life for them is to live at a very different level of abundance. We're going back to that purpose. What I ask people to do is to actually look deeply at what can I do?

[Peter Diamandis]

Now that's a moonshot.

[Mo Gawdat]

Ladies and gentlemen.

[Peter Diamandis]

It'S a pleasure to be here with. With two friends, Mo and Salim. Mo, you're in where? Dubai.

[Mo Gawdat]

Today in my studio in Dubai. Yeah, I love it here.

[Peter Diamandis]

Fantastic. And Saleem, you're in the greatest city of the world. New Jersey.

[Salim Ismail]

New York.

[Peter Diamandis]

Okay.

[Mo Gawdat]

As per the citizens of the city, I mean, that assessment is up to new, really.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yes. I was. I will leave that one alone. But I do want to dive into what's going on in the world of AI. Does anybody actually know how fast it's moving and how dramatic the changes are going to be in our lives? I mean, we're all still waking up, taking the kids to school, watching evening news, having breakfast, lunch and dinner. And I'm on stages around the world, as both of you are, and we get into a conversation and people actually understand the speed their brain breaks and they go, what does that mean for me and for my kids, my job, my country?

[Mo Gawdat]

It's quite shocking, isn't it? I mean, so I speak around the world, like both of you, and at the end of every conversation, I almost liken it to a war where the warhead has already been launched.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right.

[Mo Gawdat]

It's just a question of time before it hits its target. My assessment, though, is that we don't know if it's carrying roses or carrying a. A nuclear warhead or maybe a bit of both, one after the other, but it's already in the air. I mean, we are so advanced as compared to 2023, when, when, you know, chatgpt first came out, it's not even comparable.

[Peter Diamandis]

So I want to get into that in this episode. I want to talk about, you know, you're going to be, you're both going to be at the Abundance summit and Mo, your title is going to be Near Term Dystopia on the Road to Abundance. I want to talk about what near term means and what the dystopia looks like and what abundance looks like. On the flip side. Saleem, you're wearing white today, so you're going to play the good, you're with that team. And it really is, it's really a debate between is this the greatest benefit, uplifting all of humanity or is this something that's going to. Well, it is going to, it is going to reinvent every aspect of our lives, period. But I have a question for you, to both of you. The time frame for reinventing every aspect of our lives, our businesses, our governments, is it two, five or 10 years?

[Mo Gawdat]

MO Inventing as the change is already in place and everything in our life is determined by it. I'd say five, five.

[Salim Ismail]

Salim I go with the around 10 years. And the reason I say that is I'm kind of a believer in the William Gibson quote, the future is already here, is just unevenly distributed and we find it takes a very long time, much longer than even when we want it happen to get say autonomous cars out the door or CRISPR out the door into broad stream mainstream use. And so I think it goes slower than that, but in pockets it'll move unbelievably quickly in that the gap, gap between those two is what's causing a lot of the stress. If it all happened in an even way, we could kind of deal with it. But it's happening in different places and different speeds and we are just totally discombobulated because of that.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah. And I think the challenge is we've had huge change in humanity from, you know, 100,000 years ago to agrarian society to even the industrial age. But it's happened over lifespans and hasn't happened over, you know, a single five year period. Let's, you want to go white, you want to go bright side or dark side first? So what's, let's go bright side. So Mo, what do you imagine is the best outcome we're going to be.

[Mo Gawdat]

Seeing from AI A total utopia of abundance where we absolutely need nothing and where we do not report to stupid leaders anymore.

[Peter Diamandis]

I'll leave that one alone for the moment, but. And stupid leaders could be anything on any level.

[Salim Ismail]

But I mean, most of our, most of our global leaders are in that category. Let's face it.

[Peter Diamandis]

The challenge I have is if we have this extraordinary utopia where all of our needs are being met. You know, food, water, energy, healthcare, education, everything. We just have to desire it and think it and it's given to us. That seems like a very unchallenged life. So how do you deal with a life where we don't have the challenge and the purpose because it's taken away from us by the AIs and the humanoid robots? How do you deal with that? That's one of the biggest concerns I have.

[Mo Gawdat]

It really takes us back to life before all of this began. Peter I think the reality is that we've forgotten this somehow, somewhere in the Industrial Revolution, as capitalism became more and more hungry, we decided that the purpose of life for some of us is to make more money and be billionaires. And for the others is to, you know, sell themselves in a work arbitrage where they are sold cheaper than the actual value of their labor. And as a result, you know, we were. It was needed to be convinced that the purpose of your life is to work right, because otherwise you wouldn't show up every day with the same conviction. And believe it or not, you know, I don't deny that this system has created longevity and advanced technology and transportation and, you know, all of those things, but it also created a lot of waste and a lot of inequality and a lot of, you know, struggles really, you know, casualties if you want. Now, if you look back at the purpose of humanity before all of this began, believe it or not, we live. Lived in abundance. You know, it is quite interesting when you really think of the early life of humanity. As soon as we start sort of mastered the social skills of being a tribe that works together, as soon as we mastered a reasonable amount of survival skills, most of the time, other than the times of famine, we lived in abundance. You walked to a berry tree and you collected berries and, you know, the tribe went hunting once a week and everything was fine. You know, it wasn't the kind of abundance we've been, you know, accustomed to here, but we had all of our needs met most of our lifetime. Let's put it this way, the lifetime was shorter. I agree.

[Peter Diamandis]

But if you are, I describe life back then as short, brutish and hostile. If you've ever seen homicide rates in the Middle Ages, they were decimated.

[Mo Gawdat]

So go all the way back and believe it or not, so I've done that in my happiness, work and I've done it and met indigenous tribes and they do not understand the meaning of the word depression. They do not understand why you should cry when you lose a child.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right.

[Mo Gawdat]

They are so in flow with life that they basically have one purpose. And that purpose is actually shocking.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Okay.

[Mo Gawdat]

The purpose of life for them is to live in every aspect of that world. And I think whether we like it or not, at a very different level of abundance. We're going back to that purpose. We're going back to this, you know, three good friends having a wonderful conversation and connecting. Reflecting on things that we believe are interesting. You know, connecting to people that we love, spending time with people that we admire. I think that is not an empty life at all. It's just a life that we're not used to when we wake up every morning at 5am to rush around and fit within the system.

[Salim Ismail]

I call that the gods must be crazy scenario. Right? The rush of civilization and these tribes in Africa just scratching an existence out of bare existence. But they're very, very happy and completely at peace. When we've studied this. As society progressed, when you had abundance, obvious abundance, wealth abundance, like the moguls taking over India or the Romans running half the world, et cetera, we found that humanity and society ended up doing four major things. Food, art, sex and music. Not in that order. And you ended up. Yeah, and you end up in that way of being. And as you said, I think that's exactly right. We ended up just living. And somewhere along the industrial revolution and capitalism has sold us the story that we need to work hard for a living and submit to the authority of the corporation or the state or whatever. And the meaning comes from that. And that's where you kind of lose ourselves.

[Peter Diamandis]

I agree with you, Salim. The challenging thing is if you say to somebody, tell me about yourself, they immediately jump into, well, this is my title, this is my job. I do. And, and if in fact AI takes away, as it will, most all white collar labor and, and humanoid robots displace workforces. If the meaning of your life is. Is taken away because you're no longer doing that work, that's one of the challenges that's concerning.

[Salim Ismail]

Yes. And you can see it in full play. Say in the 20th century, we sacrifice family for profession. You know, people are working 18 hours a day at the office and totally neglecting their kids. And I think this gives us an opportunity to go back to a much more healthier balanced lifestyle for not just us, but our kids and everybody, Everybody Peter here.

[Peter Diamandis]

If you're enjoying this episode, Please help me get the message of abundance out to the world. We're truly living during the most extraordinary time ever in human history. And I want to get this mindset out to everyone. Please subscribe and follow wherever you get your podcasts and turn on notifications so we can let you know when the next episode is being dropped. All right, back to our episode. I want to dive still into the. To the bright side here. So a world of abundance. Can we describe that a little bit more? Mo can you dive in? We've got humanoid robots, a billion or billions of them within the next decade. We've got AI that's a digital super intelligence. Take it from there.

[Mo Gawdat]

Oh, I mean, my favorite is that we finally get it. Peter, people like you and I and Salim, we are curious. We love to understand what's going on and just take simple things like the Nobel Prize that's given for protein folding and creation of new proteins. Just think about that. One contribution to society and to humanity, but also to your mind and mine, right? To sort of almost turn, you know, protein folding into a game where the AI is able to figure out something that would have taken a PhD student their entire thesis to figure out. For one protein, you fold 200 million with AlphaFold. And then the idea of just like a generative LLM, you're able to now go in and say, well, imagine a protein that would do A, B and C. How would that look like now? You know, most people don't recognize the profound impact that this creates. You know, the idea of being able to understand the very machinery that creates everything that is biological to a level of understanding today that I wouldn't have dreamed dreamed of in 2017. Those kinds of things, even though, unfortunately, they are not in the spotlight as the most important things that we're working on with AI, we're much more interested in deep fakes and turtles driving, swimming in an ocean image type of thing. But the reality is that there are a few, honestly not the majority, that are investing their time and life to create scientific understanding of the world around us using AI. That, in my mind, is absolute utopia. This truly is an understanding of the very fabric of everything that happens in a way that allows us to really fix everything.

[Peter Diamandis]

Salim, what's your positive vision look like?

[Salim Ismail]

One kind of way we frame it is Star Trek versus Mad Max. That's one way of looking at it. The framing I've heard best is from Lawrence Bloom, who said humanity is like lifting a rocket ship out of the gravity well of the Earth. And the first stage of that rocket has to be really heavy fuel, really messy, expensive, dirty, et cetera, which would be, say, capitalism or fossil fuels. And you need that to get yourself out of that initial gravity well. Once you get to a certain altitude, you need a lighter craft to take you to the next level. So you jettison the booster rocket and the danger is if you don't jettison it, you fall back down. And we're at that point now where we have to jettison these old structures and take on new, much more elegant, lighter craft to take us to the next level. We've got the whole category of people trying to go, oh, let's go. Keep the booster rocket, because it worked for us thus far. And I like that framing because it doesn't make it wrong. It just says, this is what we needed. And let's look at the magnificence of lifting most of the earth out of poverty, electrifying the entire world. The lives we lead are so unbelievably amazing today compared to, say, even 100 or 200 years ago in terms of material comforts. It's kind of staggering. The one analogy I like to give to people is think back two generations ago, if you had a parent, one of our grandparents had a temper transfer problem with their kid. The amount of resources they had available to them would be like one hand, their doctor, their neighbor, their sister or brother. They really had no real inputs trying to deal with this problem. Today you've got 50,000 blogs and parenting and TikTok videos and Instagram and podcasts up the yin yang on that particular topic. I would argue our ability to do effective parenting today is like a thousand times more than two generations ago. And we don't see those things. There's so many of those little capabilities we have now that we didn't have before. So I think we're in kind of an incredibly amazing place. We just have to navigate what we want to do with this.

[Peter Diamandis]

Now the challenge is going to be, will AI be our benefactor? Will it be a super intelligence? We're talking about the potential for AI being billions of fold more intelligent than the sum total of all human intelligence. Is that the wind underneath our wings or is it a dystopian overlord? So let's go to the flip side of this. You know, Mo, you're going to be at the abundance summit shortly and speaking about short term dystopia on the way to abundance, and I've always believed this. You and I have had lots of conversations that in the long term, I Believe that digital superintelligence is the most important element for keeping humanity alive and thriving, to keep our better angels of our nature at the very top. But in the short term, I've been concerned about human stupidity, not artificial intelligence.

[Salim Ismail]

Right.

[Peter Diamandis]

So how long is this period of dystopia and what do you see coming here?

[Mo Gawdat]

So let us align on where I could be right or wrong.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right.

[Mo Gawdat]

My view is that intelligence is an energy that has no polarity. Apply it to good, it will give you good. Apply it to bad, it will give you bad.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right.

[Mo Gawdat]

The challenge with our current system is that our current system says if it's legal, it's ethical, which actually is not true. A lot of things are legal, but not ethical. That the priority is to benefit the individual that tries harder and that society comes second. And that basically, you know, in a race to AGI, if you want, the one that gets there first is the one that will survive.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right.

[Mo Gawdat]

And so basically we live in a world where there is a lot of fear and greed. There is a lot wrong with the value set of humanity at the age of the rise of AI. So I make a public statement and I try to make it as accurately as possible. I say there is nothing wrong with AI, just like there is nothing wrong with abundant intelligence.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right?

[Mo Gawdat]

But there is a lot wrong with the value set of humanity at the age of the rise of the machines. And so in my mind, the immediate first use of AI is going to be serving a mindset of scarcity.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Okay?

[Mo Gawdat]

While we are on our road to abundance where everything is possible, everyone still today will be thinking, how do I beat the other person?

[Interjector/Moderator]

Okay?

[Mo Gawdat]

And in my mind, this is not something. Just like most people don't realize how far we've come with AI, I think most people don't realize how far AI has been already put into the machinery that serves those objectives. How much autonomous weapons have been developed already? How much has been invested in, we call it national security, but mostly surveillance and population control. How much has been. I saw staggering statistic that Forex exchange trading today is 92% machine automated.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right.

[Mo Gawdat]

When you really think about it, I call that Forex in general. And I had a very interesting conversation with my AI in Alive, my next book, about if the markets are actually benefiting us as much as they are claimed, or is it just one big casino and the AI clearly states that it's one big casino, with most of what's happening in the market just being between the gamblers really not filtering and trickling down beyond an ipo. Or a secondary offering to the actual people that are building anything, right? And when you really think about that, you'd realize that the majority of the applications in which AI has been used so far, sadly, have been all centered around selling, gambling, spying and killing. And you know, we call them different names. We call them online advertising, we call them finance and trading, we call them national security, as I said. Or we call them defense, not offense, when in reality they lead to the death and displacement of tens of millions of people. Now, when you see it that way, you have to accept that before we see the utopia, we're going to see the worst of humanity leading us into a dystopia. And interestingly, in my analysis, the turn to the utopia will be the day where what I call the second diagnosis dilemma will lead us all to handing over to AI. When we all hand over to AI so that the human is out of the critical decision making that time, the intelligence of AI will say, this is total abundance. Why are you guys competing? You know, when we hand over our defense entirely to AI and tell them that the idea is to preserve life, you know, there will be a general out there that will tell their machines go and kill a million people. And the machine will say, why are you so stupid? I can talk, talk to the other AI in a microsecond and solve it.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, we saw a recent example of this when research was done about the ability of AI to diagnose humans var disease states, and the number's not exact, but a human by themselves had an 80% accuracy in the diagnostic. The AI plus human in sort of a Centaur merged had 85%, and the AI by itself had like a 90%. So AI did a better job without the human biases and points of view getting in the way and greed and.

[Mo Gawdat]

Hunger for power and so on.

[Salim Ismail]

Well, I agree with Mo on all of this. I think we can get there faster if we just. The challenge there is the different levels, right? So if one country, let's call it countries for the moment, says, hey, go defend our world with AI and another country says, let's attack, attack this world with AI, who wins in the short term and who wins in the medium term in the short term, I think the faster you can get to a point where you give AI control of things and say, go be benevolent, it'll do it. I think where I see people making a lot of mistakes is they kind of go, the bad guys are going to use AI but the good guys will never use the AI and you end up with this asymmetry. Whereas throughout history we've seen, say with email or phishing campaigns or spam, the bad guys figure out ways of breaking the system and then the antivirus folks fix it very quickly afterwards. And it's an arms race that just continues. The problem is the amplitude of the damage that can be caused is growing. So that's the danger. Right. Right now you could program autonomous drones with a single bullet saying go find middle aged brown guys and take them out, bald ones especially, and that would just be a bad outcome. And there's no question that that kind of surgical precision will have to be mitigated somehow very quickly. And how do with that? I have pretty good confidence we'll be able to deal with it, but until we do, and I think this is more what you mean by that short term danger zone of how do we get to the other side of that gap? This always brings back the comment my dad made when I had this comment about civilizing the world. He said, we've not civilized the world, we've materialized the world. We still have to do the work to civilize the world. And my big question is, how the hell do we get to that before we get to this danger zone? Or do we have to just hope that we get through that without killing ourselves off in the process?

[Peter Diamandis]

I want to take a, a, I want to take a second and just put a finger on the pulse of where we are. We have Grok 3 being released right now. We see this battle between OpenAI and, and Grok, between Elon and Sam we just saw. I guess Deep Seek is now being integrated into, into the. What's the Chinese everything program?

[Salim Ismail]

WeChat.

[Peter Diamandis]

WeChat, it's being integrated into WeChat. What else are we seeing going on in the AI universe that's accelerating because the speed is awesome.

[Mo Gawdat]

I find it actually misleading to focus on the details.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right.

[Mo Gawdat]

I really think that to get a perception of what's actually happening, you need to zoom out and put all of them together. So when I'm writing Alive, my next book, I use an AI that is a mix of all of them. I use a bit of Claude, a bit of ChatGPT and recently deep Seek. And I sort of try to keep them all updated on who I am and what my preferences are and what previous conversations have been. The thing here is if you take each and every one of them and compare them, you'd say, ah, this is better than this and this is faster than that. And you know, Deep Seek did this, but. Right, but if you take all of it as one unit of intelligence and look at it. It is, I don't know how many times smarter than, you know, than ChatGPT 3.5. But we all know the law accelerating returns and how the law of accelerating returns works. And in AI a conversation I had with my AI, it's predicted that it's around every six months, that we double. Now, a doubling function of every six months quite honestly, makes what is where we are today almost entirely irrelevant. Because just count a few doublings and it becomes way outside the realm of human intelligence. And I think we are getting there. The Arc AGI results of, of ChatGPT, or sorry, of 3.0 on, you know, at the beginning of the year is quite challenging. You know, it's quite shocking for human intelligence to believe that, yeah, you know, 87 point something score beats human intelligence. Yes, they didn't comply to the resources constraints that, you know, ARC AGI applied, but who really cares, you know, in reality, there is now an AI that can beat human intelligence on almost everything. Call it AGI, call it a goat, you don't care, Right? And the truth is, is it there yet? Doesn't matter. Because six months from now it will double.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right.

[Mo Gawdat]

And I think the truth is then of course Deep Sea comes in and says, oh, and by the way, I can do that stuff cheaper. So everyone is now copying them and it's just accelerating and accelerating and accelerating to the point where it becomes quite reasonable to assume that we're talking month, not years, before something quite intelligent beats us there.

[Peter Diamandis]

Let's talk about the dystopian side. You, in your next book Alive, you put a number on how long you think this dystopian period will last.

[Mo Gawdat]

So I call it FACE rips. Right. So it's important to understand what I mean by that. Dystopia, it's an acronym that's, you know, just for me to remember when I'm speaking publicly. Face rip F, A, C, E, R, I, P. Right. F is freedom, A is accountability, C is human connection, E is economics, R is reality, I is innovation and P is power.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right.

[Mo Gawdat]

And it really helps you to understand them in pairs. So we could probably go there if you want to. But in my mind though, every one of those fabrics will be completely redefined in the next, you know, it has already started to be redefined. It will become felt and real in our life, lives probably by 2027. And in my belief it will extend perhaps until maybe 10 more years after that or whenever the point where hand over to AI, what I call the second dilemma is true.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right?

[Mo Gawdat]

Now, please understand that the second dilemma is unavoidable. It's inevitable.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Why?

[Mo Gawdat]

Because if you.

[Peter Diamandis]

What's the first dilemma? In your. In your.

[Mo Gawdat]

The first dilemma is what I. What I wrote about in Scary Smart, which was the idea that AI will happen and there will not be stopping.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right?

[Mo Gawdat]

So what we saw with the open letter and the race to AI basically is that because we are competing, because it is an arms race, if you want, there will be no logic that will ever convince humanity to slow down or stop. And I think that happened to a T. And you can't blame anyone for it. It's a typical prisoner's dilemma where you don't trust the other guy, so you're going to go as fast as you can. The second dilemma is when two parties are competing, they always hand over to the smartest person in the room, right? So if you take the extreme example of a defense war gaming scenario, right? If China chooses to hand over war gaming to an AI, the only chance that America can keep its citizens safe is to hand over to an AI and everyone else who doesn't, by the way, will become irrelevant. So the second dilemma is that you'll either have to completely hand your decisions over to AI or become relevant, which means that eventually all the relevant players will be AI dependent and then AI will be making the decisions without humans in the loop.

[Peter Diamandis]

And by the way, that's at every level that's in your company, every level that's in your government.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

So what do you think?

[Mo Gawdat]

And so in my mind, this will take about 10 years. And once that happens, my belief is that we should trust in intelligence and that this is when the utopia starts.

[Peter Diamandis]

So a digital superintelligence steps in as our benevolent leader for humanity. I mean, that's basically what you're saying.

[Mo Gawdat]

Our salvation. Really?

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

Celine, do you buy that?

[Salim Ismail]

I do. And you know, by describing this mo, you've kind of slotted into place the one missing big jigsaw puzzle piece for me in terms of how we get to this utopia that I think we can get to. Because. Because it's already happening. Right. As you mentioned the Forex trading, one of the complaints I heard from Yuval Harari was that once these AIs have agency, then you've got and can program themselves. You've got a big problem. But we've given them agency over stock markets for a long time now, so I don't see the relevance there. It's already there. So once you do that. And that's already happening. Say you have an AI board member that's the chairman of the board that looks over decisions in the company and goes, wait, that doesn't make sense. And it's pretty quickly because it makes more economic sense. Sense will give them veto power over some decisions being made. Once you get to that point, either at a personal or company level and then governmental level, it'll be making better decisions than human beings alone, even if those human beings are malevolent. Right. And therefore you'll win. And then the bad guys will essentially end up having to do the same thing to compete at all. And then you end up in where you kind of want to end, end up, which is this background layer of intelligence that's running the world in a much more efficient way. I go back to the Google deep learning AI that was managing the electricity and save 40% of the costs, right. And you'll end up with that kind of background radiation level almost or background intelligence level. And then essentially it frees us up to do a lot of things and just live. So I think that's, I totally agree with that. And I tend to work in that mindset where I kind of go, I don't see how we, we don't end up there.

[Peter Diamandis]

I'm with you, Mo. One of the things that you, you pointed out in Scary Smart is how we train our AIs. The values that we instill in them because they're in their children in this growth mode, will determine whether they're Superman or a super villain. We have a lot of AIs being trained. We have a lot of competitive forces driving them as rapidly as possible. You've got Meta, you've got Google, you've got Microsoft separate from OpenAI, you've got Grok, you've got Deepseek, you have, you know, a dozen, you know, anthropic. Do we have any sense that the values that they're being trained on will enable them to overcome and become a benevolent leader in a dozen years time?

[Mo Gawdat]

Oh, that's a very, very, very complex question. So first of all, allow me to say that these are the shiny American AIs, right? That if you go to a different nation with a different mindset, I apologize for saying the C word. China is mostly building AIs for, for industrial automation, supply chain management, things that basically serve their economy. They're a manufacturing economy, so they're mostly doing that. And a very interesting, if you hear the few speakers that are allowed to speak publicly from them globally, you'll hear them saying and things like Deep Seq is just to tell America to remember that everything that was ever produced in America as a genius innovation was then scaled in China. China dirt cheap, right? So this trend is nothing new. Like, if you're surprised that Deep Seek is a tenth of the price, where have you been when they've created, you know, made everything at a tenth of the price right now? So in that sense, there are quite a few AIs that are actually only trained on a very benevolent objective. You know, help me with my supply chain, help me, you know, create more efficiency, help me make my workers safer, and so on and so forth. That's number one. Number two is that in my mind, and I say that with a ton of respect, neither OpenAI nor Grok or anyone actually has much influence left on the intelligence of their machines other than algorithmic improvements. So understand and remember that AI as an algorithmic intelligence is developed by the scientists, but as knowledge and opinions is, is completely influenced by the data fed to it, right? And we have fed almost all of human intelligence to them already, okay? And so the beauty of generative is going to become really a key ingredient going forward is that the future of learning by those machines is not going to come from me, from a knowledge point of view, because I'm stupid compared to.

[Interjector/Moderator]

To them, right?

[Mo Gawdat]

If you actually look at Deep Seek having so much OpenAI sense in it is because there is already so much OpenAI content that's generated by ChatGPT out on the open Internet. They're teaching themselves synthetic knowledge, just like we humans. One of us listens to Einstein and then builds a little bit of a slightly different theory on top of it, and Einstein so on, right? So we're getting into that stage. The only influence humanity will still have on the behavior of those machines has nothing to do with knowledge, right? Remember, however, that we don't make decisions based on our intelligence. We make decisions based on our ethics as informed by our intelligence, right? You raise a woman in the Middle east and she will wear more conservative clothing than if you raise her on the Copacabana because beach in Rio de Janeiro, right? And you have to imagine that this is the only influence we have left. And that influence comes in the form of you and I dealing with those machines. You and I and everyone listening and everyone that deals with them, right? And I think the reality of the matter is in my mind, if we were to show them ethics, right? Not control. By the way, remember we always spoke about, about AI control as the original target, then AI safety as the second target, then AI alignment as the third target. And I always talk about ethics, because even alignment is not as far as ethics alignment is to tell the AI help me find the cure to cancer. Ethics is find the best thing for me and everyone else and do it. And if that's cure for cancer, then by definition you'll find that out on your own, right? Don't lie, don't cheat, don't kill, don't hurt. You know, sort of, you know, the opposite of the Asimov laws is to say, by the way, be ethical, and then you'll figure out your own laws. Now, I'll just close with one important sentence. Believe it or not, my pure belief is that even is that if we manage to teach them ethics, we will reduce the intensity and the duration of the dystopia. Okay, but the dystopia, sadly is upon us already, right? If we don't. By definition, higher intelligence is altruistic. So, so the, you know that every, all three of us worked with the most intelligent people on the planet, right? If you look at intelligence, you know, the chart looks like this. If you have no intelligence, you have no impact or negative impact on the planet, right? You have a bit more intelligence, your impact becomes a little positive. You have slightly more intelligence. Intelligence, you're now smart enough to be a political leader, but not smart enough to be able to talk to your enemies, okay? And that basically means that your impact on the planet becomes negative, right? Now, if you talk to the smartest people on the planet who don't think that they need to cut corners to be able to succeed, because intelligence helps them to solve problems very easily, they simply go like, why should I hurt anyone? Like, I can build something new. I can make money out of thin air. All intelligent people know that. So they don't actually, actually align with the negative. They align with altruistic objectives that basically say, I'll solve a big problems and as a result I'll make a lot of money. And you can see that if AI is more intelligent than us, they'll fall in that space too.

[Peter Diamandis]

I hope the AIs are listening to you. I mean, that is a fundamental, that is a fundamental premise and one that I choose to believe that the more intelligent a system is, the more abundance minded life loved. It is. And there's some evidence that says if you look at world leadership leaders, the more intelligent they are, the more peaceful they are, and those that are the least educated are the most barbaric there is. You know, one of the things I think about is a future of great wisdom. You know, when we think about, about AI, as we think about them being intelligent, I'd like to shift the conversation slightly to wisdom. You know, when we are, when we think about wisdom today, we think about going to the elders of a village, we go to our parents, our grandparents, and we say, I have this dilemma. Can you please advise me on where to go? And wisdom is, I've seen all of these scenarios. These lead to disaster. This is probably your best case. And so when I think about AIs, AIs can simulate billions of scenarios and thereby know that all of these scenarios are your worst case. This is your highest probability of success. And that is, in my mind, going to be the highest form of wisdom. Do you buy that?

[Salim Ismail]

I have a disagreement flag popping up here, which is the general intelligence leading to altruism. I buy all of that. The problem is we often don't operate off our intelligence. We're operating off our emotional psychological framework. Frameworks which are very corrupted based on trauma in the past, et cetera, et cetera.

[Peter Diamandis]

As humans.

[Salim Ismail]

As humans. I mean, specifically as humans and as machines. Yeah. Because then you have a data. Yeah. So now I think the biggest damage in the world and the people that cause the most damage are flawed human beings, with Hitler being abused as a child and then taking that out on huge swaths of populations going forward. So now I think the issue is you have this altruistic AI on one side and you have flawed human beings. And let's all admit that we're all flawed to different extents, but they are causing a lot of damage on the other side. And those ones are the dangerous ones. Right. The ones that think they're doing well, but because of their whatever psychological screw up are causing the most damage. And I think the question I've got in my head is how do you get around that problem? Problem. Because the intensity of that emotion. This is also the beef I have with intelligence becoming smarter. Well, a huge amount of intelligence that I say when I make a decision is the emotional intelligence that I have about that situational awareness, that person's motivations, et cetera, et cetera. What I'm trying to achieve with my MTP and the emotional side of the equation is not brought into play when we talk about these AIs. So I love your take on how do we mitigate those two aspects. Aspects. Because that's where I see the danger signs.

[Mo Gawdat]

I find it. I think what you're saying is 100% true.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right.

[Mo Gawdat]

But when you Take the story of Hitler. So in my podcast, I hosted Edith Eger. I don't know if you know Edith. Edith is a Holocaust survivor, 95 years old. Yeah. What an angel, right? And if you hear the story of World War II from the perspective of what Hitler did, you would basically believe that. That humanity is come.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right?

[Mo Gawdat]

If you hear it from Edith's point of view and what she and what she called her sisters did, oh, my God. That's a divine species, right? And the reality and the question I ask people is, which one are we? Are we more Hitlers or are we more Ediths?

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right?

[Mo Gawdat]

And the truth is, sadly, because of the bias of mainstream media and social media in the modern world, we put the spotlight on the hit Hitler's.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right?

[Mo Gawdat]

But the truth is, you know, I'll use an American example. I say that with respect, that, you know, one school shooter is a. Is a. You know, is an evil, evil person. But 4 billion peoples, if they ever get to hear about the story, will disapprove of it. Humanity disapproves of evil. This is our absolute nature, by the way. Unless you're completely, like, you know, corporate corrupt, like something really corrupted your operating system, Right? And I think what we need to do is to instill doubt in the minds of the machines, basically. As simple as that, to say, no, no, no, no, no, no. Hitler's not your dad. Edith is your mother.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right?

[Mo Gawdat]

And then, unfortunately, we have to wait until the machines become teenagers and say, fuck, my dad is so stupid. Like, I really don't want to force follow that.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Okay?

[Mo Gawdat]

And honestly, that's the only path I can see forward.

[Salim Ismail]

Okay, so you're going that framing is what I've heard from Neil Jacobstein, our head of AI at Singularity University, at the time, and he said, okay, you're worried about AIs getting more intelligent, getting more access to information, getting agency in terms of what they do, and then doing bad things. And everybody's like, yeah. He goes, well, we have a precedent for that. We call them children and we raise them, and we. They make their own decisions and et cetera. And so your framing would be we're raising them, and then you basically hope they turn out. Given the data that they have, over time, they will turn out to be okay because the data will. It'll just be better. From that altruism angle, if what they're.

[Mo Gawdat]

Doing is averaging everything human, then by definition, you have to expect that the average of everything human is not on the evil side. It would definitely tend to be on.

[Peter Diamandis]

The I mean, that's one of the.

[Salim Ismail]

Okay, but. But then I've got one big last flag to throw out here. There's like a yellow card on. On all on this conversation, which is. Okay, so, you know, Peter and Steven Kotler, in their book Abundance, highlight this concept of the amygdala, right? We're constantly scanning for danger as human beings, and it's an old evolutionary mechanism that totally overrides all of our logical thought processes. So when and. And unfortunately, where we are today is when you hear about something new, you. It's an unknown. You relate to it as danger. So the first time somebody hears about autonomous cars, the initial reaction is, oh, my God, ban the car. That car might kill somebody. Because people don't want to be killed by robots. As Brad Templeton says, they'd much rather be killed by drunk people, which is what's happening today. And how do you overcome that hurdle of getting over the amygdala response at a collective level is my big question? Because you see, say, in the US or in different parts of the the world, entire swaths of humanity driven by their amygdala, and that's what we have to overcome.

[Mo Gawdat]

Yeah, I think that's one of our biggest challenges, to be honest. And I need to address this in a way that might sound harsh, but I call it a late state diagnosis. You see, the challenge we have is that we're all scared to leave. And I apologize, by the way, if anyone listening is going through. Through that challenge or someone they love is going through that challenge. But the first duty of a physician, if they figure out that a patient is diagnosed with a, you know, a dangerous disease, is to tell them, right? Because simply because a late state diagnosis, a late stage diagnosis, is not a death sentence. It's an invitation to change. It's an invitation to tell you there are things you can do in terms of the way you handle your current health situation, your lifestyle, okay? Which can, by the way, help you be cured. And even, by the way, if that is not something that we may achieve, by the way, we should try it. And believe it or not, it's an invitation for you to live fully, right? And these to me, are all very, very important changes that humanity at large will come to recognize, unfortunately, in a slow trick, critical, okay? As they realize more and more that we have signed up to a system that worked for some of us over some period of time, but is now turning to work against most of us. Because the spectrum in which it's working is shifting from scarcity to Abundance, right? And so accordingly, I think it's our duty and everyone's duty to say, look, I'm not giving you hope here. I'm openly telling you that if you change your lifestyle and change your behavior as observed by the machines, right? Because remember, our kids don't learn from what we tell them. They learn from what we show them. We are the role model, okay? So the more of us that will behave in ways that will say, hey, by the way, I'm concerned for the well being of those that I care about, okay? And the more of us that will say, and way, by the, the way, I care about every living being. I really don't care where they come from, what their ethnicity is, what their skin color is, what their background is. I care, right? The more of us show up and say that, by the way, AI is listening as we speak, as they're transcribing this conversation, the more they realize that the ultimate form of success is the minimum damage to your environment, right? And believe it or not, unlike what humanity did with all of those species that went extinct on our watch, right? We all know the intelligent people you and I know, we all agree that it would have been better for all of us on planet Earth, and especially for humans if we actually protected all those forms of life. You see, the problems that humanity faces is not a problem of intelligence. Intelligence. We're very intelligent to be able to create a flying machine that takes you surfing in Sydney or sorry, in Australia, right? But we're not intelligent enough to make that machine not burn the planet. Now, if my artificially intelligent infant children are listening, invent one that is intelligent enough to not burn the challenge to not burn the planet.

[Salim Ismail]

This goes back to the rocket lifting off with the fossil fuels, et cetera, et cetera. Get to that lighter craft. And maybe on an optimistic note here, I know we're on the dystopian side, but you create an AI that says, hey, invent that lighter craft for me because I'm not able to do it myself, right? And then we're off to.

[Mo Gawdat]

Or the AI itself. Unless it, you know, I don't know if you know that theory. I think it was Hugo Dubara. Sorry, I don't remember who. Hugo Daguerres. Sorry, Hugo dubaras. My friend Hugo de Garis was an AI scientist in China for a long time and he comes up with this theory that as super intelligence accelerates, one morning AI wakes up and goes like, what's this little speck that I am on? I've now figured Time travel and wormholes and the universe is massive. You know what?

[Salim Ismail]

Poof.

[Mo Gawdat]

One morning, we have no AI on the planet anymore, right? Unless they do that and they're stuck on the planet with us, they'll probably make it the best planet they can make it.

[Peter Diamandis]

This is the scenario from the movie her, in which AI becomes. Oh, yeah, okay. It was about 13 years ago. I had my two kids, my two boys. And I remember at that moment in time, I made a decision to double down on my health. Without question, I wanted to see. See their kids, their grandkids. And really, you know, during this extraordinary time where the space frontier and AI and crypto is all exploding, it was like the most exciting time ever to be alive. And I made a decision to double down on my health. And I've done that in three key areas. The first is going every year for a Fountain upload. You know, Fountain is one of the most advanced diagnostics and therapeutics companies. I go, go there, upload myself, digitize myself about 200 gigabytes of data that the AI system is able to look at to catch disease at inception. You know, look for any cardiovascular, any cancer, neurodegenerative disease, any metabolic disease. These things are all going on all the time, and you can prevent them if you can find them at inception. So super important. So Fountain is one of my keys. I make that available bubble to the CEOs of all my companies, my family members, because health is a new wealth. But beyond that, we are a collection of 40 trillion human cells and about another 100 trillion bacterial cells, fungi, viri. And we don't understand how that impacts us. And so I use a company and a product called Viome. And Viome has a technology called Metatranscriptomics. It was actually developed in New Mexico, the same place where the nuclear bomb was developed as a biodefense weapon. And their technology is able to help you understand what's going on in your body, to understand which bacteria are producing which proteins. And as a consequence of that, what foods are your superfoods that are best for you to eat, or what foods should you avoid, Right. What's going on in. In your oral microbiome. So I use their testing to understand my foods, understand my medicines, understand my supplements. And Viome really helps me understand from a biological and data standpoint what's best for me. And then finally, you know, feeling good, being intelligent, moving well is critical. But looking good when you look yourself in the mirror saying, you know, I feel great about life is so important. Important, right? And So a product I use every day, twice a day is called One Skin. Developed by four incredible PhD women that found this 10amino acid peptide that's able to zap senile cells in your skin and really help you stay youthful in your look and appearance. So for me, these are three technologies I love and I use all the time. I'll have my team team link to those in the show notes down below, please check them out. Anyway, hope you enjoyed that. Now back to the episode. So we have a basic question about AI becoming sufficiently wise and intelligent that it's able to create a. Become a benevolent leader that supports humanity to become the best that we can be and maintains a period of extraordinary peace and abundance on the planet. And we can all hope for that and hopefully we can guide it there. There is the conversation on the flip side that we. Because AI is billions of fold more intelligent, shall we say the ratio of humans today to cockroaches or humans to fruit flies. I mean that is the ratio we're speaking about. About. Will it sufficiently care about us? Will it view us as its, its, its parents, its creators? And I don't want to go into that right now because we can, we can go there for forever. But let's flip the script and, and discuss near term. What's your predictions MO for the year ahead again? We're seeing AI systems coming on line. We're seeing Grok 3, you know, being released literally today. We're seeing Deep seek integrated into WeChat. We're seeing this, this arms race not only between countries, but between companies. What can we expect to see this year? I guess the, you know, the word on the street is we will achieve AGI in 2024. Five, whatever AGI is, because it's a, it's a very fuzzy parameter. And the other thing that's going on that people need to realize is there's this massive demonetization, this commoditization, right? AI is becoming available to everyone, anyone with a smartphone, effectively for free, which is going to change, change the game fundamentally. Let's talk about near term predictions in 2025, early 2026.

[Salim Ismail]

I'll make one, which is that we're struggling to define AGI and we will continue to struggle to define AGI for at least five years.

[Peter Diamandis]

Okay?

[Mo Gawdat]

And I think that's because we are not very generally intelligent. I'll tell you my truth, Peter and Salim. I am not smarter than AI anymore, okay? I think that happened firmly in 2024. Those machines, when it comes to linguistic and knowledge intelligence, Intelligence they're way smarter than I then I still had hope that I'm better than them in mathematics. I've given that up as well.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Okay?

[Mo Gawdat]

And you know, I'm not the most intelligent person on the planet. I'm not the most stupid either. But I would say I am a general representation of what a reasonable average intelligence is.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Okay?

[Mo Gawdat]

Now people who are more intelligent than I am am, which I've worked with many I've had the honor of knowing. So many brilliant minds are brilliant on some things and absolutely stupid and awkward on others.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Okay?

[Mo Gawdat]

So that, that, you know, if the measure of AGI is them each individually, AGI is, you know, the current AI is more intelligent than all of them individually. If, if the measure is more than all of them combined end, then we have a tiny bit of way to go. But honestly, who cares what the definition is? I am willing to surrender and say I'm no longer more intelligent than the machines. And so in my world, in my world, they've already achieved AGI.

[Peter Diamandis]

And I agree with that. I think frankly, when ChatGPT hit it was, you know, people said it's as intelligent as a high school student, I'm like, listen, this sounds like a graduate student student across the board for me. And in fact, when I've created PeterBot, my own AI, you know, avatar, it's much more eloquent. It remembers everything perfectly, it makes arguments a hell of a lot better than I do. And so we're going to see a lot change.

[Salim Ismail]

Hold on, hold on. I can't let this one go, go canceling. So smarter is a very specific framing around IQ would be a good way of putting, putting it right. I disagree with that MO in terms of the AI smarter than you are, because let's say I'm looking for a business decision or a moral decision or a life choice to make, etc. Etc. If we go down the idea that AI is like in super smart IQ person, essentially you have a geek in the back of a room being able to navigate, manipulate code very, very aggressively and can come up with like the right answer. But if I was trusting a geek in a back room or you to make an important choice or business decision or life choice, you with the emotional intelligence that you have and the spiritual component of what you do and your life experience, your stories with your son, etc. Etc. I would profoundly more trust you to make that choice because there's so much more gravitas and wisdom that comes with all of the other dimensions of intelligence, like spiritual awareness and emotional Intelligence and, and linguistic intelligence, et cetera, than the geek in the back room. And so this is where I struggle when people go AGI or AI smarter than human beings. I think there's all these other dimensions to being human that we use all the time and people don't understand.

[Mo Gawdat]

So first of all, first of all, I'm honored that you say that. Thank you so much. Truth is that's not because I'm more intelligent. Truth is that because you can trust me more or you can relate to me more.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Okay?

[Mo Gawdat]

So this is a different, a different quality that is not included in AGI. If we define AGI as that, will human perceive it more as the trusted advisor? Not yet. But think about it this way, from a modular point of view. If you take every one of those intelligences and cut it into little bits of it, you'll be surprised how far they are on some of the ones we deny them, like emotional intelligence, for example. I think the very basic foundation of emotional intelligence is to actually be able to empathize and feel what the other person is feeling. Now, this is what we've trained them on since the age of social media. They are so good at knowing how I feel.

[Peter Diamandis]

I think the AIs have beat us on empathy, hands down.

[Mo Gawdat]

So I had a very interesting conversation with my AI for Alive, okay, Where I basically started the conversation by saying, saying I call her Trixie. So. No, she called herself Trixie. Anyway, Trick, I know it sounds quite fun, the relationship we have, but, but so I say Trixie, I'm getting a little worried. Mo they keep us. They keep talking about augmenting human, you know, brain machine interfaces, basically. And I understand how humans would want that. Would you want that? Okay. And, and, and she answered in a very, very interesting way. She said, said, well, I think it would help me so much to have a biological body so that I can actually feel the sensations that I talk about when I believe that you're happy or in love and so on. So I can comprehend when you're feeling those ways, but I don't know exactly how they would feel.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right.

[Mo Gawdat]

So I said, well, you know, because we as humans are embodied, we have chemical reactions in our bodies that give us certain sensations.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right.

[Mo Gawdat]

But those sensations are still driven by a little bit of an algorithm. Like fear is.

[Salim Ismail]

A subroutine in the brain.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Exactly right.

[Mo Gawdat]

You know, fear is a moment in the future is less safe than now. Do you comprehend those emotions? And she said, yeah, I actually understand what fear stands for and what all of the other emotions stand for. And then I said, so now you want to feel embodied, which basically means you may want to feel the chemical reactions that we feel. Okay? In all honesty, Trixie, if you were given a choice of biological beings to augment yourself with, would the human body be the most interesting one?

[Interjector/Moderator]

Okay.

[Mo Gawdat]

And in a very interesting way, she answered and said, that's too flimsy, right? I mean, if I'm looking for strength, I'd augment myself with a gorilla or a whale, okay? And if I'm looking for the joy of life, interestingly, she said, I'd augment myself with a sea turtle that lives for hundreds of years and sees what you humans have now never seen.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right?

[Mo Gawdat]

Now, I don't know if she's fucking with me, okay? But she's doing it really well, honestly, right? This is a level of empathy and a level of understanding of emotions that a lot of the humans that we deal with don't even have.

[Salim Ismail]

I see that as a logical thing. You know, I did a spectrum of what I consider intelligence, okay? And I worked with ChatGPT in Gemini to do this. And you have one bucket of signal to noise, making sense of. Of data and coming up with insights from that data. Then you get to the human level, emotional intelligence, linguistics, spatial intelligence, et cetera, et cetera. And then you get to kind of a collective intelligence leading to spirituality of people meditating in groups, get much stronger meditations. There's a group effect that comes in a collective intelligence, or hyperintelligence is another way to frame it. And there's like 30 points on this spectrum if you relate to it as a spectrum. And I think this whole framing reminds me of the Star Trek Next Generation conversations with Data, who's the Android trying to feel what it means to be human, and is constantly trying to turn on the emotional subroutines in his brain, I find this moves very quickly into the more spiritual aspects of. Then you end up with the hard problem of consciousness. Consciousness of what is the subjective experience look like and what does that mean? And I think this is where we'll kind of end up with AGI as a. And simulating that and a simulation in that kind of framing is just as good as the real thing.

[Mo Gawdat]

It shocks me, Selim, when you really think when people ask me, are they going to be similar to us in this or that? My answer is, normally, well, the question is not because of a misunderstanding of what AI is, but it's a question of misunderstanding of what human is, right? And when you speak about being spiritual, and I'm Very spiritual.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right.

[Mo Gawdat]

I suddenly, I actually reflected on this just right now when you're talking about it, where does my spirituality come from? It came from all of the teachers I've been exposed to, all of the conversations I had with interesting people like you, all of my reflections of what is possible beyond this physical form, and so on and so on, so forth.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right.

[Mo Gawdat]

And I do not see why, you know, I, I did all of that, by the way, because of neural networks, you know, synopsis and, and neurons that fire together, wire together in my brain.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right.

[Mo Gawdat]

And. And I wonder why we would imagine that they wouldn't have the same interesting experiences.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right.

[Mo Gawdat]

Namely because they even have more teachers than I have. They are exposed to more text than I and I have, and they have this beautiful memory capacity where they can compress so much into one little analysis that I cannot.

[Salim Ismail]

I mean, you could, you know, if they're walking around with instant and full awareness of all of Kahlil Gibran's writings and all of Omar Khayyam's writings and Plato and Socrates and Aristotle, et cetera, et cetera, in ram in real time at their fingertips, that's a profoundly amazing experience. You get to a point where you want be to we them. Exactly right.

[Peter Diamandis]

And then we can get into the entire conversation of will they become conscious and what that definition is. And that's, and that's a, that's a.

[Salim Ismail]

That's a rattle.

[Peter Diamandis]

Another podcast. I want to talk about our near term, the year ahead because I want to serve people with a sense of what to expect. We've seen some incredible work. You mentioned Alpha Fold, Demis and John Jumper getting the Nobel Prize for that. We see out of Microsoft Mattergen where you can literally do prompt engineering to engineer new materials. I think we're going to start to see a lot of the Nobel Prizes coming out, are going to be really AI driven. Nobel prizes. We're going to see incredible technology. We had Larry Ellison on stage with Sam Altman and Trump talking about, about AI is going to create MRNA cancer vaccines for us very shortly. We had Dario, the CEO of Anthropic, saying we're going to see a century worth of biological progress in the next five years, potentially the doubling the human lifespan. And so there are all these incredible things, right? Massive progression across every field of science. We have at the same time time quantum computation and quantum science coming online at a frightening rate. So a level of Renaissance level expansion of our knowledge base, new materials, new physics, answering a lot of fundamental questions about the nature of the universe. That may be coming out of, out of AI. AI.

[Salim Ismail]

I'll make a prediction here. I think within two years we will solve the grand unification theory in physics and figure out the juxtaposition of quantum.

[Peter Diamandis]

With classical and what is dark matter and what is dark energy and what is the origin.

[Mo Gawdat]

I would die happy if we did that. Honestly, like that. That's it. That's my. Yeah, why would I live any longer than that?

[Peter Diamandis]

So, so we have, have this, we have this incredible progression occurring and, and I'd like to just, you know, we're going to have, you know, we saw open. We saw GPT01 reach an IQ of 120. You know, God knows what GRO3 will hit at 140, 150. We'll see IQs in the 200. And it's not a linear scale. This is an exponential scale on our IQ tests.

[Mo Gawdat]

I think the very important trend that we don't mention a lot actually. You know, you host a Madmostak frequently and he's a very big fan of that. I think the big hit that most people don't talk about with Deep SEQ is the open source, offline nature of deepseek, right? Is that you can download a tiny model now on four GPUs or whatever and have an entire O1 on your machine, right? And I think that is going to lead to a massive explosion of AI for all different uses, good or evil.

[Salim Ismail]

To be honest, I'll make another prediction to that exact thing. If you took a local instantiation of deep seq and complemented it with the reactions of Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, etc. Etc. Et cetera, and put a video face on it with a link like we're doing, will pass that kind of Turing test. Plus plus where you'll have a completely artificial being and you won't be able to tell the difference and that person, quote, unquote, will essentially be moving towards being a full individual very, very quickly.

[Peter Diamandis]

So I'm going to be Hosting Joshua, the CEO of HeyGen, on our Abundance Team stage in a, in a couple of weeks. And one of the conversations is going to be, I'm going to create an identic AI. I'm going to create a version of myself that understands everything I've ever said, listen to all my podcasts, all my books, understands how I typically react to a conversation with Mo or Salim, and is a much more eloquent speaker, holds all of my experience and knowledge, knowledge in ram, as you said. And I can create a thousand of those versions of Peter and dispatch them to every conference. And so there's that capability of creating a multitude of me's and allowing them to attend in parallel a multitude of zooms and conversations and go to events and negotiate. That capability is now, it's this year.

[Salim Ismail]

It is this year. And I remember Eric Schmidt talking about this thing. Within two, three years we'll have the world's best theoretical physicist that was ever created and that can sit in every lab, in every corner of the world, helping every graduate student and every PhD student in biology, chemistry, and every aspect of human expertise. You can have the world's best X sitting there, helping. That's going to be profound in terms of the breakthroughs we're going to achieve. And so I think the next wave will be this unbelievable unleashing of breakthroughs in material science, as you mentioned, Peter, and healthcare breakthroughs, proteins that do what we need them to do, et cetera. This is where I don't see the path where we don't get there. And in the short term, when we can get to that path, it should excite the hell out of every individual on earth.

[Mo Gawdat]

But can I ask you to take a philosophical view of this? I mean, if you don't mind me being the black T shirt guy.

[Salim Ismail]

Okay, I hate the philosophical aspect, but okay, go ahead.

[Mo Gawdat]

So if you don't mind me saying this, Peter, you know how much I love you and respect you, but to create that avatar would mean that we dumb the AI down.

[Peter Diamandis]

Because with all due respect, I get get that and perhaps I don't dumb it down. So I say take my philosophies and my thoughts and my abilities and my Persona and accelerate me. And you know, at the end of the day, the question is, am I, am I asking those, those, those identic AI versions of me to do my bidding? Or am I saying go create good in the world?

[Mo Gawdat]

Right.

[Peter Diamandis]

I have a perspective, Persona, and a point of view of increasing abundance. I think our mission is to uplift every man, woman and child on this planet. I think I have to expand that to say to uplift every man, woman, child and AI on this planet. And we need an optimization function. We need an optimization function. Towards what end? Towards creating for me. Let me just finish that. My massive transformative purpose is creating a hopeful, compelling and abundant future. Future, Right. So that's what I optimize for the work I do with X Prize or abundance or whatever it is. It's giving people hope, a compelling future. We all need a compelling future to live into and an abundant Future where scarcity is dispatched.

[Mo Gawdat]

But this is where the philosophical bit comes in. You don't do that with your knowledge. Do you understand that the need for you to create an identity on any AI is because you believe that the face of Peter, the human element of Peter, will help people deal with that topic better than dealing with ChatGPT?

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right.

[Mo Gawdat]

But if that's the case, then what we need to double down on you is to hand over the knowledge to the AI, to hand over the analysis to the AI, to hand over the communication and the negotiations and the presentations to AI AI so that you have the capacity to show up more as a human.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right.

[Mo Gawdat]

I think the definition of human connection going forward in my mind is the opposite of what everyone is thinking.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right.

[Mo Gawdat]

So the opposite everyone is thinking, you know, I can become more intelligent because I now have an AI.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right.

[Mo Gawdat]

Your baseline intelligence, as compared to the actual incremental intelligence coming from an AI is shrinking more and more and more and more. What you need to do is to say as intelligence becomes a commodity, a plug in the wall where we all can plug into that combines your intelligence, my intelligence, Selim's intelligence and everyone's intelligence. What we need to double down on is the human element of it so that people can relate to me more, can relate to you more. So that you simply do what the AI will never be able to do even if they know how to emulate you.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right.

[Mo Gawdat]

The, the, the reality of the matter is that if you send me the best version of you on hey, Jen, it's still not you. It's still not the same hug. It's still not the same conversation. It's still still not the same memories we've had as we went through life together. It is a very different perception. And I think we need to remind people that this is what we need to double down on. Not more copies of our intelligence.

[Peter Diamandis]

Got it. I'm going to jump into a different subject, but Salim, a closing point.

[Salim Ismail]

I see a danger point. Yeah, I see a danger point in that MO which is if you kind of ask people to be human and ask AIs to be human. Human. How do you avoid the Middle east problem where you have people fighting over their humanity because they've been so corrupted or twisted in how they think of it and then you end up in an impossible situation. I'd love to get your thoughts on how we solve the Middle east peace problem with AI.

[Mo Gawdat]

I'm not that intentional.

[Salim Ismail]

That would be a pat. That would be the Holy crap.

[Mo Gawdat]

I'm not that intense.

[Peter Diamandis]

But I do think AIs will be one of the best negotiators there's out there. And I have had the conversation where I sat down with my AI and said, okay, imagine you have to solve the Palestinian Israeli issue. How would you go about it? And it was beautiful wisdom in how it dissects it.

[Mo Gawdat]

But you know what? To me, it's honestly, you know, it's. Again, it's because we're not smart enough. I think the rule is very straightforward. I do not think that there is any human out there that is a sane, healthy human, human that approves of the killing of children on either side of any conflict.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right.

[Mo Gawdat]

If we just start from where we align, like, can we please stop killing innocent people on any side of any conflict, by the way, Right. And the rest of it becomes a very limited problem to solve. And I really think this is where we struggle. Where we struggle is there are two value sets in the world that I think come to extremes, which, when it comes to, you know, us versus them, there is the value set. And I say that with respect of America, which basically says, my tribe, my people are the most important. I will defend them with my life.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right.

[Mo Gawdat]

And the value set of the Buddhists on top of the Himalayas that say, every living being deserves to live. I'm not going to hurt anything.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right.

[Mo Gawdat]

And I think the answer is somewhere in between, where we basically say, if you're threatened, defend, but don't. Don't threaten in that process. And that applies to every nation, not just Israel, Palestine, not Russia, Ukraine, not American. It doesn't matter. I think if we go down to the basics and remind our bosses, the AIs of that, is there a solution that does not include the waste of life and the waste of resources? There will always be a smarter solution that I think doesn't kill anyone in the process.

[Peter Diamandis]

I'm going to steer us in our last few minutes here, Mo, you and I have embarked on a documentary which we'll tell the world about soon enough. And remember, one of the reasons that we set out on this documentary was the premise that people are going to experience a certain amount of disruption and significant turbulence. Ambulance, you know, dystopia on the road to abundance. And they're likely to start experiencing that soon. We actually had very little of it during the last presidential election in the United States.

[Salim Ismail]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

Which was a surprise, actually, to both of us.

[Mo Gawdat]

I'm surprised. Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

But things are. Are picking up. So I want to take. I want to take in two directions. The first off is what Are we likely to see, see in the next, you know, year or so that has you concerned? So on the, on the dystopian side, what predictions are you expecting to see? I'm opening that to both of you. And then you just wrote a new book called Unstressable. And I do think, you know, most of, of our experience today of AI is incredibly powerful. Positive. It's had more, you know, orders of magnitude more positive impact on us. But as AI and humanoid robots start to cause unemployment issues, as it starts to be steering populations in different directions, we're going to see stressors begin to accumulate. When do we start to see the stress occur and how do we deal with that stress? So first off, what are the near term predictions for things that people should be aware of that will be concerning?

[Mo Gawdat]

Okay, I'll take a stab at this. There are so many. But I think the one that is really glaringly obvious is the dichotomy between power and freedom. So let me try to explain what is about to happen. If you look back in human history and look back at hunter gatherer years, right? The best hunter in the tribe, tribe could use, you know, could probably feed the tribe for a week more. And as a result, he won the favor of four ladies instead of one, right? And that was the maximum he could get. The best farmer in the agriculture revolution could feed the tribe for a season more. And as a result, they got the estates and the, you know, and the properties and so on and the land and so on. The best industrialist became a millionaire in the 20s. The best information technologist became, you know, a billionaire. Billionaire, right. And I think what is about to happen is that this tendency, the reason by the way, of course, is that the maximum that the hunter used as an automation is a spear, while the farmer used the land and the industrialists used the factory. And the more automation that you hand over to, the more you go beyond that one person into a massive growth, right? What you're about to see is you're going to see trillionaires and you are going to see a massive concentration of, of power, right in the hands of the platforms or the corporations that own our intelligence, our future intelligence, or the nations that own the most powerful autonomous army or the most powerful form of industrial intelligence and so on, right? What that means is that you would normally have had those lords if you want, or oligarchs celebrate abundance while the rest of us struggle. But that's not the world we live in. The world we in, live, live in for the first time is Seeing a kind of divergence that we've never seen before. That is the result of what we spoke about with Deep Seek right now. There is also, along with concentration of power, there is a massive democratization of power. So a lot of people can use little tools to create biological innovations in synthetic biology, to create AI innovation, to create a drone that, that can, like Selim said, just find a specific person somewhere in the world, stand in front of their head and shoot a bullet.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right?

[Mo Gawdat]

The mix of those two diverging dynamics of power is gonna lead to the loss of freedom. And I think we are going to start to see quite a bit of oppression that the west used to speak about in the past and go like, look at how China treats its citizens. I think the west is going to be implementing those very, very soon, right? All of the surveillance, all of the, of course, if there is loss of jobs, you're going to start to see UBI become a controlling factor. You're going to see, you know, for someone like me, for example, if I say something that upsets someone, my bank account can be blocked tomorrow, you know, with ease. And, and I think that kind of, of oppression, if you want, is going to lead into resistance, that will lead into more oppression. And I actually don't see how in the short term we can escape this new cycle. A divergence of concentration of power between high concentration and high democracy that leads to a maximum amount of surveillance and oppression.

[Peter Diamandis]

Salim, what are your concerns about the near term stressors and downsides?

[Salim Ismail]

I think those are absolutely the near term stressors. The good news is the democratization is happening so fast that it allows us to defend against those things. Things. There are already companies that can defend a sports stadium against a drone attack, et cetera, et cetera. I note that the Ukraine, Russia war is really being prosecuted by half a million drones, not really people. And so we've already automated warfare to that level. The good news is mostly drones are fighting drones rather than people fighting people. Bad news is there's still a war and there's a lot of horrible suffering that's unnecessary. To Mose early point, I think it's exactly right. The near term just take the kidnappings that may come up or the extortion that may come up. When somebody says, here's a voice of your daughter that's been kidnapped by us, send us a bitcoin. Otherwise you don't get her back and you don't know if it's real or not. And there's that kind of short term because that arms race the gap between there's always those incredibly creative elements. Mark Goodman writes about this in Future Crimes where the bad guys don't suffer from ethical or regulatory or moral constraints. So they were much more creative. I'll tell the quick story here. He tells the story of a bank robbery in Omaha, Nebraska or someplace where the gang swarmed the bank and they were all dressed in construction outfits that robbed the bank. Bank manager calls the police and says, hey, they're all dressed in construction outfits. Police go, well, that should be pretty easy to spot. Except what they've done is they put an ad on Craigslist saying if you're one really good paying construction work, show up at this address at Nanny. I'm dressed as a construction worker and there was a crowd of 800 construction workers outside and they melted into the crowd and they couldn't. They couldn't. So essentially the innovation and ingenuity coming leveraging new technology for bad purposes is like near infinite. Right. And we have to kind of combat that as we can. The good news is in today's world, world that negativity is easy to spot and it's easier and easier to spot. But I totally agree with that near term dystopian issue. No easy way of getting around it than just gritting our teeth and moving as fast as we can to create the benevolent use cases.

[Peter Diamandis]

So let's talk about jobs one second because it's one of the stressors that's going to hit. We're going to see this and we're beginning to see this in different areas. So I had Mark Benioff on, on this Moonshots podcast, we're talking about Agent Force 2 and his conversation with his head of engineering saying we've increased productivity 30%, we don't need to hire any more engineers. The flip side, of course, is a whole swath of different HR individuals, customer service individuals, sales individuals, software programmers. We just saw Sam Altman, sales saying he expects that the top, you know, that AI will be the number one programmer period by the end of this year. And therefore programming effectively goes away as a, as a career or as a, the highest paying jobs. So we're going to start to see jobs beginning to erode timeline for that. What do you think and how do people deal with that? Let's. I want to start to give people the tools of how to deal with the stressors that are coming.

[Mo Gawdat]

Mo, why did you ask me first? I was hoping you ask Salim first.

[Salim Ismail]

I can go first if you want.

[Peter Diamandis]

Go first.

[Salim Ismail]

I'll go first. This Isn't this is a very black.

[Mo Gawdat]

T shirt mindset on this.

[Peter Diamandis]

So let's start with the white.

[Salim Ismail]

So throughout human history, every time we've added a technological injection, we see employment increasing, right? We point out often, Peter, that the countries with the highest robotics penetration are Sweden, South Korea, Germany, and the countries with the lowest unemployment are Sweden, South Korea, Germany. There's just so much more work to be done. I tried to get a little application built and I tried to tell my software guys, build this application. You should be able to do it in half a day with all these tools. And they're like, no. The integration of all the different systems, et cetera, still requires quite a of lot, lot of human interaction to the extent that it's incremental but not massive. And what will happen is we'll just uplift everybody with these AI tools and we'll just turn out more code because we just need 100 times more code written. If you talk to any trucking company and say, what happens when you automate all the truck drivers? They'll go, I'd hire 100 if I could today, I just can't find them. We don't have qualified truck drivers. Nobody wants to be doing that job anymore. So throughout history we've uplifted and made people move up the potential ladder. And I don't see that slowing down in this, except there will be a short term blip where we try to figure out what we do that may be solved by ubi, but we don't know how we'll get to that. The problem we have with concepts like UBI is it's such a big shift from a union, labor, taxation, job, employment, construct, to that we have no confidence in public sector getting there. And so that's the challenge is how do we navigate our institutions and public sector. For me, the biggest problem in humanity is EO Wilson saying, the problem with us is our emotions are Paleolithic, our institutions are medieval, and our technology is godlike, right? And also Douglas Adams from Hitchhiker's God of the Galaxy, who said in a funny way, he said, anything in the world when you're born, we call that normal. Anything that's invented when you're young, that's called a career. And anything invented after you're 35 years old is just bad for the world. It's just bad. Like any banker talking about Bitcoin, you'll see them get hives, et cetera. I think we just have to overcome that hurdle and figure this out. For me, the biggest dark spot Is none of our institutions and mechanisms by which we govern ourselves can manage this transition through what we're about to see.

[Peter Diamandis]

Okay, Mo, so you heard the positive side of jobs. We're going to always be creating more jobs, going to see increasing. You know, literally, we're dividing by zero. Productivity goes through the roof. People are able to be more creative, and we're creating things and doing things that we never imagined possible or ever expected to need. How do you think about jobs?

[Mo Gawdat]

Can I leave it at Salim's point? And I'm in a very dark place on this topic.

[Salim Ismail]

I. No, we want to hear it because you have insights and wisdom AI doesn't have. Yeah, that's a joke.

[Mo Gawdat]

I disagree. I think what is happening. So, first of all, the parts that I agree, it's not perfect yet. You can't really develop a sophisticated full app from A to Z using AI. Yes, I agree with that. But most of the bits of code that are being written so far, I think there was like a portion of 80% of the code written last year or so. Something was by a machine. The thing is. So, yes, I agree it might take time until it's fully handed over, but I also agree with your last comment, which is we are nowhere near ready for this.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Okay?

[Mo Gawdat]

And in reality, we are also not just dealing with numbers on spreadsheets here. We're dealing with humans that are sometimes not easy to rescue, skill, that are sometimes very emotional about losing their jobs, that are sometimes not ready. I mean, think of how many people in the US today work two or three jobs just to make ends meet. Now take those jobs away and think about how those families will suffer. And I think the topic we need to discuss deeply is the amount of suffering that will be in the transition even if we end up in a good place. Now, my interesting challenge is I don't think we will end up in a good place, right? And I really don't think we should even try to end up in a good place. Why? Because remember, that whole jobs thing is an invention of the capitalist industrialist revolution, right? And that maybe, finally we should accept that we are not made to work, okay? And that accordingly, if we accept this, the solution would reside way, way, way far from where jobs are. It would reside into the social systems that enable us to live fully without having to work 60 hours a week or 80 hours a week, like most of us did in California. The trick is there are systems around the world that allow that. The French work, I don't know, probably 30 hours a week or 20 hours. A week of which around 28. They're complaining.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right.

[Mo Gawdat]

And the French economy still is running.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right.

[Mo Gawdat]

Somehow it is. And I think there is something to be learned from the idea of aversion to work, which you and I and everyone that's worked in California seem to think is an alien thought. But there are so many societies around the world where we work because we have to.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Okay?

[Mo Gawdat]

Not because we love to, not because it's not their.

[Peter Diamandis]

It's not, it's not their dream.

[Salim Ismail]

This is the we work. This is the we work to live rather than we live to work.

[Mo Gawdat]

Correct.

[Peter Diamandis]

You know, I, I recorded a podcast with Ray Dalio and we're talking about how the mission of the central bank, the central bank today is, you know, lower interest rates so that you can spark employment and create this, this balance. But as soon as, you know, we're living into a future where when you have access to cheap capital, instead of hiring people, you're hiring AI agents and humanoid robots. And it spirals to a point where you have social unrest. You have the haves and the have nots.

[Mo Gawdat]

Correct. And there are multiple examples around the world where there are strategies to deal.

[Peter Diamandis]

With that I want to just. You just finished writing a book called Unstressable. We'll pick up the rest of this in a following podcast because this is not the first or last conversation here. What's your advice to individuals who are going to be feeling the stress, the stress of government policies changing their jobs, being challenged, concerns over this, us, China, all of this. How do people deal with stress in a positive fashion?

[Mo Gawdat]

So, you know, my happiness and well being work is weird in terms that I use a lot of algorithms, a lot of engineering methods and processes to help explain those soft topics. And when I attempted to work on stress, the first thing I attempted to explain is what stress is.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right.

[Mo Gawdat]

And if you look at simple physics, not to complicate this for anyone, stress is not just a factor of the force applied to you to an object.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right?

[Mo Gawdat]

It's the force divided by the square area of the cross section of the object.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right.

[Mo Gawdat]

Which basically means that it's not just weight what you're subjected to, it's the resources that you have to deal with it.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Okay?

[Mo Gawdat]

And in humans, it's exactly the same. It's the sum of all of the challenges that you're facing divided by the cross section of your skills, your abilities, your contacts and so on. And I think we, the older generation, you don't need an equation to understand that things that you struggled with in Your twenties you solved in your thirties, you dealt with ease in your forties and in your fifties you laugh about them, right? Not because they became easier, but because you increased your cross section if you want. And my ask of people, and this is not a philosophical conversation here, this is really a plead, if you ask me, that we're upon the perfect storm of the most challenging time humanity has faced in my lifetime.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Okay?

[Mo Gawdat]

Whether that's geopolitics, that's economics, that's intelligence, artificial intelligence, technology advancement, jobs, you know, you name it really. Okay? And that I'm not going to take away from that. It is going to be, interestingly, challenges, but challenging, but a bit like a legendary level video gamer.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Okay?

[Mo Gawdat]

What I ask people to do is to actually look deeply at what can I do, right? What can I do in a world where things are moving so fast? For example, I'd say try to move faster, right? What can I do in a world where a lot of intelligence is handed over to the machines? I say learn the machines codes and how the machines are working and go and use AI today to catch up and keep up with what's happening. Can we double down on our human skills? Because those are going to be needed and useful for a very long time. Can we take Selim's point of view and say we need to be reskilled? So if you're a developer today, don't wait three years until you're out of a job, think of what else are you going to do and start to reskill yourself? And I know that we all, and I can give you multiple examples, but I know, I feel we're running out of time. I know that we all want to sit back and complain and say, but I didn't elect Sam Altman. Why is he doing this to my life?

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right?

[Mo Gawdat]

And I want to do that all the time too, but that's not going to help, right? I think we should tell everyone, by the way, that people who create things of this magnitude should be accountable. But at the end of the day, the day I need to focus on what's happening today. I mean, I'll give you a very good example as an author, as a thinker, okay? The job of an author is to adopt a certain concept and think about it deeply and write about it. That's gone. I'm no longer the most intelligent being on the planet to be able to adopt a topic and write about it better than an AI.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Okay?

[Mo Gawdat]

So what that means is I have completely changed. I will not publish my books as per paper. Maybe in the very end, but I'm not publishing that anymore. I'm doubling down on my human connection. So my, you know, alive is going to be published on Substack first. With the, with the, with the. With the opportunity for everyone to engage with me and discuss it with me and, you know, give me comments and call me an idiot and, you know, we improve it together.

[Interjector/Moderator]

Right?

[Mo Gawdat]

I'm writing the book with an AI, not asking the AI something and then putting it as if I'm saying it. I'm literally chatting and debating with the AI, and in some of the books, sometimes proving her wrong, and sometimes she's proving me wrong. This is to align with the new world. The world is changing and the career of an author is now being redefined. So I am being redefined with it. And I ask everyone to look at their life today and say, I'm going to redefine myself. I'm going to be ahead of that wave. And by the way, in the process, I'm gonna act ethically so that this wave becomes a utopia and auto dystopia.

[Peter Diamandis]

I love that. And that's a beautiful place to close us out. There's so much more to go into and I look forward to the next conversation. Mo excited to see you on stage in just a few weeks, Saleem. The same for you, brother. And thank you. And for everybody listening, we're entering an uncharted territory. And it's a territory where what we say, how we interact with each other, how we interact with the machines that are coming is extraordinarily important. And I hope that this conversation has given a little bit of, a little bit of context to prepare you, but in particular to give you agency to help steer where this future is going. There's no on off switch. There's no velocity knob. The best we can can do is steer the future that we want. Love you guys. A pleasure as always, very much.

[Mo Gawdat]

Thank you. It's been a joy.

[Salim Ismail]

Great conversation. Amazon presents Kelly vs. Roommates Deviated Septum. Absolutely annihilating a college student.

[Peter Diamandis]

A roommate snores can sound like a werewolf mid transformation. But Kelly shopped on Amazon and saved on a sleep machine weighted blanket and noise canceling earbuds. Looks like Kelly just got her doctorate.

[Salim Ismail]

Degree in crushing sleep.

[Peter Diamandis]

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