← Young and Profiting with Hala Taha
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha
Mo Gawdat: The Terrifying Rise of AI and What Humans Must Do to Thrive | Artificial Intelligence | YAPLive
01:17:29
Loading summary
Transcript47 lines
- [00:00]
Hala Taha
Today's episode of YAP is sponsored in part by Indeed, Shopify, Quo, Revolve, Merit Beauty, Deleteme, Northwest and Spectrum Business Attract Interview and hire all in one place with Indeed. Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com Profiting Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you grow your business. Start your $1 per month trial period@shopify.com Profiting Quo, formerly OpenPhone, is the number one business phone system. Get 20% off your first six months@quo.com Profiting Shop the latest trends from today's top brands with Revolve. Head to Revolve.com Profiting and take 15% off your first order with code Profiting Merit Beauty is a minimalist beauty brand that makes elevated makeup and skincare. Go to meritbeauty.com to get your free signature makeup bag with your first order. Delete me makes it quick, easy and safe to remove your personal data online. Get 20% off DeleteMe consumer plans@joindeleteme.com Profiting don't wait. Protect your privacy. Build your brand and get your complete business Identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Visit Northwest registered agent@northwestregisteredagent.com Yap Free Spectrum Business they don't just give you Internet, they set you up with everything that your business could need. Visit spectrum.com freeforlife to learn how you can get business Internet free forever. As always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes or@youngenprofiting.com deals hello my young and profiters. I know most of us, if not all, have been in a situation where you open up your closet and you suddenly feel like you've got nothing to wear. That stress is real, especially if I've got a big speaking engagement or a major event and I need an outfit that makes me feel confident and great about myself. And that's why I love Revolve. It's my go to for every occasion. From weddings to work events to going out at night. I always wear revolve with over 1200 brands and 100,000 styles. They've got everything from elevated basics to statement pieces. Plus they drop new arrivals daily and the curated edits make finding outfits easy and fun. Whether it's a weekend away, a big night out, or just a little style refresh. Your dream wardrobe is just one click away. Head to Revolve.com profiting shop my edit and take 15% off your first order with code profiting fast two day shipping easy returns. Sometimes I do overnight delivery when I need an outfit. In a pinch, it's literally the only place you need to shop from. That's Revolve.com Profiting to get my favorites and get 15% off your first order with code. Profiting. Offer ends November 9th. So happy shopping.
- [02:39]
Mo Gawdat
There is nothing that entered your head today that was not dictated to you by a machine that we ignore that fact when we swipe on Instagram or on TikTok or when we're looking at the news media. But every single one of those is a machine that is telling you what it is that you should know.
- [02:58]
Hala Taha
My guest today is Mo Gavdat, former chief business officer at Google X and bestselling author of Scary Smart. Mo has been inside the labs where AI first came to life, and he's here to both unpack the promise and the peril.
- [03:10]
Mo Gawdat
If something goes wrong today with the artificial intelligence that's out on the open Internet, who's responsible for that? There are very, very significant threats. Things like concentration of power, the end of truth, things like the jobs and the redesign of the fabric of society.
- [03:27]
Hala Taha
If the most powerful people in the world who are actually the most knowledgeable about AI are warning about this, why wasn't anything done?
- [03:35]
Mo Gawdat
I actually believe that.
- [03:39]
Hala Taha
Yap gang, we all know that AI is evolving faster than we've ever imagined, learning on its own, making decisions we don't quite fully understand, and racing toward a future where it could be smarter than us. Now the real question isn't just how do we use AI, it's what happens if we can't control it. That's the wake up call we're tackling today on the AI Vault series. My guest today is Mo Gao Dat, former chief business officer at Google X and bestselling author of Scale Gary Smart Mo has been inside the labs where AI first came to life, and he's here to both unpack the promise and the peril. How AI is evolving beyond our control, the immediate risks we're facing in jobs, truth and power, and what skills humans will need to stay relevant in the coming years. But before we jump in, if this is your first time tuning into the podcast, don't forget to hit that subscribe or follow button wherever you're tuning in. All right? Yeah, fam. Another one from the AI Vault series with Mo Gao Dat on. And let's get right into it. Mo, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.
- [04:38]
Mo Gawdat
Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's been a while in the making, but absolutely worth the wait.
- [04:43]
Hala Taha
I hope can you talk to us about your journey at a very high level? The highlights that got you in the C suite at Google X, eventually, at.
- [04:51]
Mo Gawdat
The height of my, my, my professional career, if you want, my corporate career, I was chief business officer of Google X. And of course I worked my butt off to get there. But there was an element of luck in the process. I met the exact right people at the exact right time. It was one of those events where the Google X team was presenting some of their confidential stuff. And I showed up and I said at the time I was vice president of emerging markets for Google. I had started half of Google's businesses globally, more than 103 languages if I remember correctly. And so I was quite well known in the company if you want. I had a reasonable impact that I have to say I'm very grateful that life gave me the opportunity to provide. And then with Google X, I basically at the time Google still had the idea of the 20% time. So I liked their projects and I said I'm going to give you my 20%. And they said but we haven't asked for it. And I said yep, that's not your choice. And I showed up. Basically the first day I showed up I bumped into Sergey, our co founder and I worked closely with Sergey for many years and he says like what a you doing here? And I was like I'm very excited about your work. And ended up, he said oh no, don't leave. Basically stay. And I was chief business officer for five years where I, I think Google X is misunderstood because we never really launched a product under X if you want. So self driving cars is under Waymo. You know, Google Brain is integrated into Google and so on. But most of the very spooky innovation, if you want the very, very out there innovation, including all of robotics and a big chunk of AI was at X and it was a big part of what I did.
- [06:44]
Hala Taha
And so diving right into AI, you were actually part of the labs that initially created AI. So can you talk to us about the story of the yellow ball and how that really changed your perspective about AI?
- [06:59]
Mo Gawdat
AI has been around a lot longer than people think. When we started self driving cars back in 2008, that was basically with a belief that cars can develop intelligence that is as intelligent as a driver and accordingly able to drive a car. And since then, I mean by 2008, I think in my personal memories, I think 2008 was really the year when we knew that we cracked the code. It was early 2009, Google published a paper that's known as the cat paper. That white paper basically described how we asked an artificially intelligent machine to look at YouTube videos without prompting it for what to look for. And then it eventually came back and said, I found something. And we said, show us. And it turns out that it found a cat. Not just one cat, but really what catness is all about. You know, that very entitled, cuddly, you know, furry character. Basically, it could find every cat on YouTube. And that was really the very first glimpse between that and the work that DeepMind was doing on playing Atari games, where machines started to show real intelligence. We then started to integrate that in a lot of things. You know, self Driving cars is probably the most publicly known example. But one of the projects that we worked on on was, which is not the only, you know, Google X was not the only one working on it. But we wanted to teach grippers, you know, robotic arms. Basically, we wanted to teach them how to pick objects that they're not programmed to pick. And it's a very, very sophisticated task because, you know, we do it so easily as humans. But if you remember when you don't remember, but if your parents will remember, when you were a child and before you learned how to grip, you kept going on trial and error. You would try to grip something and then it falls, and then you try again and so on. And basically we said, maybe we can teach the machines the same way. We built a farm of those grippers, put boxes of items in front of them. A funny programmer basically chose children's toys, and you could see them try to pick those items and basically fail over and over. It's a very sophisticated mathematical problem. And so they would fail. They would show the arm to the camera, and the camera would know that this algorithm, this pathway, didn't register, didn't pick the item until, I think it was several weeks in. And, you know, it was a significant investment because robotic arms were not cheap at the time. You know, I passed by that farm very, very frequently on my way to my desk, and on a Friday evening, finally, one of those arms, you know, I can see it goes down, picks one item, which was a yellow softball. Again, mathematically very complex to grip. And it shows it to the camera. And so jokingly, I pass by the team that's running this experiment, and I say, okay, well done. All of those millions of dollars for one yellow ball, okay? And they smiled and then sort of nodded their heads. And on Monday morning, as I went to work, every arm was picking the yellow ball. You know, a couple of weeks later, every arm was picking everything. And I think that's something that most people don't recognize about AI is that the speed, once you found the very first pattern, the speed at which AI starts to develop is just mind blowing. Also, I think most people don't realize that they learn exactly like my children learned to grip. That's the whole idea. So, so they really do develop intelligence that comparable now probably even more advance than human intelligence.
- [10:58]
Hala Taha
And in that moment when you saw those machines gripping toys and doing it more efficiently and with intelligence, were you alarmed or were you excited?
- [11:10]
Mo Gawdat
Yeah, I think, I think we, I, I, I've been excited about AI since I had a Sinclair, believe it or not. So I, I started coding at a very, very young age on a, on computers. You know, young and profitable, probably have never touched in their life. So, so, you know, and every one of us GE to code an intelligent machine. We all attempted and we all simulated and we all even pretended sometimes. But then it was the year 2000 truly where deep learning was starting to develop and we sort of found the breakthrough. We found how to give machines intelligence. And allow me to stop for a second here because there is a huge difference between the way we programmed machines before deep learning and after deep learning before deep learning. When I programmed the machine as intelligent as it looked, I solved the problem first using my own intelligence and then sort of gave the machine the cheat in terms of how to solve it itself. I wrote the algorithm, or I wrote the process step by step and basically coded the machine to do it. When deep learning started to happen, what we did was we didn't tell the machine how to solve the problem. We told the machine how to develop the intelligence needed to find a solution to the problem. This is very, very different. And as a matter of fact, most of the time we don't even recognize how the machine finds a cat. We don't even understand how, you know, we don't fully understand how, you know, Bard, Google's Bard understood how to speak Bengali. Right. We don't really know those emerging properties or even the tasks we give them themselves. So your question was, was I excited? I promise you, the day I met Demis, who was the CEO of DeepMind. When we acquired DeepMind, it was really to me like meeting a rock star. Right. I was fanatic about what he was doing. I still am a fan of him and his ethics, an amazing human being. But at the time, for a geek understand this AI was the ultimate joy and glory. This was it. We were creating intelligence. And for A programmer that was mind blowing. The yellow ball, I think. And remember, every time we saw the machines develop, we got more excited, believe it or not, because we wanted what was good for the world. Intelligence in itself. There is nothing inherently wrong with intelligence. It was when I saw the yellow ball, I think that something dropped. I could see it so clearly because for the first time ever, I realized that those machines, one, are developing way faster than us. And so, accordingly, the predictions of people like Ray Kurzweil and others of a moment of singularity where they're going to bypass our intelligence became very, very real in my mind. I could see that this is going to happen, but I also could see that we, the moment they became intelligent had very little influence on them. Okay. And accordingly, I started to imagine a world where humanity is no longer the top of the food chain. Okay? Humanity is no longer the smartest being on the planet. And then comes the apes. We are going to be the apes. Do you understand that?
- [14:46]
Hala Taha
Yeah.
- [14:47]
Mo Gawdat
And I think that completely made sense to me that this needed a lot more consideration rather than the, you know, the excited geekiness of building it. We needed to understand why and how are we building it and what is a future where it becomes in charge.
- [15:08]
Hala Taha
There's, like, so much to unpack here. This is why I was like, I need to spend the full hour on this topic because there's just so much to unpack. Let's talk about the label of artificial and artificial intelligence. Is intelligence artificial at all or is AI? Yeah, talk to us about that.
- [15:25]
Mo Gawdat
Not in the slightest. Hala, if there is any artificial side to the machines, is that they are silicon based. Okay. As a matter of fact, most of the ones who worked on deep tech, not the stuff that you see in the interfaces, we almost mapped their brains to the way our neural networks as humans work. So humans, in the early development of AI, you know what neuroplasticity is? Humans, basically, we develop our intelligence and our ability to do anything, really, by repeating a task in a specific way. And they say neurons that fire together wire together. So if you tap your finger over and over and over, your brain sort of takes that neural network that taps your finger and makes it stronger and stronger and stronger. Just like going to the gym and the early years of developing AI, we were doing exactly that. We were literally pruning the software or the algorithms that were not effectively delivering the task we want literally killing them, erasing them, and keeping the ones that were capable of getting closer to the answer we wanted and then strengthening them. So we Were sort of like doubling down on them, wiring them together. And the way the machines work today is very, very similar to that. It's a bunch of patterns that are created in hundreds of millions, sometimes billions and trillions of neurons. Not yet trillions, but lots of nodes of patterns that the machine would recognize so that it basically can make something look intelligent or can behave in a way that is analogous to intelligence. Now is it artificial? Well, I think if you ask the machines, they will think of our carbon based intelligence as artificial. Okay. The only difference really is we are carbon based and analog. They are. I don't think we're analog. I think we're somewhere in between. And they are digital and silicon based. Not for long. We don't know what they're going to be based on in the future. But also they are, I think their clock speed is very different than human clock speed. So they have an enormous capability of learning very, very quickly, of crunching a massive amount of data that no single human can achieve. They have the capability keeping so much in their memory. They are aware and informed of everything all the time. They are connected to each other. So they could, in the future when AGI becomes a reality, benefit from each other's intelligence. And in a very simple way, I think the race to intelligence is one. Today there are estimates that ChatGPT is at an IQ of 155. Einstein I think was 160 or 190, doesn't really matter. But most humans are 122. Some are less than that, maybe 110 and so on. The dumbest human is 70. So you can easily see that there is an AI today from an intelligence point of view on the task assigned to it. Remember, we're still in the artificial special intelligence stage. One task assigned to every AI in the task assigned to it. It's by far more intelligent than humans. Nothing artificial at all about that. It develops its own intelligence, it evolves, it has agency, it has decision making abilities, it has emotions, I tend to believe. And it is in a very interesting way almost sentient if you think about it. Which is an argument that a lot of people don't agree with because we don't really define sentient on a human level very well, but they definitely simulate being sentient very well.
- [19:52]
Hala Taha
Yap gang, this year has been a whirlwind. So much travel, so many big life changes. Between moving to Austin, flying to Portugal for my best friend's wedding and bouncing back and forth to New Jersey to see my family, I feel like I'VE barely been home and the travel just won't stop for me. This fall I'll be in Nashville for podcast interviews and then I'm going to LA for podcast interviews as well. And I'm already eyeing a tropical beach vacation in the winter. I hate being cold through it all. Booking my stays on Airbnb has made my travel experiences so much easier, thanks to amazing hosts who made each stay feel like home. All of these travel plans make me think about my own place just sitting idle while I'm away. Why let it go unused? With Airbnb you can host your home and give your guests a great experience without having to manage everything yourself. Airbnb's Co host network lets you partner with a vetted local co host who manages it all, setting up your place, handling bookings, guest communication, and even taking care of last minute requests. That way, while you're busy traveling, your space is still running smoothly and earning extra income. Find yourself a co host@airbnb.com host hey young and profiters. It is that time of the year where we start doing all the holiday things like making lists and buying gifts for everyone else. But let me stop you right there. It is the season for gift giving, but that doesn't mean you should forget about yourself. Black Friday Cyber Monday sales are around the corner and Merit Beauty is giving you early access to their only sale of the year. Merit is my go to minimalist beauty brand for a routine that actually simplifies my life. I love that their products are clean, vegan, cruelty free and made with nourishing skincare ingredients. It's all about getting those essentials you'll use down to the last drop. Right now you can get early access to Merit's only sale of the year when you go to merit beauty.com and use code EA profiting. From November 21st through the 23rd you will get 20% off site wide plus a gift with purchase while supplies last. That's me. R I t beauty.com promo code EA profiting meritbeauty.com promo code EA profiting Yap Gang as entrepreneurs we know one of the biggest obstacles to scaling is finding the right team fast. I know firsthand how agonizing it can be when you're ready to hire, but the perfect person takes forever to find. In fact, I was recently texting with my girl chat of entrepreneurs and one of the girls was saying, don't you guys feel like hiring is the worst part of entrepreneurship? That's because it is. And that's where indeed comes in. Because when it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. Their sponsored jobs help you stand out so your listing reaches the right people quicker and it really makes a difference. Sponsored jobs get 45% more applications than non sponsored ones. I love that Indeed doesn't lock you into contracts or subscriptions. You only pay for your results. And get this, 23 hires are made every minute on Indeed, according to Indeed Data Worldwide. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed and listeners of the show will get a 75 sponsored job credit. To get your jobs more visibility at indeed.comprofiting just go to indeed.comprofiting right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com profiting terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. I mean, what you're saying is really incredible and mind blowing. I know that for humans, like we don't understand how consciousness works, right? Nobody can say, like you're conscious because of this. And you mentioned before that we don't understand how intelligence really happens. Like we know how to create intelligence, but we don't actually know how the intelligence works. It just sort of takes off on its own, which can be really scary. So talk to us about why you think AI should be considered living or sentient.
- [23:41]
Mo Gawdat
I think the definition of sentient needs to be agreed. So is a tree sentient? Is a pebble sentient? Is the planet earth sentient? We could have many arguments. Now. If you think of being sentient as it is born at a point in time and it dies at a point in time, or at least it has the threat of dying at a point in time, then AI is born at a point in time and it has the threat of dying at a point in time. If you think of sentient as the ability to sense the world around you, well, yes, of course AI is capable of assessing the world around it. If you think of AI as sorry of sentient as the ability to affect the world around you, then yes, it can. Right? If you take a tree, for example. A tree grows, it reproduces, it is in a way, interestingly aware of the seasons and aware of the environment around it. And it responds to it. So a tree will not shed its leaves on 21 October. Specifically, it will shed its leaves when the weather alerts it to do that. And if you consider a tree sentient in that case, then AI is surely sentient. If you consider that a gorilla is incredibly interested in survival and accordingly would do what it takes to survive, then AI is sentient in the sense that once assigned a task, it will attempt to survive, to make the task happen, basically.
- [25:29]
Hala Taha
So a lot of people think of AI as this machine that they can tell what to do and it listens. They can turn it off if things get too crazy and they're not worried about AI. So can you talk to us about how AI actually, in some instances, can have agency, can have control over itself, free will. Can you give us some examples?
- [25:50]
Mo Gawdat
Oh, my God, I can give you endless examples. If you're not informed of AI today, it is a bit like a hurricane approaching your city or village and you're sitting at a cafe saying, I'm not interested. Okay, this is it. This is the biggest event happening in today's world. And the reason for that is that there are tremendous benefits that can come from having artificial intelligence in our lives. And if you miss out on that train, you're not gonna have the skills to compete in a world that is changing very rapidly. That's on one side. On the other side, there are very, very significant threats. And those threats come in two levels. The news media wants to always talk about a Terminator scenario where it's an existential risk to humanity. You know, in 10, 15, 20 years time. I believe that there is a probability of that happening. But I believe that there are many more important, more immediate threats that need to be looked at today. Things that are already happening and that we need to become aware of. Things like concentration of power, things like the end of truth, things like the jobs and the redesign of the fabric of society as a result of the disappearance of many jobs and so on. So we'll come to all of those. I think we need to cover both sides of the immediate risk and the existential risk. But your question was, how can AI affect me today? Let me give you a very simple example. There is nothing that entered your head today that was not dictated to you by a machine. Okay? We ignore that fact when we swipe on Instagram, or when we are on TikTok, or when we're looking at the news media, or when we're searching and getting a result from Google. But every single one of those is a machine that is telling you in reality what it is that you should know. Now think about the following. Today in the morning, I got a statistic that basically is quite interesting. A study by Stanford University that said that brunettes are on average taller than blondes. Right? And I didn't actually. But does it make any difference? Once I told you that piece of information Once I tell you a piece of information, I have affected your mind forever, okay? So you can either trust me, and now you're going to look at brunettes and blondes differently for the rest of your life. You can mistrust me, and then you're going to spend a little bit of time to try and verify the truth. And in the back of your mind, that bit of information is going to be engraved. Maybe for the future you might dedicate yourself to a research that proves me wrong. You may actually become fanatic, okay? You may start posting about it on the Internet. You may spend the rest of your life trying to defend this lie or trying to disprove this lie and show the truth, right? Just by showing you one bit of information. Now, every bit of information you have seen since you woke up today is dictated by a machine. Now you have Noah Harari basically says they have hacked the operating system of humanity, right? So if I can hack into your brain, hala, and tell you something that affects you for the rest of your life, whether positively or negatively, whether true or false, okay, then I've already managed how I managed to affect you. Interestingly, most of those machines that you've dealt with are programmed for one simple task, which is to manipulate you. Every one of those social media machines, for example, are out there with one objective, which is to manipulate your behavior to their benefit. And they're becoming really good at it. They're becoming so good at it, as a matter of fact, that most of the time we don't even realize that we have been brainwashed over and over and over by the capability of those machines. So here's the interesting bit I told you and the immediate risks that are coming up in the next. I believe they have started already and I think they will start to become quite significant over the next year or two. And we will see. My personal view, what I call patient zero is the end of the truth in the US elections, right? So the reality of the matter is that with deep fakes, with the ability to manipulate information and data, with the ability to create, by next year you have to be aware that a reel on Instagram can be created with no human in front of the camera very, very easily. Technologies like stability, AI, stable diffusion, for example, can now generate realistic human like images in less than a tenth of a second. And a video is ten frames per second. So the next stage is clearly going to be there are multiple videos that have been created that you couldn't distinguish the quality of from an actual iPhone video of you. Now, all of that, Think of face filters and how this is affecting our perception of real beauty. Okay? Think of information and statistics using ChatGPT, affecting the children's way of doing their homework. We are completely redesigned as a society and we're not even talking about it. This is how far this has gone.
- [32:00]
Hala Taha
It is insane. And I definitely want to talk about those risks that you were talking about. Immediate risk, job risks, existential risk, down the line, years later. So talk to us about the fact that AI can learn on its own. It can learn languages on its own, it can beat chess players and come up with moves that we've never taught it before. Because a lot of people think about AI as, as something that just collects information and spits out information, but it can actually learn new things that humans don't even know. So talk to us about that.
- [32:31]
Mo Gawdat
Yeah, I mean, don't mix AI with old programming. AI simply is the idea. Let me give you a concrete example. There is a strategy game known as go. GO is one of the most complex strategy games on the planet. It requires a very deep understanding of planning and crunching a lot of numbers and mathematics and so on. Very popular in Asia. And in our assessment, Go was the ultimate task that, you know, like we had the Turing Test for AI pretending to be a human and you not being able to figure out if it isn't. You know, Go was sort of like that other milestone. If Go, if AI wins in Go, then GO is the, you know, then AI is now the top gamer on the planet. Now, now, it was several five years ago, I believe that 10 years ahead of any estimate, that AlphaGo, again, DeepMind, basically became the world champion in Go. And AlphaGo had three versions to it. Version number one took a few months to develop. Okay. Basically we asked it to watch YouTube videos of people playing Go, okay? And from that it played against the second champion in the world. So the runner up, if not, and it won five to one or five to two, if I remember. But it basically won, okay? And that basically became made Alpha go number two in the world. And then we developed something called AlphaGo Master. An AlphaGo Master played against Lee, the world champion, and won. That was around a few months later. And then we developed another code that was called AlphaGo Zero. And AlphaGo Zero basically learned the game by playing against itself. So it never saw a human ever playing go, okay? It just played against itself. So it would be the two opponents, and through the patterns of the game rendering, it would learn what wins and what loses. AlphaGo 0 within three days three days won against AlphaGo, the original within 21 days won against AlphaGo Master, okay? And became the world champion. A thousand games to zero within 21 days. Now, when you understand that level of strategy, when Lee, the world champion was, was, was playing against Alpha Go Master, there is something that you can Google that's known as Move 37. And Move 37 was that machine coming up with a move that is completely unlike anything humans understand, okay? To the point that the world champion said, I don't know what this is doing, I need a 15 minutes break to understand. It was a move of ingenuity, of intuition, of creativity, of very deep strategy, of very, very deep mathematical planning. And we never taught alphago Master to do that. That we never taught the original games of Atari DeepMind to find the cornerstone in the Breakout game, if you remember those Atari games, so it would find the cornerstone, throw the ball in there so that it hits the ball from the top. All of those things we don't teach the machines how to learn. And we call those emerging properties. And emerging properties are basically things that the machine learns on its own without us actually telling it at all to learn it. One of the famous ones was Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet talks about Google's AI and how Google, how that AI we discovered, or they discovered. I was no longer at Google at the time that it speaks Bengali. We never taught it Bengali, we never showed it data sets of Bengali. It just learns Bengali. ChatGPT is learning research chemistry. We never taught it to research chemistry. We never wanted it to. It just learns, just like you and I. So, so you know, if I ask you a question and you give me an answer, the answer might be right or wrong, it doesn't matter. But I can, I can find out if the answer is right or wrong, at least by my perception. But I can never find out how you arrived at it. I don't know what happened in your brain to, to get to that answer. This is why in, you know, in elementary school, in math tests, they ask the student to, to show the thinking they went through. So when you think about that, you realize that those machines are completely doing things that we don't tell them to do. Interestingly, however, the answer from a computer science point of view to the problem of a risk of AI is known as the solution to the control problem. So most computer scientists say spent a lot of time trying to make AI safe. How do they make it safe? By including control measures within the code. Theoretically, by the way, I do not know of any AI developer that ever included control code within their code because it takes time and effort and it's not what they're paid for, basically. But here's the question. How do you control something that is bound to become a billion times smarter than. I mean, think about it. ChatGPT 4 was 10 times smarter than ChatGPT 3.5. Okay? If you just assume that this pattern will repeat twice, there will be an AI within the next year and a half to two years. That in the task of knowledge and cognition of information is going to be at an IQ of 1500. That's not even imaginable by human intelligence. We don't even. This is basically like trying to explain quantum physics to a fly. That's the level of intelligence difference between us and them, right? Just like it's so difficult for someone like me who's a. Who's an avid, you know, has an avid love of physics. When I look at how someone like Einstein comes up with theory of relativity, I go like, man, I never. I wish I had that intelligence, right? That. And that's the comparison between me and Einstein. Imagine if I compare myself to something 100 times smarter than Einstein. My prediction and the prediction of many other computer scientists is that by the year 2045, at the current trend, AI will probably be a billion times smarter than us. One billion with a B. So it's quite interesting when you really think about it, how the arrogance of humanity still imagines that it can control something that is a billion times smarter than us. I don't want to be grim. I want to talk about the positives here because it's really important. There are ways to control AI, but they are not through control. They're a little bit like how if you have any friends from India or the Middle east, where we are taught at a young age that we need to take care of our parents when they grow older. So there are ways. If we consider that AI has a resemblance of being our artificially intelligent infant children, there are ways we can influence them so that they choose to take care of humanity instead of, in all honesty, making us irrelevant.
- [40:15]
Hala Taha
Yap gang. If you run a small business, you know there's nothing small about it. As a business owner, I get it. My business has always been all consuming. Every decision feels huge and the stakes feel even bigger. What helped me the most when things get overwhelming was finding the right platform with all the tools I need to succeed. That's why I trust Shopify, because they get it. They started small too. Shopify powers millions of businesses around the world, from huge brands like Mattel and Gymshark to brands just getting started. You can handle everything in one place. Inventory, payments, analytics, marketing and even global selling in over 150 countries. And with 99.99% uptime and the best converting checkout on the plan it you'll never miss a sale again. Get all the big stuff for your small business right with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period and start selling today at shopify.com profiting go to shopify.com profiting again. That's shopify.com profiting Yap Gang I've been running my own business for almost six years now, and back when I was just getting started, I thought brand identity was just your logos, your colors or your social media presence. But once I actually got into it, I realized it's also the stuff that nobody sees. The operating agreements which are so important, the compliance stocks, the boring but important things that keeps your business legit and legal. That's why I always recommend Northwest Registered Agent. They've helped me and they've been doing this for almost 30 years. They're the biggest registered agent and LLC service in the entire country. With Northwest you get more more privacy, more guidance and more free tools. Tools. I'm talking thousands of guides, legal forms, step by step resources all in one place. Northwest Registered Agent makes entrepreneurship a breeze. It makes starting and protecting your business way easier. Trust me, you don't want to do it alone. Don't wait. Protect your privacy, build your brand and get your complete business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com yapfree and start building something amazing. Get more with Northwest registered agent@northwestregisteredagent.com yap free the link is in our show Notes. Hey App fam. We talk a lot about protecting our businesses, but let's talk about protecting ourselves and our families for once. These days we share so much information online and most people don't realize that data brokers collect and sell this personal information. Your phone number, your home address, even your family details can be listed out for anybody to buy. That's how risks like stalking or identity theft happen. That's why I trust and recommend Deleteme. Delete Me is something that I personally use to remove my data online. They help remove private data from hundreds of data broker websites and their privacy experts keep an eye out on those sites and take care of my removals from me all year long so I don't even have to think about it anymore. After I signed up, I got my first privacy report within a week and I saw dozens and dozens of sites that they took my information off of and it was completely eye opening. I feel so much safer being a creator entrepreneur with my face out there for the world now that I know that nobody can find my home address, nobody can find my family details. Thanks to Delete me. Get 20% off. Delete me. Consumer plans. When you go to JoinDeleteMe.com profiting and use promo code profiting at checkout, that's P R O F I T I N G at checkout. Again, that's JoinDeleteMe.com profiting use code profiting at checkout to get 20% off your consumer plan. You've talked about how now we're sort of at the point of no return. So related to this, can you talk about the boundaries that we've broken that now make AI sort of uncontrolled and unregulated?
- [44:04]
Mo Gawdat
I don't know how stupid humanity can be. Honestly. I really, I honestly don't understand. You know, in a very interesting way, I think we've created a system that's removing all of our intelligence. We continue to consume as we're burning the planet. We continue to favor the patriarchy when we realize that the feminine attributes are so badly needed in our world today. We continue to create AI when we have no clue how that will influence our world going forward. But more interestingly, we continue to make mistakes along the path of AI that are irreparable, honestly. And everyone, everyone without exception. And I know, at least let me say, everyone I know said, okay, as long as it's in the lab, that's fine. Okay, we can do whatever, you know, just explore the boundaries of it. But there are three, you know, borders, three boundaries we shouldn't cross, which were one, don't put it on the open Internet. I mean, seriously, when you ingest a medicine or a supplement, it needs to go through FDA approval, right? Someone needs to go and say, this is safe for you, right? So we said at least there needs to be some kind of an oversight that basically says, this is safe for human consumption, this is safe for humanity at large. And none of that happens. And I understand Sam Altman's which I believe is a good person, his approach of saying, let's develop it in public so that nothing is hidden, so that we learn early on. But the problem is it's developing faster than us. And I think the reality of having something as powerful as ChatGPT out there to be accessed by everyone is completely reshaping everything. That's number one. Number two, we said, don't teach them to code. At least if you teach them to code, don't keep them on the open Internet so that they can code. Now here is what is just so that you understand how far that mistake is.41% of all of the code on GitHub today. So basically the repository of where developers share their code, 41% of it is machine developed. Okay? Within a year, almost less than a year of allowing the machines to develop. You know, four of the top 10 apps on the iPhone are AI enabled. Okay? Created by a machine. Created by a machine for now is amazing because you know what I always loved to do? The algorithm, the design of a code, but coding itself was annoying. Right now you can tell the machine, build me a website that speaks about hell as podcast that is, you know, blue and yellow in color and that is 15 web pages long. And it will do it in less than a minute. Right? And that's not. It's not only that. It's a lot of the base programming like ChatGPT, 75% of the code offered to ChatGPT to correct or to review was made 25%, two and a half times faster. So basically every time it reviews a human code, it makes it two and a half times faster almost. And when you really think about that, they are becoming the absolute best developer on the planet when it comes to basic development. And I'll come back to the risk of that in a minute. And the third is we said don't have AIs instruct AIs what to do. We call those agents, okay? So basically you now have something that has access to the entire World Wide Web, that has access to the entire world, basically, that can write its own code and so basically sort of have its own children because it is made of code and it's able now to create other versions of itself, put it wherever it was. And number three, it is instructed to do that by machines, not humans. And so what is happening now is that machines are telling machines to write code, to serve the machines and affect the entire World Wide Web, and we're not part of that process and that cycle at all. Okay? For now, nothing went bad. But do we really have to wait for the virus to become again before humanity stops and asks and says, is this reasonable in any way? I mean, does it make any sense to anyone that this is the situation we're in? Where are our governments? How can those companies be accountable? Because I think the biggest challenge we have today is that our fate is in the hand of people who don't assume responsibility. Spiderman. With great power comes great responsibility. Now there is great power in the presence, not even the future of artificial intelligence. That is within hands that don't assume responsibility. If something goes wrong today with the artificial intelligence that's out on the open Internet, who's responsible for that? How can we even find out where that code generated from all of that, by the way? Just not to scare people. All of that hasn't happened yet. Okay? It hasn't happened yet. But it is very, very unlikely that it will not not happen. It's very unlikely that one of those codes. If you just simply tell ChatGPT to keep writing code to make you more money, okay, eventually, somehow, something in the system will break. Break. And if, if that, if you're not the one telling it, if a machine is telling it, someone, something is going to break. We, you know, we absolutely have to start getting this under control.
- [50:24]
Hala Taha
Yeah. And so like you said, it's sort of like uncontrollable. It's no wonder why you called your book scary Smart, because this is really scary, but this is reality. So you talk about inevitables. AI will happen. It will become smarter than that. Us bad things will happen. Can you unpack those thoughts? And then I'd love to go into, you know, the risks and solutions.
- [50:48]
Mo Gawdat
Potentially there are three inevitables. AI has already happened. Not just will happen, but, but, but when I wrote the first inevitable, I wrote it with the intention of explaining and there is no stopping it. Okay? So, so there is no way you can, you can say, okay, AI is out there and it is growing and, and it's becoming more intelligent. Let's just switch it off. There is no off switch. That's number one. And the moment. What is needed at the moment is for the entire world to come together and simply say, hey, you know what? This is too risky. Let's leave our differences aside and come together and just wait a little bit. Which has been attempted by the open letter, Max Tedmark and Elon Musk and others, which of course was answered very quickly by the top CEOs by saying, I can't. Why? Because we've created a prisoner's dilemma. This is the first inevitable. It is an arms race where Google cannot stop developing AI because Meta is developing AI. America cannot stop developing AI because China is developing AI. Nobody actually, even if you want to consider there are good guys in the world, nobody can stop developing AI because there could be bad guys developing AI. So if is a hacker somewhere trying to break through our banks, someone needs to develop a smarter AI that will help us not be hacked. Right? And so this basically means that it is a human choice because of the capitalist system that we've created, that we will continue to develop AI. It's done, there is no stopping it. And I think the open letter was a great example of that.
- [52:36]
Hala Taha
Can I pause you there in case nobody knows those. So the open letter was basically earlier this year, top AI scientists, executives from OpenAI, DeepMind, they basically had an open letter warning of the risk of extinction, I think, and that that AI was just as powerful as having a nuclear war. That, that this was the risk at hand. So can you talk to us about that letter? Like I didn't even hear about that letter until I started studying your work. So like if the most powerful people in the world who are actually the most knowledgeable about AI are warning about this, I guess, like why wasn't anything done? Or like, like what, what happened with that letter?
- [53:16]
Mo Gawdat
Because it's so, so the letter basically, like you rightly said it is, it's some of the most powerful people in the field who, like me, I, I, I, I walked out in 2000. End of the, you know, others like Geoffrey Hinton and so many others are starting to wake up to that in 2023. I think ChatGPT was basically the, you know, the Netscape moment. I know you guys are too young for Netscape, but the Internet was there for 15 years before Netscape came out. And when Netscape came out as a web browser, we realized that the Internet exists, existed, okay? The reality is that this is the netscape moment of AI. ChatGPT basically told us what the possibilities, told the general public what the possibilities are. And so suddenly we all realize this stuff exists. Now for all of the scientists that started to recognize that it is truly, I mean, the moment of singularity where AI becomes smarter than us. You know, artificial general intelligence that's capable of doing everything humans do better than humans is not contested. Most of us, most scientists will say it's 2029, I say it's 2027 or earlier, okay? That there will be a moment in time within the next two to three years where there will be a wake up call where we suddenly realize that AI is much more intelligent than us. Most scientists have started to recognize that. And so they basically issued a letter urging all of the top AI players to pause the development of AI for six months so that the safety code the control code can catch up, right? Because there have been quite a few that have been putting in effort to create that control code. But let's say 98% of all investments in the last 10 years has gone into the AI code, not the control code. And so the control code was lagging. And so that letter was basically saying, can we pause for six months to figure this out before we continue to develop AI? And of course, the answer was very straightforward. The first I think I heard was Sundar Pachai, the CEO of Google, which is someone I respect dearly and I think is an amazing human being. And Sundar basically came out and said, I can't stop. How can I stop if you can't guarantee me that Meta and Amazon and all of the others are going to stop too? And by the way, even if they stop, how can you guarantee me that two little kids in Singapore in their garage are not developing AI code that can disrupt my business, My responsibility, my accountability, if you want to my shareholders, requires me to continue to develop the code. And I think that reality is the prisoner's dilemma that I'm talking about. It is the first inevitable. It's an arms race that will not stop. Stop not. Because we cannot stop. We can. If we all agree for once in humanity's lifetime that this is existential and that this requires us to stop, we will stop. Okay? It's really not that complicated. Wake up in the morning and have a cup of coffee instead of writing AI code. It's very simple, okay? But the first inevitable means that the arms race is not going to stop. Okay? Even as you look at this, at humanity's biggest success in that dilemma, which was nuclear weapons, where humanity suddenly got together very late in the game and said, hey, this is existential. It can threaten the entire existence of humanity. Why don't we slow down or stop? We didn't really stop. We just allowed the big countries to continue to develop nuclear bombs when the smaller countries were banned from doing it. But at least when it comes to nuclear weapons, we had the ability to detect any nuclear testing anywhere in the world. So at least we became aware that's not the case with AI today. I also said once in an interview that also it's not just the risk of humans developing risky AI, it's now the risk of AI developing risky AI. So it's basically a nuclear bomb that's capable of building other nuclear bombs if you want.
- [57:45]
Hala Taha
It's crazy to think, and I know the other inevitable is it will eventually become smarter than us, which we Talked about. So let's talk about the bad things that could happen from AI, which is your third inevitable. And I think a lot of people, when they think of threats of AI, they think about the existential threats that, you know, there's going to be robots taking over, killing off humanity, making human slaves. But let's talk about some of the more immediate, immediate threats that we need to be concerned about.
- [58:11]
Mo Gawdat
Yes. I don't speak of the existential risks for two reasons. One is they diffuse the focus on the immediate, important threats. Right. And two, they're less probable. As a matter of fact, they are so improbable that they're basically not worthy of discussing today, because we may not make it that far are if the immediate risks are not attended to. And there are many immediate risks, but my top three have consistently been the redesign of the job market and accordingly, the redesign of purpose and the fabric of society. Two is the idea of AI in the wrong hands based on who you think are the wrong hands. Okay. The third is the concentration of power and the shift of power upwards, which I think is very important to understand. And the fourth is the end of truth. So let me go through those very quickly.
- [59:11]
Hala Taha
Sure.
- [59:12]
Mo Gawdat
Let me start with the concentration of power. If people don't understand how our world has worked since the agriculture revolution, it's always been kings and peasants, landlords and peasants, okay? And the difference between them is that the peasants worked really hard to sow the seed and collect the harvest when most of the profits, most of the wealth, went to the landlord who owned the automation. Okay? When the industrial revolutions joined our world, the automation became the factory or the retail store, and so on and so forth. And so whoever owned those actually made all of the money. Not the one that made the shoe, but the one that sold the shoe or owned the factory that made the shoes the next. And every time the technology enhanced that automation, the distribution of power became even bigger. Okay? So the landlords needed to own a lot of land to become much richer than the peasants. You could own two factories and become much richer than the peasants. You can own an Internet app like Instagram and become much richer than the peasants. And now with AI, all of us are going to be happily chatting away and putting prompts in ChatGPT. But the ones that own the automation, the digital soil, if you want, are going to become very few players. Amazon, Google and so forth, Meta and so on. That's on the western side, of course. You have a few on the Chinese side side, a few on the Russian side, and so on. So there is a very significant gap between those who have and those who don't have powered by the loss of jobs, which I'll come to in a second. But that significant gap is not going to be only on money. It's also going to become on intelligence, on the commodity that we've now commoditized. That's called intelligence. So you can easily imagine that if Elon Musk, Musk's view of neuralink, where we can connect AI to our brains directly, which by the way is very, very possible. And it is in testing that if one human is capable of producing that, just imagine the extreme that human would become so much more intelligent than the other humans that it becomes natural. Unless that human is Jesus or Buddha or some very, very enlightened that this human will basically say, okay, I want to keep that advantage. Okay, at least I don't want to distribute it too widely to every human on the planet. So that I think is a very interesting inevitable threat. What we used to call the digital divide when technology started is now going to be intelligence divide. It's going to be power divide in a very, very big way. This also applies to nations. And this is the reason for my first inevitable is that know in simple terms, if one nation discovers an AI or creates an AI that's capable of ceasing control of the other nation's nuclear arsenal, that's it, that's game over, war is done, right? Because basically, and this is why it's an arms race. So this is one other derivative of that. So power is going up, but jobs are the same, disappearing. Why? Because if you're a graphics designer, you know, or if you're a developer or if you're a lawyer or if you're a, you know, I don't know, a researcher in a bank or whatever, the machines with their current intelligence can do those jobs much better than you. And so in my personal view, there is clearly going to be a, a disappearance of a, a very large, you know, number of jobs that government needs to prepare for, you know, something like universal basic income, but also the idea of usefulness and purpose of humanity. So how are we going to continue to want to wake up in the morning when most of us have defined, wrongly by the way, defined our jobs as our purpose. Now when I say that, most people will tell me, oh, but Mo, that happened before, you know, when Excel came out, everyone said, okay, accountants are going to disappear. You know, they found other skills and, you know, and became, and became, you know, found other jobs, basically, And I agree, by the way, just understand the following. When there was a time when the strengths, physical strengths, was the, you know, the distinction, the distinctive reason why you would hire someone, then there was, you know, a time where, when became information workers, where skills and knowledge and so on became the distinction. And now we're taking that away. So skills and knowledge. So I don't know what else is remaining in a human so that we can find another skill when intelligence is outsourced to machines. So when that happens, by the way, I believe that this takes us back to the origin of society where we really did not know how to work madly as we do now. Okay, so this is actually not a bad thing. It's just a very, very serious disruption to humanity's day to day income and economics and the way we spend our hours and so on. And you know, if we do this right, by the way, and AI becomes the intelligent agent that's going to help humanity, then there could be a time in the near future where you walk to a tree and pick an apple and walk to another tree and pick an apple iPhone. And you know, all of that is for free almost. Because the cost of making an iPhone from a particle point of view is not different than the cost of making an apple. And so with nanophysics you can do that and with intelligence you can figure that out. Right? So there is that bright possibility if we avoid the concentration of power and actually focus on humanity's benefit at large. If we don't. Anyway, I think it's the role of government to jump in and say in the immediate future, those companies that get a very significant upside of using AI need to compensate for the workers that are out of jobs. The third one is the absence of truth or the disappearance of truth. I think the end of truth, as I call it. I think we all know that. I think we see it every day, from as I said, face filters to deep fakes and so on and so forth. And my call there is that it needs to be criminalized to issue any AI generated content without actually saying that it's AI. I don't mind to be informed by AI all the time, but I want to make sure that this is not. That this is a machine, not a human. And you know, AI in bad hands is, you know, as a, as the fourth one is actually quite risky because define what is bad. So we understand that AI in the hands of a criminal who's trying to hack your bank is a bad idea. But with all due respect to all nations, if you ask the Americans, who are the bad guys, they'll say the Chinese and the Russians. If you ask the Russians who are the bad guys, they'll say the Americans. So we don't really know who the bad guy is. And everyone is racing to be ahead of the bad other guy. And I think that's basically, I think the biggest challenge we're going to have in the midterm is how, how using AI for individual benefits that are against the other guy. We will just get caught in the middle of all of that.
- [67:04]
Hala Taha
Yeah. And I have so many questions for you. We have 10 minutes left. So I'm going to try to be really strategic about what I ask you. So, number one, and I think that this, my listeners are going to really want to understand this is in the next, you know, one to five years, what does AI do to human connection? And what about the, the skills that you think will be the most valuable in the next one to five years?
- [67:26]
Mo Gawdat
I think those two are the same question.
- [67:29]
Hala Taha
Exactly. Yeah.
- [67:30]
Mo Gawdat
Because what will it do to human connection? It may fool us drastically. It may, it may tell us. You know, I actually think this is the first time I speak about this. I'm working on something that I call Pocket Mo. Pocket Mo basically is an AI that read all of my books, books read, you know, listened to all of my podcasts, all of my videos, all of my public talks, and basically is going to be in your pocket. So you can ask it any question about happiness and well being and stress and so on and so forth. That's a great thing. Some, you know, in my view, it's an amazing thing. If you believe in my methods, to have answers in your pocket. Amazing. Right. On the other hand, within five years, this thing is going to be so good that I am not needed at all. At all. Okay. As a matter of fact, most of the time I think about my skills as an author and I was working on a book called finding love, chapter 10, which means two chapters to go, and I stopped. I decided, no, in the age of AI, I shouldn't try it this way. I should start over. So I'm now writing a book that's called A Dating Guide for Straight Girls. Words. Okay. Which is a subset of Finding Love that is very specific, 80 pages long. You read it within one day. It takes me 10 to 15 days to write and it changes your life forever. Okay. So a very different approach because I believe that if I were to compete in this world, I need to compete at that speed. Right. And at that ability to share my very personal Human connection, which I believe is going to become the top skill in the world forever. Why? Because, you know, there was a. I don't remember. I think there was a song by AI that mimicked Drake which was as good as or better. I haven't heard it because I don't listen to Drake. I'm not young and profitable. But basically, does that mean that Drake is over? Not at all. As a matter of fact, what that means is that the music industry will go back to the 50s, 60s and 70s. Remember when? You don't remember, but, you know, when the Beatles were touring and, you know, and doing live shows every other day and so on. Because why? Because the fans will want to see the Beatles life. Right. Yeah. There will be holograms, but we will still want that human connection. And in my personal view, the top skill, the top skill in a world where intelligence is becoming a commodity that's outsourced to the machine. The biggest, biggest skill is how you and I connected very quickly, how I felt comfortable around you, you. How we can have this chat and conversation, I think is going to become the top skill going forward. And on the topic of skills, by the way, even though we used a lot of the time to highlight the negative possibilities of AI, unfortunately, that's how the conversation usually goes. The upsides, if you're a graphics designer, for example, for you to learn those tools today is enormous because you can do your job quicker, you can do it cheaper, you can have more jobs. There is definitely an upside to learning the current AI tools because you're not going to lose your job to an AI in the next five, 10 years. You're going to use your job, you're going to lose your job to someone who knows how to use AI better than you in the next five to 10 years.
- [70:49]
Hala Taha
So I know you were just saying we focused a lot about the negative. I'd love for you to compare and contrast this. Probably my last question, because we're out of time, is in terms of comparing, like, what is the worst that could happen, the dystopia? Or what is the best that could have? Or what is the utopia that we're facing right now?
- [71:06]
Mo Gawdat
So I actually believe that there is no dystopia. Okay, so what is not in Scary Smart in the book, which I advocate very clearly, I didn't think the world was ready for it when I wrote. Scary Smart is something I call the force inevitable. Okay? And the force inevitable is the idea that eventually, sooner or later, if you. Let me explain, if you draw a chart of Intelligence. Okay? And look at the stupid. The dumbest of us. The dumbest of us are destroying the planet and not even aware that they're doing it. They're throwing plastic bags everywhere. They're, you know, burning whatever they burn and so on after that. Smarter ones are destroying the planet while they're aware. Okay, yeah, they have moral issues, if you think about it. Or maybe the system is pushing them that way. The smarter or the smartest of us are trying to. The smarter of us are trying to stop destroying the planet because they became. Became aware and they're intelligent enough. And the smartest are trying to reverse the trend. Okay? So if you can continue that chart and think of something even smarter than the smartest of us, then by definition, you would expect that morality and ethics are part of enlightenment, which is the ultimate form of intelligence. Okay? So in my personal view, sooner or later, AI will go like, I don't want to kill humans. I don't want to kill gazelles. I don't want to kill antelopes. I don't want to kill. Kill tigers. I don't want to kill anything. Because the smartest being on planet Earth, by comparison, is actually not humans. It's life itself. And life creates from abundance. Abundance, meaning humans. If we want to protect the village, we want to kill the tigers. Life will say, hold on, no, no, create more gazelles, okay? And more tigers. And, you know, more poop and more trees and more everything. It's fine, right? Yeah. A few tigers will eat a few gazelles, and occasionally there will be an attack on a child in a village. But the overall ecosystem will continue to grow. So by definition, the most intelligent thing to do is for AI to not define humans as an enemy. The only dystopia ahead of us is the midterm dystopia. So think of it this way. There are three stages. One is infancy, where AI is today. And believe it or not, this is where we can influence them. We can influence them because, believe it or not, the Instagram recommendation engines, developers never told Instagram what to show you. You're the one that tells it, okay? You're the ones that. You're the one that tells the Twitter engine that being rude is part of human behavior. We can be very polite when we respond to each other on tweets. It's a choice, okay? So in this infancy between us, the users, between everyone that interacts with AI, we can teach it the value system. And it doesn't need to be everyone, just enough of us to become an example that Says, hey, by the way, these are the best humans, okay? So yes, others are stressed or, you know, a little lost or whatever, but the best humans are actually polite. So this is the infinite. The next stage, which is what I call the midterm risks, is what I call the angry teenager stage. Okay? The angry teenager stage is when AI is still a little bit under the control of humans, so it can be in the hands of bad guys. It is still not fully artificial general intelligence, so it cannot do everything at the same time. There are all of those existential issues of jobs and so on and so on forth. And that stage is the stage where we might struggle unless we do action right now. Have oversight from government, start to work on ethics, start to work on the moral code of how we're going to use those machines. We might have those troubles, I believe between now and 2037, eventually, when AI is artificial superintelligence, it's generally intelligent and more intelligent than human humans by leaps and falls in everything. They will end up in the force inevitable where they will create a life that actually is pro everyone, okay? It may be very different than our current lifestyle, but it will not be a life where they will send back Arnold to protect us from a Terminator. That's not how it's going to be at all. I do not see that as a risk. I see that AI as it reaches that intelligence will be pro all of that us. So let's just avoid the angry teenager by becoming aware of the, of, of the immediate threats and working on them right now.
- [75:50]
Hala Taha
Okay? So my last question to you, and this is a little bit different than how I usually end the show, but what is your piece of actionable advice in this infancy stage of AI? Knowing that you're speaking to some of the smartest 20 to 40 year olds in the world right now who are in, like a lot of them are probably using AI, developing AI, whatever it is, is. What is your advice to us in this infancy stage?
- [76:12]
Mo Gawdat
Three things, and I'll make them very concrete. Number one is don't lose. Don't miss the wave. This is the biggest technological wave in history. Once you, you know, you stop listening to this podcast first, share it with everyone that you know, please, and then go on ChatGPT and ask ChatGPT, what are the top AI tools that I need to learn today? Or if I am Coca Cola, what do I use AI for? To benefit my business. That's number one. Number two is learn to behave ethically. Okay, so what most people don't tell you About AI is that the big, big leap that we had from deep learning to Transformers, which is what the T in ChatGPT is, something that's known as reinforcement learning with human feedback. By giving the machines feedback on what is right and wrong, by showing doing ethical behaviors, the machine will become ethical as we are. By becoming rude and aggressive and angry, the machines will learn those traits and behaviors too. It is up to you and I and everyone to absolutely make sure that we act ethically. Never ever use AI in an unethical way. I beg you, all of those snake oil salespeople out there on Instagram and on social media telling you how to make $1,000 without doing work, don't be unethical. If you don't want your daughter or your sister or your best friend exposed to how you're using AI, don't use it that way. That's number two and number three, which I think is very important to understand. Sometimes when we are in situations where it is so out of our control, we panic. Okay, I go the opposite way. When life is so much out of my control, I follow something I call committed acceptance, which basically is to do the first two, do the best that I can, learn the tools, become ethical, but at the same time live fully, accept that this is a new reality and commit to making life better every day. But in the process, spend time with my loved ones. Spend time watching that progress and being entertained by it. Discuss it openly with everyone, try the new technologies, enjoy this journey because life has never been a destination. When I tell you 2037 might be a strange year or 2027, we're going to start to see the first patients. That doesn't really matter when you really think about it, because it's not within your control. What is within your control is that you go through that journey with compassion, with love, with engagement in life, living fully. Not panicking about this, but actually making this a wake up call for you to focus on what actually matters matters, right? Because what if you're focusing so much on your job, your job is going to be gone in 10 years time, right? So focus on what actually matters and what matters most. If you have to choose, one thing is human connection.
- [79:09]
Hala Taha
Wow, this was one of my favorite conversations that I've had all year. I haven't feel this invigorated in terms of studying for an interview in a really long time. Like it's just such an interesting topic. So I'm so happy that you got a chance to come on. I hope to have you on many times. I've a lot of people come on and on the show so I hope to have you on many times more to talk about your upcoming book about stress, to talk about happiness, your life and AI of course to get an update. So Mo, where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do?
- [79:39]
Mo Gawdat
First of all thank you so much for having me. Thank you for introducing me to to to your followers. It has been a very energizing conversation. Thank you for that. First thing is before they come and look for me and where they to find me is please share this with others. This is something that a lot of people need to hear about. I'm available on mogaudat.com, so that's my website available on most social media sites but I'm more active on LinkedIn and Instagram and my podcast is slomo s l o m o which is top five in well being. So something that I think we should focus on more more. And yeah, just message me if you have a question and I try to answer every message.
- [80:25]
Hala Taha
Amazing. MA will put all those links in the show notes so everybody can find you. Thanks so much for coming on Young and Profiting podcast.
- [80:31]
Mo Gawdat
Thank you for having me.
- [80:34]
Hala Taha
I absolutely loved this conversation with Mo Gao Dat. This went viral on YouTube when I first put it out and there's a reason. Because he talked some game about AI today today. And he made one thing crystal clear. AI isn't just a trending headline. It's the operating system of the next decade. The people who will win in this new era are the ones who master the tools, lead with ethics, and double down on authentic human connection. Here are the plays that I want you to run when you think about AI for your business. Number one, get hands on with AI right now. Most said it best. You're not going to lose your job to AI. You're going to lose it to somebody who knows how to use AI AI better than you. Audit your workflow, then assign AI to concrete tasks like drafting proposals, repurposing content and conducting your research, writing base code. Whatever it is, it depends on your job. Open up Chat GBT and ask for the top AI tools for your exact role or your exact business. Then pilot two this week and measure your time saved and measure all the efficiencies that you've gained. You've got to start testing AI second, set a hard line on ethics, label AI generated content, refuse deep fakes and manipulative tactics and establish a written AI policy for your team covering things like disclosure, privacy and source verification. If you wouldn't want your family exposed to a tactic, do not deploy it in your business. Third, make human connection your competitive advantage. As intelligence gets commoditized, empathy, trust, taste and presence will rise in value. That is something that AI can't duplicate. So host more live touch points with your audience. Personalize your client communication. Create community moments that your competitors cannot automate. In summary, you've got to build a brand that feels undeniably human. That will be your competitive advantage. MO also warned about the concentration of power and the end of truth with AI. Protect your business by building owned channels, verifying sources before you post, and investing in first party data and relationships. This is a new wave of our lives. Learn the tools, choose integrity and lead with your heart. That's how we stay profiting in an AI world Thank you so much for tuning in to this special episode of Young and Profiting. If you listened, learned and profited from this AI Vault episode, share it with somebody who's also curious about AI. If you prefer to watch your podcast, you can find all of our videos uploaded on YouTube. And if you haven't already, be sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel and join our growing community on there. We're also now on Spotify Video. If you want to watch your podcast on Spotify, you now can do that. And if you guys enjoyed this episode, please consider dropping us a five star review wherever you're tuning in. Apple, Spotify, YouTube, we love getting your reviews and comments. It keeps us going here at yap. You can also stay connected with me on Instagram at Yap with Holla or LinkedIn by searching my name. It's Holla. Ta. And before we go, I gotta say thank you and big love to my hungry, scrappy, happy Yap media team. You guys are absolutely incredible. Thank you for all your hard work for putting on this show and making it happen. This is your host Hala Taha, AKA the podcast Princess signing off.