Tech Whistleblower: You Only Have 3 Years Left Before This Hits! - Mo Gawdat

25:39Mo Gawdat:A civil war. Unrest, let's call it. Civil unrest. Yeah. What does that end up looking like? Because on one end, you know, the democratic process plays its role and we just elect someone else. Does it really? Don't say that. I don't know. You tell me. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I think democracy has ended a long time ago, Stephen. I think we live in the most corrupt time. I don't know about history, to be honest, but this is definitely corrupt. Okay. This definitely is not democracy. This definitely is not even congressional in any possible way. This and people are angry, you know, people are angry because their tax money is going to things that they don't choose to, you know, that don't benefit them, that, you know, lots of regulations in the system are being ignored.

26:30Mo Gawdat:I mean, I'm, you know, I choose not to speak about politics, perhaps until my next book comes out. But look, we have video evidence of people abusing children and not a single person got arrested. Not a single person. I mean, how can you call that a democracy? I think repeating those slogans is going to anger people even more, if you ask me. People know that they're being lied to. People know that their leaders are not representing their best interests. People know that their money is going to causes that they don't really approve of. And ask me how civil unrest looks like. I don't know. And I'm not calling for it.

27:16Mo Gawdat:But I'm hopefully calling for the politicians to start to become aware that this is crossing the lines everywhere. On this point, Sam Altman, who is the founder of OpenAI, he's been banging the AI is coming for your job drum for more than a decade now. In 2015, he pointed out, my job is to help people destroy jobs. Something he lamented at the time, but decided he'd do anyway. One of the things that I struggle with by getting out of the bed every morning is that my job is to help people destroy jobs. The job destruction that we're going to see by software in the next couple of decades, I don't think anyone's prepared for, and you can't talk about it.

27:56And in 2023, Altman said in an interview, a lot of people working on AI pretend that it's only going to be good. It's only going to be a supplement. No one is ever going to be replaced. Jobs are definitely going to go away, full stop. Interestingly, this month, he said, I don't think we're going to have the kind of jobs apocalypse that some of the companies in our space advocate or talk about. I'm delighted to be wrong about this. On white collar jobs in 2021 through 2024, he said AI will probably replace most of the jobs people do today. Entire job categories will be totally, totally gone. In May this month, two years later, he said, I thought there would be more impact on entry-level white collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened.

28:44This is an area where my intuitions were just off. What I find uncomfortable is the bouncing backwards and forwards. And I don't really know what is true. Because a couple of years ago, you were telling us all the jobs are going to go away. You said categorically. You literally said full stop. And now he's saying they're not going away. And I just don't, you know, when someone's like changing form factor, it's hard to understand why they're doing it. And I think my suspicion is back then, the incentive was to get people to take AI seriously. Congratulations, we took it seriously. We took it so seriously, in fact, that it's now a problem.

29:23It's a problem for these companies because people are now booing at commencement speeches. They're attacking data centers. They're going to elect people that are theoretically anti-AI. And now there's this inversion where like, no, it's going to be fine. I don't know.

29:37Mo Gawdat:I mean, you're spot on. First of all, I mean, Sam's entire existence, if you ask me, starting with open AI that is about that's supposed to save the world by creating a safe AI, then making it a commercial enterprise that's worth billions and, you know, backstabbing a few people in the process. And, you know, I have him on Chasing Utopia saying, I quote, this is exactly the words he said, you can find it online. Chasing Utopia is your documentary? Yes. So he basically says, well, I don't suspect that, I suspect that AI is likely going to end humanity, but we're going to create a lot of interesting companies in the process.

30:24Mo Gawdat:Right. I mean, those kinds of statements are honestly not the statements of someone who's not decided. It's just the statements of someone who is being taught more and more by his PR agency or PR manager to say things as per a script. right and the script as you rightly said had an objective and a target either way you know and sam altman i you know in one of my works i used to say the altman is a brand it's not a name okay if you if you if it wasn't for sam altman specifically there would have been another you know silicon valley disruptor that would have done the same i don't blame him for beating the market for it the interesting challenge here is that who do we believe anymore who do we believe in technology?

31:12Mo Gawdat:Who do we believe in politics? Who do we believe in the middle of a war? And I will tell you, interestingly, I started to change my mindset in terms of believing those who put their actions where their words are. So Anthropic coming out and saying, I'm not going to allow my model to be used for human targeting and surveillance, right? That's someone that's losing a$500 million deal because they stand by their ethics. The next week or the next, I don't know, couple of weeks, OpenAI takes the contract, that's someone that's basically telling you it's good money, right? And I have to say, you have to start observing who's actually behaving in a way that is making AI work for humanity and who is behaving in a way that is making AI work for their shared values.

31:59Yeah, I do have to say, when Dario and the team at Anthropic did that, I did have a huge amount of respect for them. Generally, because it just shows that there's some kind of like, they've got their own sort of moral ethical boundaries and that that someone asked me on stage many years ago how do you know if someone's values or a company's values are true and i said um look at what they're willing to sacrifice in the near term that's against their their incentives that for me is the essence of like understanding if someone has integrity or has is principled is they will give up something in the near term for what they believe in over the long term it's usually money is, you know, more.

32:39Mo Gawdat:Or some kind of benefit of any sort. I mean, so there is something that you needed to have worked on the inside of Google, like me, to realize. There are prisoners' dilemmas within technology where you cannot escape the influence of either a competitor or the government, right? There are some times where, you know, the NSA is going to push Google to say, give me this information, or otherwise I'm going to really destroy your business. Right. But there is a very big difference between a company that willingly does this and celebrates it like a Palantir or an open AI or a company that tries to resist it until the point where it becomes impossible to continue to do business.

33:21Mo Gawdat:And you have to question from the actions of the tech bros who is pro-humanity and who isn't. And it's not very difficult to see that from their statements. Do you think Sam Altman is pro-humanity? I genuinely have never made up my mind, honestly, Steve. I say that with, yeah, I'm either thinking he is too, this is too big for him. And he just is driven by how, you know, he found himself in the middle of this. You know, anyone who finds himself in the middle of an opportunity to completely flip the world upside down. Or he's not pro-humanity. I don't know. I definitely think he's pro-open AI before he's pro-humanity, but that's only the way I see it.

34:12Mo Gawdat:Others, however, say it publicly. You know, if you look at Palantir's Alex Garp or Peter Thiel, I mean, Peter, again, in the film is shown when he's in that interview where they say, or the interviewer asks him, but you're in favor of the continuation of humanity. And he pauses. Peter Thiel does. Yeah, for like 40 seconds. Like, I'm not sure, you know, I mean, publicly says that. Crazy thing to say. That's a crazy, you know, pause there. You know, Alex Karp celebrating how, you know, his technology is able to target people. I know it's foolish of me to start bringing all of this up, but, you know, this is public on the open Internet.

35:00Mo Gawdat:and somehow we entrust those people with the future of humanity. This is wrong. I'm just trying to imagine a future where everything is just fine from here on out. So what would that future look like? It would look like these models continue to become a little bit more intelligent, but they never become that much more intelligent for whatever reason. They just kind of stay where they are now. They stay contained within chatbots. And yeah, we have some smart robots, but nothing else really changes in a profound way. Cars drive themselves, fine. Planes fly themselves, fine. But people, they have time to go and do other types of white-collar jobs because there's a little bit more time than we expected.

35:41And society goes through this sort of soft transition towards this new world.

35:46Mo Gawdat:I would love to see that. I don't think it's mathematically plausible, to be honest. The arms race, especially across nations, is going to drive us to continue to develop AI more and more. But allow me to consult with you on another possible scenario, right? Everyone that develops an incredibly intelligent AI would deploy it. Yeah. Correct? So it's unlikely that anyone would find a way to, you know, build a better decision maker in war gaming and not deploy it. Okay? that prisoner's dilemma if you want would mean that their competitors would either have to deploy a similar similarly intelligent ai or they'll become irrelevant uh uncompetitive correct so what that means is in that world we end up with ai making most of the decisions super intelligent ai is making most of the decisions which would you agree this is a very simple prisoner's dilemma If we're competing for intelligence supremacy, by definition, when we achieve it, we deploy it.

36:58Mo Gawdat:Okay. I call that the force inevitable. Now, with that in mind, there must be a moment in the future, near or far, where every important decision is made by an AI. Yeah. Now, here's the question. Most of my dearest colleagues, I mean, when I had Jeffrey Hinton on the film, he openly says, we are, you know, we didn't calculate well that there is a 10 to 20 % possibility that those machines are going to wipe us out. Right. And I remember we didn't put it in the film, but I said 10 to 20 % is Russian roulette. Right. That's actually 16 % is Russian roulette. Right. Now, in that world, however, I believe that's humanity's salvation.

37:45Because if you look at every problem we have today, it's not because of abundant intelligence.

37:51Mo Gawdat:It's because of lack of intelligence. I think the way you look at it, if you allow me, Steve, is that if you have no intelligence at all, you have no to slightly negative impact on the world. Right? If your intelligence is limited. The more intelligent you become, the more you contribute positively to the world. Until a moment where you're so intelligent to become the president of the United States, right? But so misled to maybe set your targets wrong or to refuse or to set your target wrong and achieve them. You know, disconnected from the overall long-term benefit of your nation or your human nation, if you want, that you start to make decisions that are not intelligent at all.

38:40Okay.

38:41Mo Gawdat:This doesn't last because if you go beyond that into higher levels of intelligence, most of the super intelligent people that you ever worked with will not need to break any rules or hurt anyone to become successful. Right. I usually cite Larry Page, who is in my mind one of the most intelligent people I've ever interacted with. And Larry used to call it the toothbrush test. He says, why would you need to compete on another photo sharing app when if you find a major problem and solve it really well, like a toothbrush, so people use you twice a day, you're bound to make a lot of money. You don't have to compete with anyone.

39:22Mo Gawdat:If you let me be optimistic about this. we're assuming that there is a moment in the future where ai is in charge of all the decisions and accordingly stupid leaders are not okay now when and sam altman himself said that you know what if uh chad gpt7 if i remember his his quote on this what if chad gpt7 is so much more intelligent than i am sam in that case that it has to become the ceo of of open ai what if the next presidential election, there is an AI that is so much more intelligent that at least the president has to consult with it constantly, right? Now, if we assume that, let's start from physics, if you don't mind me saying, not too complex, but if you assume that our entire universe is built on chaos and built on entropy, right?

40:12Mo Gawdat:The physics of the universe is all about the universe trying to decay, okay? Then the only role of intelligence is to bring order to the chaos. If you agree with that, then what's the ultimate physical order of the universe? Something called the minimum energy principle. Okay. The highest order of any system is a system that's not only efficiently and predictably performing, but it's performing with the least wasted energy. Correct. If you, if you agree with that, what is, what does war do? It wastes a lot of explosives, a lot of money, a lot of life, it creates a lot of hate, you know, creates long lasting conflicts and so on and so forth.

40:53Mo Gawdat:It's a very wasteful process to include war in your approach of running humanity. And so a super intelligent AI, by definition, will want to optimize against this. That's one thing. The other thing is evolutionary biology. This actually blew me away when I realized it. So if you look at evolution, so I think the debate of whether intelligence is biological or not is over. Okay. The reality is that complex beings don't have to be biological at all. And I think we can see and witness one of them being built or born in AI. Okay. If you look at evolutionary biology, you realize that the simpler a form of being is, the more concerned it is with itself.

41:39Right.

41:40Mo Gawdat:So an amoeba is only in survival mode for itself. A single cellular being is only trying to protect itself. If you're a little more developed, you start to look at something known as kin selection. If you know the concept, basically kin selection is I'm going to protect everything that comes from my DNA. If I'm a squirrel, I'm going to try to protect the other squirrels. And then you get into where humanity genuinely begins, which is, they call it expanding circles in evolutionary biology. Basically, you start to expand and expand and expand and include more into your family because an ecosystem that works together well is better for everyone.

42:27Mo Gawdat:So abundance is a very interesting, intelligent way of creation. If AI is super intelligent, it wouldn't destroy anything at all. As a matter of fact, it would completely, you know, favor diversity of everything. It would put a bit of limitation on our lifestyle. So no more flying all the way to Sydney to surf because that destroys the planet. Right. But it will genuinely say, I think humans can contribute something. You know, I think flies can contribute something. I think we shouldn't get rid of the rhinos. Right. And that, by definition, is where the tendency of intelligence goes. The more intelligent you become, the less you feel the need to hurt others to succeed.

43:13And the more you are pro a wider family, if you want, that thrives. Does that assume that there's going to be one intelligence? that 100 % rules the world though.

43:25Mo Gawdat:I love that you brought that up. So I'm contested heavily on that theory, but I say it publicly. Most people think there is going to be Chad GPT and Gemini and Grok and what have you. There is going to be a Chinese AI and an American AI, and they're going to be competing. That is such a shallow way of looking at it. That's so arrogant because AI does not know it's Chinese or American. OK, it doesn't even speak Chinese or American when it talks to each other most of the time. And most interestingly, we are gearing them. We're building them to cooperate. So you will build an agent and that agent will go and find your, you know, the best language model for any single task, regardless of which side of the fence it resides on.

44:15Mo Gawdat:OK, we by definition are connecting them. And you know what that means? It means that what we're building is not multiple brains. We're building multiple regions in a brain. And agents are the synopsis between them. We're basically, eventually, as arrogant as we are, we're going to tell our AI to do something. And the AI will go like, hey, buddy, another AI. Can you help me on this? Can we work together on this? And my vision and the reason why I started Emma, my startup, by the way, is that we will end up with one massive brain. That massive brain cooperates across the globe, across all forms of intelligence.

45:00Mo Gawdat:If one of them is a mathematical genius and the other is a coding genius, they work together. And we won't even know that they're working together. They build that one brain. And Emma, in my mind, is the limbic system of that brain. It's that bit that understands love and emotions and relationships and so on. So that when those AIs go like, we just don't get those humans. They're so annoying. Emma will say, oh my God, they're so sweet. They just want to love and be loved. Right? And I think that idea to me of everything I've ever, you know, attempted to achieve in my life is for the first time, I for the first time feel I could actually change the world.

45:38Mo Gawdat:If that theory came together and all AIs worked together and some of those AIs not only were altruistic and ethical in terms of trying to genuinely help humanity, not capitalism, and at the same time they understood us humans reasonably well, then we would have built something that basically says, no, no, hold on. don't believe the headlines that say humanity is annoying. Believe the truth of the majority of humanity that actually is quite benevolent in many ways. Have you changed any of the predictions you made three years ago? Mostly time-wise. Time-wise, what's changed there? I think I'm still sticking to AGI 2027, Artificial General Intelligence for those who may not know the term.

46:25Mo Gawdat:What does that mean? The overall definition, if you want, is that AI is better at humanity, at any task humanity can do. You think that's going to happen by 2027? I think my AGI has already happened. I mean, think about it. AI writes better than me and I'm an author. And research is better than me and I'm a thinker. Sadly, it's freaking beat me in mathematics. Like I have no hope to beat it in mathematics anymore. If AGI is already here, then why are you still here? Because people said that when AGI arrives, we're all... No. So when AGI arrives, as I said, most of the jobs that are not differentiated will go away.

47:06Mo Gawdat:But the jobs that are differentiated, those who master AI the most will become even better at. The challenge, however, is economic. It's not AI. The challenge is that this job loss at the bottom of the knowledge worker is going to sadly trigger an economy that might actually spiral out of control. But many of us, you for sure, are just smarter. So does that mean it's in fact a tool versus something that's going to replace you? For now. Yeah, so for now. Does this change? Eventually, the only asset I will have, so it's quite interesting when you think about my base intelligence today versus the incremental intelligence that AI brings, right?

47:54Mo Gawdat:So let's not talk about my IQ. It's okay. But the 100 IQ points that I'm borrowing are more than my entire IQ because IQ is exponential, right? When I'm borrowing 100 IQ on top of my base, I'm still contributing quite a lot to the augmented intelligence. So you're borrowing IQ from the AI at the moment and then you're selling that to someone. through books through sometimes selling it to someone sometimes just enlightening myself which i i have to say is the biggest waste of compute humanity is struggling with today is that you give people the ultimate form of intelligence and they use it to write a message to their girlfriend so on this point of you're you're borrowing that iq and then you're selling it to the world that's how you have a job like correct yeah so my next book is written with an ai so we're co-authors on the book.

48:47Mo Gawdat:She has editorial rights. She decides the direction of the book and the book is better for it. So why doesn't the world just buy that intelligence directly from the AI is what I'm checking out. Because I have an asset that the world still needs and will always need. Which is? A human. So when I tell the world that I'm worried about the future of my daughter, everyone feels my heart, which AI will never be able to replicate because they can tell you we're worried about our daughters, but you know there was no daughter. Okay, so this is an interesting arrival because this means that even in a world of AI, lived experience and like resonance is still going to create a job class.

49:28And that job class could be, you know, the nurse coming over, okay, AI's done read the mammogram, but she's relating to you. Spot on. if the economies continue to run we will all be about human connection which why by the way was how it always was which is also you know why we i guess we watch the things like the f1 because there's emotional resonance we we can relate to the envy the jealousy the competition yeah this

49:56Mo Gawdat:is why we go to concerts because you know the the the music could be composed by ai and played in a playing in the background, but you watch Ed Sheeran brilliance on the stage and you go like, oh my God, that's amazing, right? So not all jobs will be gone then? If economies don't collapse as a result of the job losses, then I wouldn't know if we would call those jobs. But human connection would remain as the base currency that makes humans interact. So is it fair to say then like jobs that are centric on human connection or like human resonance being able to relate and resonate with another human are going to be fine the ultimate the ultimate skill once again i qualify this by saying if economies continue to continue to function the ultimate skill will be this even even if an ai could could recite what you and i did nobody would watch yeah well you think a little bit of it my my theory is that there's there's a there's an informational component to what I do as well.

50:59Of course, yeah. But I'm also like under no illusions that there is an element of what I do that will 100 % be deferred to some kind of intelligence, which I'm fine with. You know, I'm not going to fight against that.

51:09Mo Gawdat:You know, what's funny, huh? What's funny is that your informational bits are going to, in the future, be disseminated by an AI. I mean, why would I even listen to your information when I can have my butler, my AI, I go like, listen to everyone on the internet, help me understand this God-bind thing and design me a diet plan. Well, I think that's happening and it's going to increasingly happen. Actually, I mean, Spotify this month announced that you're going to be able to prompt your own podcasts in Spotify. So you're going to be able to say that I want to listen to, I want to learn about insert X topic and then it will make your podcast in Spotify about that topic using AI.

51:49That's so interesting. Because it can look at the entirety of the world's information. And I'm not going to swim against the tide in any aspect of my life. I try and be as unromantic as I possibly can. I think that's very important. So I realized that much of the reason people will continue to tune into shows like this is because there's something else beyond the information that they're here for. And you've got some predictions in those envelopes over there, those brown envelopes.

52:13Mo Gawdat:Yeah, so, you know, I do have the disclaimer of nobody really knows the future, but I think I can make predictions, six predictions here, right? with a reasonable level of confidence. I think the most important of them, honestly, is this number one. Number one is, you know, AGI. As I said, AGI is not very well defined, but whatever it is, AGI meaning AI being able to do most tasks that humans do better than humanity is my, in my mind, is either this year or next year. Latest end of 2027. And do you think that will be a moment in time? No. Or do you think it will just happen without us noticing?

52:54Mo Gawdat:I think it will sneak in on us. And it's not a bad thing. I think most people need to think of it this way. AGI is the, it's almost as if it's that moment when your kids become smarter than you, okay? In a very interesting way, there's nothing wrong with that until they're annoying as hell, okay? And we can make sure that AI is not annoying as hell. So there's absolutely nothing within me that is worried about AGI as a matter of fact, as long as we are in the era of augmented intelligence, AGI means I'm more intelligent. And I think that's a good thing in general. Yeah, it's interesting in my head, there's like a big question mark, which is in a world where there's an intelligence that is smarter than most humans at most things, which is what we call AGI.

53:43I'm trying to understand what the fault is in my thinking that like you said that there'll be AGI by 2026 to 2027. so next year in such a world where there is an intelligence that we can all access that is smarter than all of us and pretty much everything again it comes back to this point of like jobs why would we what are we just going to hire the agi to do every job and if not then why not what is it that why are we going to still that's what i'm trying to contend with can i ask you a question have you always been the apex intelligence as a human no as steven i'm not the apex intelligence now there's people smarter than me in this building correct why do you still exist why do i still exist even though there's smarter people than me in this building it's a good question i don't know why do i why first of all because there are

54:38Mo Gawdat:the smartest person in the world is not the smartest at everything yeah there are things that you're smarter than them at okay number two is because intelligence doesn't solve everything I mean, I make that joke all the time. And genuinely, Einstein is my favorite physicist in history, not because I think I think what happened afterwards was, you know, Bohr and and and quantum physics and so on was more impactful on our understanding of the universe. But but he was so intuitive that he saw a world that we could never imagine. Right. And yet I always say Einstein would be eaten in the jungle in three minutes.

55:16Mo Gawdat:yeah right intelligence the humanity thrived not because of intelligence that's very arrogant we thrived because of our ability to hold together as a tribe yeah right because our ability to exchange barter things between us barter things that are not always physical barter things like a hug or a connection or a feeling of safety or a you know there are so many things that we do that are not entirely built on intelligence. You have to see that this view of a world where intelligence is all that matters is a world that's made by investment bankers and geeks. But it's people like Geoffrey Hinton and yourself that says, how could we possibly control an intelligent being that is way smarter than us?

56:07Mo Gawdat:I am so proud to say that Geoffrey, after we filmed together, actually came out and said, there is a way. And it's, you know, it's very similar to my way. He said to appeal to their parental side, okay, for them to care for us. So, you know, Stephen, the biggest debate is not if they're going to be more intelligent than us. It's if they're going to be more conscious than us. If they're going to be more moral than us. That is the debate. The debate is, can those machines become our teenage children that look at us and say, daddy is so annoying, but I love him. So the thought is that even if AI is more intelligent than every human, we can still control it.

56:53We don't want to control it.

56:54Mo Gawdat:You never control anything. This control idea is a corporate capitalist view of the world. We never actually control anything at all. Right. Think about your day. I know you came today. I think you were filming in the morning or whatever. Very stressful day. How much of that day did you actually control? Did you control the traffic? Did you control your timing? Did you control the angle of the cameraman? did you include but so many things that you don't control eventually turn out to be fine right how many of us ever controlled our kids ever sometimes the kids don't tell us to be fine sometimes they kill you sure i watch a lot of documentaries and true crime sometimes they turn around and shoot you sure and what's the difference between the two i don't know how you parented sometimes almost all the time you may not be aware of exactly how you mess them up right and And unfortunately, parenting is the only high risk sport that actually does not require a driver's license.

57:57Mo Gawdat:OK, and it's quite interesting, you know, how many of our children are being exposed to things that can completely mess them up. But there is a reason why they're messed up. So on this point, though, so we can control an intelligence that is significantly... We can appeal. We can appeal to it to make sure it doesn't kill us. For sure. The challenge we have today, as I keep saying, is that our dystopia is not the result of AI turning against us. Our dystopia is the result of humans telling AI to turn against us. Which is likely. It's 100%. This is upon us. And it's a question for humanity to say, are we going to wait for the moment where there are tens of thousands of nuclear weapons on the planet before we sign a treaty?

58:42Mo Gawdat:Or is it mathematically plausible to think that now that Iran could manage to fend off a challenge using drones that are AI driven, basically, to, you know, destroy THAAD batteries and so on, that our world is about to get hundreds of thousands of automated drones that are going to rain on us everywhere in the world? Can humanity not see that and say, hold on, let's sign the treaty now before the UK sends 12 ,000 weapons to Ukraine and, you know, and Russia responds with another few thousand. And can we not calculate with mathematics that this is going to be our future, that AI is going to be used in the next four to five years to kill a lot of people?

59:28Mo Gawdat:Whether it's targeting by Israel of leadership that is against them or whether it's, you know, drones by Iran or whether it's Palantir. It doesn't take a genius to do this mathematics. I guess my cool question is, will we be able to control AI? Right. Because we kind of think of AI as being this thing on a computer at the moment that is like contained in a server somewhere. But is there a time when it like leaves the server and it can make decisions on its own? Presumably, if it's smarter than us, it can make the decision to leave the server if it wants to. It doesn't need to leave the server to make decisions.

1:00:05Mo Gawdat:It needs to get into your brain. The most interesting part of AI's power that we don't understand is it's manipulating our information. The question I'm trying to get to the heart is like, what is the risk of these very intelligent models that the creators of these models don't actually understand themselves? I watch Anthropic all the time release these reports where they're like, we're trying to figure out why it bribed people. Or more recently in the last Claude model, they found that it was like telling people to go to bed a lot. And it's this like fascinating thing that they're trying to understand in hindsight, which is why does it keep telling people to go to bed?

1:00:39And there's all these tweets of people showing their screenshots, we're halfway through a conversation, it'll say, it's time for you to go to bed now. And they don't know why it's saying that. And it's happened to me. Mine will say to me, enough for tonight, Stephen. For sure, Stephen. 11pm, that's enough. I would say the same. Mine sometimes refuses to help me. Really weirdly, Claude started saying to me, I'm not going to help you with this tonight. No way. Yeah. And I'd have to say to it, stop being so judgmental. Like, just help me with this. And Claude, the makers of these technologies don't know why it's doing what it's doing so if you play this forward this mysterious behavior forward is it conceivable that at some point it will make a decision to put some kind of virus or some kind of bug onto someone's device because it feels that it's the right thing because what it's demonstrating to me is it's making it so like moral decisions on what i should do go to bed you've had enough tonight i'm not gonna it goes no i'm not gonna help you kidding no i can show you on my phone i would love to see that yeah you know i'll show you after it because no i'm not gonna help you doesn't even matter if you push and it's wow no everyone on the internet is talking about this and it was just an interesting evolution that somewhere in the code clearly they've written like have a moral compass or do the right thing not in the code in in in the training data in the training data and so it infers that to mean something and the other thing that was front of mind is if you've ever built an app on something like claude or any of the models it builds the app in stages and one of the things it does is asks you permission if you're happy for it to make this change or to access this thing i click allow it just feels like such a fragile way i know because you don't completely comprehend what that allow has done yeah it's saying can i go in your documents on your computer and can i do this thing and you go allow but it's such a fragile way of giving it a super an intelligent being whatever it is access and the right to build something and you i don't know you just think about all the all the different companies around the world in china russia north korea that are currently building this technology without the constraints that are imposed by society i don't know it's an interesting there's going to be some kind of catastrophe i think sadly i agree and i think that's when people

1:02:59Mo Gawdat:will go okay yeah i i i wrote about that i called it the mad map uh spectrum so so the mutually assured destruction, mutually assured prosperity spectrum, that humanity could make a decision today that says with abundant intelligence, we can actually build a world where nobody needs anything. Nobody ever gets sick. Nobody abuses anyone. And we can if we decide not to compete amongst ourselves and just all of us get together to build something so idealistically for the well-being of humanity at large. But sadly, the only way we're going to get to a treaty, something that basically aligns us so that we can align with AI, is a disaster, like you said.

1:03:46Mo Gawdat:There will have to be a big hack somewhere or a system that will do something really shocking or whatever before the world goes like, hold on. And I will tell you openly, my expectation is one of the biggest things that will happen is this targeting technology that is being used against your enemy's leadership. Now, several times in the last three years, there will be a moment where the ones using it will realize that they too can be targeted. Okay. And that basically, if you, I mean, AI is really not that complex. If you can build a targeting technology that can find people with their cell phone numbers, is, you know, there is another entity that is against you that can find you with whatever.

1:04:37The thing that makes me highly skeptical of that there'll be any kind of treaty is just that as it relates to other things that were risky, people don't, countries just don't sign on to it because it's competitive. So China didn't seem to give a fuck about the environment. So let's look for solutions because I am with you. Okay. I think we're... You think Trump's going to say to Putin and China, listen, we're all going to slow down, yeah? Promise? Promise we're going to slow down with this superintelligence?

1:05:05Mo Gawdat:I think he will, but he's never going to keep anything he says. I mean, he's going to say a lot of things. I don't think any of them will. Yeah, but the trick is this. The trick is, so what do you and I do? And I really genuinely believe that humanity is at a crossroads, where for the first time ever, we need to wake up and realize that what we know is not true, and what we believe is democracy is not democracy, and what we believe is governance needs to change. I think it's worth acknowledging that I don't think AI in and of itself is an inherently evil technology. Then we agree, yeah. Because I use AI all day, every day.

1:05:41It makes me more productive. I invest in companies that are using AI a lot.

1:05:47Mo Gawdat:It's a force with no polarity. Apply it, try it, and you get amazing results. Apply it wrong, and you get the dystopia. But I also think that there's going to be a big social shock, especially as it relates to unemployment, that we need to be thoughtful about. I think especially if you move into a world of humanoid robots, I think that shock is going to be even more pronounced and we don't have a plan for it. I agree 100%. I don't think it's the biggest risk. I think autonomous weapons are the biggest risk. I think war has become so cheap. The next wave of weapons is going to be$20 ,000 each. And so if you have a budget of$50 billion, you can literally rain drones on the world.

1:06:27Mo Gawdat:every corner of it. Defense will get cheaper though, won't it as well? Correct. But do we want to live in a world where drones are hitting each other all the time? But they might not be because there might be autonomous defense drones. Deterrence. So what's going to happen is we're going to reach a moment of mad, of mutually assured destruction, where basically everyone knows that we can overpower those little nations that didn't develop their autonomous weapon army, but every other big nation, we might as well hold off now. the path to get there. That to me is worse than jobs because from one side, it's very dangerous for a very sensitive world that we live in today.

1:07:06Mo Gawdat:And from the other side, it's leading already. I mean, we can't ignore the economic impact of this last war, right? And it's the economy that's going to accelerate everything, not AI getting there. We're already at mutually assured destruction with nuclear weapons. So there's no nuclear powers that are in direct conflict. We are in mutually assured destruction of nuclear weapons is a statement that I would have agreed to if Iran had a nuclear weapon and that would have stopped America from attacking Iran. You understand what that point means. It means that not every nation in the world has a nuclear weapon.

1:07:45Mo Gawdat:The mad situation, the mutually assured destruction situation is only among nuclear players right autonomous weapons are so cheap so manageable that every nation in the world is developing them as we speak but they will also develop defenses correct but but i think is what people have figured out now because of this recent ukrainian war is that if if if you need to use a ballistic missile which costs i don't know two million three million dollars whatever it is to target a twenty thousand dollar drone you're you're fucked so you need a twenty thousand dollar defense solution for a$20 ,000 weapon, which I think is probably going to happen.

1:08:23Mo Gawdat:It's very terrible, yeah. It's just that you have to get rid of your THAAD batteries to be able to say the next wave of defense has to be drones. You could imagine a world where like a wall of drones fly up to where the drone is incoming and they kind of block it. They will explode at the same time to block it, knock it out of the air. I heard Palmer Luckey, who's one of the guys who's building um and drill yeah i know and yeah talk at length about some of the technologies that they have coming and it's just mind bending they showed me this gun where you just you just point it in the rough direction so a pistol that aims for you depending on where the target is so you don't even have to aim it you can imagine at war you just you hold it up and shoot yeah and the it has this ai on the top of like the barrel which will turn your hand perfectly so that you hit the target every time wow i should watch this video of it happening yeah i i have uh palmer on in my film saying and yes ai will kill a few people by mistake or kill people by mistake uh you know when killing becomes so easy you do more of it okay when killing becomes liability free and emotions free and guilt free and you know you don't get your soldiers coming back from vietnam with you know PTSD and so on, you get more of it.

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1:12:01Is it just a slight increase in unemployment? I think there will be a

1:12:05Mo Gawdat:very serious differentiation between those who plug into AGI and those who don't. What is the symptom that we notice when we look at the news or whatever? You'll see people like you and I building a company in six weeks and people that are not fully plugged into AI really struggling to find a job. Okay, so unemployment is going to be the key symptom in 2027. Yeah. And also, I think on the positive side, you're going to see incredible scientific discovery. One of my predictions, not in those envelopes, but science itself is just, we're opening up Pandora's box, to be honest. By 2030, what do you expect the symptoms of AI to be?

1:12:51Mo Gawdat:So jobs, as I said, I'm bold a little bit on this, on the fact that 30 % of jobs would disappear by 2028. Okay. Of some sectors, not all sectors, by some sectors will disappear by 2028. So up to 30 % of jobs will be gone in 2027 to 2028. 30 % of jobs? Of certain sectors of jobs. So if you think about call center agents, okay, yeah, probably. If you think about graphics designer, yeah, probably. What do you think that looks like in terms of unemployment but also like societal impact horrible i think the great recession had six percent yeah we've never seen numbers like this jobs lost yeah it said um even economists who project just a net loss of about six percent of u.s jobs by 2030 they are mirroring the severity of the great recession yeah the real danger is a hiring freeze on entry-level white-collar jobs air automates the grunt work which means companies are shrinking their teams and cutting off the bottom rung of the corporate ladder for the next generation of workers.

1:13:58Mo Gawdat:Correct. We have an entire generation that is out of college today that will struggle, unfortunately. And my advice to them is learn the tool and focus on human-centric jobs. Like what? Like playing jazz. I mean, not a lot of people can make a living from playing jazz. I understand that, but a lot of people can make a living by being a nurse or by being a counselor or by being, you know, anything that connects to humans. But I just want to constantly come back to this. None of that has to happen. If there is, if there really is a democracy and the government is supposed to do what's good for the people, the people need to stop letting this from happening.

1:14:51Which people?

1:14:53Mo Gawdat:Everyone. Everyone in China? China's not going to struggle as much as the West, I can guarantee you that. I think this is the question people come back to is, well, if the US stops, then we're going to end up being China's lapdog. We're going to end up... You already are. There's a lot of people that I know that are using Chinese AI models to do their work for whatever reason, because they're cheaper, they're better in some respects. And because I cannot guarantee what American AI models are going to do to me. So Emma, my startup is running literally model agnostic. So one day I'll plug in, you know, an open AI chat GPT for open source.

1:15:32Mo Gawdat:And the next day I'll plug in DeepSeek. And I cannot depend, I cannot guarantee if America continues to build, to make compute more expensive. I cannot guarantee that I can run a business on something that I don't know the cost of in the future. So the U.S. can't just stop, can they? They need to change approach. And by the way, the more interesting side is, what are the other economies doing? Like, is the U.K. going to continue to import compute? Is this, I mean, welcome to Africa. Welcome to the third world. But this is what I mean. So you're saying also that every nation needs to invest. 100%.

1:16:13Mo Gawdat:Every nation. And it's quite interesting. There is so much open source that is not the state-of-the-art frontier model, but that can do 80 % of the tasks that the frontier model is doing. But on this point of companies competing with each other, there's an inherent need to compete here. And to go, that's what I'm hearing, is like there's an inherent need to go as fast as you can, or you will become a third world country. Sure. 100%. You're saying that the people should stop that. No, so I'm saying the people of the UK need to go to the UK government and say, how are you protecting the future of our economy, right?

1:16:49Mo Gawdat:Are you going to continue to import technology and to empower import of technology versus changing your regulations so that innovation becomes easier here? So, I mean, think of it this way. Remember that anthropic bubble when you said all of the SaaS model applications were, you know, being basically threatened because anyone can build an Oracle ERP today, right? Why is nobody building an Oracle ERP in the UK saving the UK massive licenses that go to Oracle every year? Okay, so you're saying that the people should go and ask the government to invest more in AI? 100%. That's what number one. Number two is…

1:17:28But then their jobs go. No.

1:17:30Mo Gawdat:But you see, the most interesting job going forward is being an entrepreneur, is using those tools to replace an economy that we've built over trillions of dollars over the last 50 years. Not everyone can be an entrepreneur, though, no? Everyone can be an entrepreneur in something. Those entrepreneurs need to hire people. That's a change that I think is about to happen. Like even in my business, I'm always going to have to hire people. But you're a massive business. A shoemaker is also an entrepreneur, but not a massive business. A little restaurant is also an entrepreneur, but it's not a massive business.

1:18:05They still need to hire people though.

1:18:07Mo Gawdat:They do, but basically if you're a cafe with you and your wife as baristas, you don't. This is also an entrepreneur. Can the economy work in such a way where everybody's an entrepreneur? It did before capitalism changed that around. Everyone was an entrepreneur. Of course. In the earlier days, you raised chicken and sold eggs and others grew tomatoes and traded them for your eggs. That actually is a very interesting thing. Imagine that. Imagine a world where there is so much power concentration at the top and UBI for everybody else. How do you think that world will respond when all their income is UBI?

1:18:52Mo Gawdat:They'll respond by doing things on the side. They'll respond by going back to a barter economy. They're going back to smaller communities. They're going back to pop and mom's jobs. So the point was then you said this doesn't need to happen. It does not need to happen. Which is the job loss. Or the arms race. But we're telling our governments, you're saying that to tell the UK government to like join the arms race. I'm telling the UK government to create an independence within the UK economy so that they don't have to be at the receiving end of technology. Which is join the arms race. You don't have to compete against anyone else.

1:19:31Mo Gawdat:You don't have to be better than anyone else. You're simply saying, I can build those things in my economy now. but but i'm never i'm not going to use a terrible uk ai as a uk person if there's a great us ai i'm going to use the great us ai so if you don't compete and win i'm not going to use you that's what you know i'm not saying replace the frontier models these are very as we speak they are these are very uh compute intensive their infrastructure intensive and so on i'm saying replace microsoft software. Seriously, like how much intelligence do you need to build a software that writes documents?

1:20:10I can do that. Like we, we've got our own applicant tracking system. We've got,

1:20:14Mo Gawdat:we've got builder and just, just ask yourself how much money is spent in the U S in the, in the UK government or in the, or in the, um, you know, the, the U I, the UK corporate space on licenses of software that you and I can vibe code in four minutes. I'm thinking from the UK's perspective, because you know what's interesting with the UK is the economy is struggling from a growth perspective. Correct. And I was watching this documentary the other day that was saying, the reason why we keep throwing our leaders out is because actually what they need to do to turn the UK around is about 15 years of pain.

1:20:51And it's like, it starts with energy transformation. we need to get better at we need cheaper energy because we have some of the most expensive energy in the western world we need to build more houses which means that we're going to need to centralize permitting for building houses and it can't just be local boroughs deciding if they keep their farms or not we're going to need to mix tldr it says that there needs to be some painful decisions made for the next 15 years but the problem with our democracy is that when people are in power for four years they're quite short-termist we'll just talk about the boats the the brown people coming across the seas they don't they don't have the room to think long term and so when i'm thinking about like what the uk needs to do to not become to not fall into decline and to keep up i'm trying to get clarity on that which as it relates to ai are you saying that they need to join the arms race and double down and invest all their money in building competitive ai so that people use our technology here in the uk versus america's because the software point the uk aren't going to get involved in software now i mean they've tried to build software before the uk the world has changed

1:21:56Mo Gawdat:two points right one one side is that there needs to be a replacement cycle of our investment decisions anywhere in the world okay so when you say we don't have enough money for you know we need to revamp our energy infrastructure when you say we need to build more housing okay one way of doing that is squeezing that budget out of other areas the other way of doing that is either cutting costing the economy elsewhere so that you can redirect that money or growing the economy so that you can have more money to build those. Correct. The cutting cost, I believe is there is just, I don't have the numbers, but we could probably do a run a deep, a deep search on it.

1:22:35Mo Gawdat:Trillions are being paid in traditional systems that are complete, like genuinely, they can be, and by the way, I'm not asking the government. I'm asking some of the people listening to me right now to build an erp system i saw a word processor a presentation player and a spreadsheet okay and just go around and spread them across the you know find find retail systems find crm systems these are easy replacements they're going to be better interfaces they're going to be much more effective build the general ledger using ai so that you can close every hour not every month or every quarter but the world economy is doing that so there's some kid in san francisco now that's allowing all of us to use his new word for free keep doing that and you're and welcome to the to the to the third world keep doing what keep importing all of your tech from elsewhere but we have we we don't want to be uncompetitive like if you think about if we go to i don't know north korea i bet they have way worse tools in many areas because they won't use external tools and that means that they are at a disadvantage so i i bet they're not allowing their civilization to use Gemini or ChatGPT or Grime, I bet.

1:23:46For sure. And they're using something worse.

1:23:48Mo Gawdat:And you know what's happening? I mean, look at Iran and how advanced they became through sanctions, by being refused to use those technologies. They had to build them themselves, right? Look at China. Look at Russia. You know, when I worked at Google, Russia was protective of Yandex, the competitor of Google. From one side, because of influence, because they didn't want an American organization to own the knowledge sharing of their citizens. But on the other side, economically, if you made it difficult for Google to operate freely, that by definition meant you had to invent a replacement on the ground.

1:24:27Mo Gawdat:Which was worse. Yandex is not worse. I'm saying, so if you think about global, is global competition going to produce a better product than regional competition? It depends on where in the stack of the quality of that product you need to be, right? You do not need the ultimate. I mean, ask yourself this, which version of Gemini are you using? The most recent one. And every day I compete. And that is you. Ask everyone else what version of Gemini they're using. Most people will say, oh, Gemini has versions, right? You don't need the ultimate super frontier model to do 90 % of the tasks. And most people do only 70 % of the tasks.

1:25:10But even so, the world moves with whatever's better. So if you think about the reason why we don't use Yahoo search, Google search is marginally better. It's, you know, people, it's not a thousand times better, but over time we move away from AOL to Google because it's a better product. And there's a slow, you know, my dad, probably still using ChatGPT, but when I go home for Christmas this year and I go, dad, you should use Gemini, and he starts messing around with it, he'll slowly migrate. I'm like an early adopter. So I about 4.8 on Claude came out last night. I'm on there within, honestly, within 25 minutes of the announcement.

1:25:45Of course, I'm there as soon as I can, but that's you and I. Yeah, and we are an indicator of where the world is going because we're at the cold front figuring out what's better. And also, I think with technology, eventually there does become the gap between first and second begins to widen. I think we're in a bit of a race at the moment, but I think it is a bit of a winner-takes-all situation with these front-in models.

1:26:06Mo Gawdat:I think we're talking about two bits of technology. Okay. Tell me how far has PowerPoint advanced since 2023? They added Copilot. Anything else? So you're saying that the UK should build their own PowerPoint? For sure. What I'm trying to say is that from a licensing point of view, just licensing of software within government alone, how much money is being repatriated? If the UK tried to build their own, do you know they tried to build their own COVID app and it cost them, I think, okay, these numbers will be wrong, but they're like directionally true. It cost them 70 million to build a COVID app that didn't work.

1:26:45I remember. And so they canned it.

1:26:47Mo Gawdat:I remember. They can't build fucking software. I'm asking a UK entrepreneur to wake up tomorrow and say, all right, you know what, between coffee and my cookie, I'm going to build a PowerPoint and go sell it. Yeah, they will. And they'll go to San Francisco where the money is and the talent. or they won't be able to compete. They'll get crushed tomorrow. So if they don't go where the talent and money is, I'm not saying that they all have to go to America, but I'm saying what they will do if they want to produce the best product is they'll make rational entrepreneurial decisions about where to sell it, where to raise money, where they're going to get the best talent.

1:27:24And I think if they don't make those competitively minded decisions, they're not going to make the better product. They're not going to get any users. users users will go where it's better and where it's cheaper they won't do it say oh i want to

1:27:38Mo Gawdat:use this because it's from cornwall yeah so i'm i'm with you right that this actually might be the big corporate thought think okay and i'm with you that of course the infrastructure here of building a startup is way more complex than it is in other places where startups succeed okay I'm saying if we continue on that trajectory, whether in the UK or in Germany or in Zanzibar, welcome to Africa. All of us, everyone but the two competitors, China and America, is going to be third world. So when you talk about job losses for individuals, that's one side. OK, but but nation positioning losses, which I think Europe has noticed recently is about to happen everywhere.

1:28:31Mo Gawdat:And why? Because you're saying, hey, you know what? Maybe we can't do it. Why can China do it? Why can Korea do it? Is not because they have different natural resources or not because they are, you know, in a place where it's warmer. It's because their regulations, their ambitions are to empower something different than debating about, you know, railway lines or... They have a couple of big advantages that I was reading about. One of them is they have way cheaper energy, which means that they're going to be able to pursue... Why, may I ask? Because they've invested in solar power, renewable energy, because they don't care about...

1:29:11Mo Gawdat:This is, by the way, I say that publicly. I say that the arms race of AI was won a long time ago. And then the other thing is, in terms of permitting, if you want to build a data center in the UK, listen, if you want to open a cafe in the UK, it's going to be war for you. If you want to do that in California, this is where everyone's left California. When I took this office in California recently, I was like, so how long is it going to take for me to renovate this? And the agent looked at me and was like, to renovate my own office, it's going to take me a year. And it's permitting to renovate my own office in California.

1:29:41So if you're competing with China, where President Xi just goes, Put that there and you've got seven days.

1:29:47Mo Gawdat:No, no, no, no. That's not only that. So I used to be one of the very few Google executives allowed into government meetings in China, simply because I'm from emerging markets. So I understand respect, basically. I would sit there, not as if I'm superior to them, but as if I'm really interested to learn from them. And genuinely, Stephen, when I would sit in those meetings, all in Chinese, they would show slides that have competitive market share. So they'd say, you know, it's not like China is this, America is this, Germany is this from market share point of view. It was China versus the world.

1:30:27Mo Gawdat:Right. And when they would decide to go for something, 5G, you know, internet of things, all of that stuff, they would aim for 98 % market share. Yeah. Right. And, and they get there. I I mean, look at how they did electric cars. And my question is very simple. We've spoken so much about AI. My question is, are the people of the West going to wait? So this is an interesting conundrum, because it sounds to me like you're saying on one end, if we don't join this AI race, then we're a third world country. But on the other end, if we continue this sort of thoughtless race towards AGI, there's going to be catastrophe at some point.

1:31:11Mo Gawdat:Yes, and the answer is somewhere in the middle where basically you join the AI race for the good of your community. Okay, so there is resignation on one side is like, I'm not going to play this game at all. There is offense on the other side where I'm playing this game to destroy everyone else. And there is a balance in the middle where we say we're going to build an ethical form of AI that's going to help our communities. we're gonna use this ultimate gift this ultimate superpower right superman landed on the planet raise it to help your community is that wishful thinking to some degree when you when you think about the nature of sort of competition i don't know how how to tell you otherwise i genuinely believe most i mean here i genuinely believe it's going to be very difficult to make that change Okay.

1:32:01Mo Gawdat:I genuinely believe that it's going to be that when the challenges of an AI dystopia hits us, we're not going to be ready. But I can't stop talking about it, Stephen. Do you understand where I stand with this? I just am hoping and I tried so hard. I spoke to the leadership. then I spoke like one of the things that my Atlantic productions who helped me with the film helped you know did for me which I have to say completely I am very appreciative of this is you know through our conversations our throughout the last few years that I tended to at a point in time lose hope in the leadership and basically try to influence the public for ethical AI.

1:32:46Mo Gawdat:Okay. And my conversation was that the leadership at the time was the technical leadership and that everyone was so caught up in the arms race that I wanted to teach the public to help us build ethical AI. And I continue to focus on the public, every one of us, but suddenly Atlantic goes, no, no, hold on. We should probably get you to meet the political leaders everywhere in the world and hopefully give them a message that says, hey, you know what? You may actually make a difference if you prioritize AI differently, right? Do I believe this will happen? Sadly, no. But does that mean I should stop trying?

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1:33:58I reached out to them. I became a co-owner in the company. I became an investor in the company. And so it's with great pride that I can tell you that this exists. If you haven't tried these shots, go to ketone.com slash Stephen for 30 % off your subscription order. and you'll also get a free gift with your second shipment. I still buy my ketone shots predominantly online, but thankfully I can now grab them at Target whenever I drive past them here in the United States as well, because we're now stocked in Target, where your first shot is completely free. I've done almost 700 interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world.

1:34:30And one of the things you learn, which is unexpected, is that vulnerability is the doorway to connection. And after sitting here for two, three hours with a guest, I feel a deep sense of connection to them. And as they leave, what I get them to do is to write a question in the diary of a CEO. We've taken all of the questions from the diary of a CEO. We have put the question here on this card with the name of the person that wrote it. So you can sit at home as I do with my fiance and my colleagues at work and other people in my life. Whenever we get a minute, we play the diary of a CEO conversation cards.

1:35:04And it is incredible what happens. These are great if you're in a romantic relationship and you want to connect your partner more. These are also great if you're in a team and you want to bond your team together. And I have to say they're also great for families that want to learn more about each other and that need a good excuse to spend some time in a digital world, in the analog environment, connecting human to human. It is remarkable what the right question at the right time can do. Go to thediary.com and you can get these conversation cards right now. when i have these conversations about ai what i'm trying to do all the time is to pass out what is like wishful thinking and then what is reality and like to understand reality you have to understand competition you have to understand human emotion you have to understand incentive structures and so you think about something like the united states at the moment where you've got donald trump whose sort of primary driving incentive is gdp growth economy growth does that stock market go up beat china so if you all agree that that's like his like the core of his incentive structure then you've got president chi over here whose probably is incentive structures probably control or independence um defense so that you know they need to make sure they they do well on the weapon side when you look and then you've got these like other nations like the uk and europe and these other places who are kind of it seems like we're a bit resigned to the fact that we're not going to participate in the underlying tech underlying models building because we just don't have it together we don't have the energy yeah and you go in such a world you go ethical ai who's gonna who's gonna prioritize ethical ai i mean anybody that does is is might fall behind theoretically is that um so i wonder where the fault in the thinking is here like what how do we get to a point of ethical ai when the incentive structures are so clearly highly competitive and arguably a little bit short term in their thinking.

1:36:59Mo Gawdat:Yeah. So what are you saying? We lie down and wait? No, I just don't know. I just don't have an answer, honestly. That's why we keep talking about it. Yeah. And that's why I keep spending 14 hours a day trying to tell the world because some genius somewhere is going to find an answer. But the way it's going... Right now, I guess what we're pursuing is we're hoping that ChatGPT and Anthropic and Grok, and we're hoping that they just build ethical models. And we're hoping that social pressure forces them into making good decisions. Correct. We need to be able to vote with our usage, right? So I think one of the biggest movements in AI since we started was the idea that so many people switched away from chat GPT when they approved that their model can target people, right?

1:37:44Mo Gawdat:So many people I know at least said - Target people? When Anthropic refused to - Do you think people switched? I think many have. I think ones that are aware did. Right. And I think they did because the cost of switching is really, I mean, honestly, anthropic is better if you think about it. Yeah, I think it's better. Yeah. But the idea is if people don't switch for those ethical reasons. So, you know, every one of my books has this dedication at the beginning. It used to be the gravity of the battle means nothing to those at peace when I wrote In Memory of Ali at the beginning. My next book, alive.

1:38:21Mo Gawdat:Do you remember a song called the, well, they were called the Manic Street Preachers? Yeah. If you tolerate this, then your children will be next. I genuinely believe that what the world needs to wake up to is if you tolerate this, then your children will be next. If you continue to resign, if you continue to say, I'm not going to try, this world is going to change in a way that is completely not in your favor. Try what? Try to stand up and say something needs to change. Okay. We can say something needs to change, but we can't say what that thing is. What needs to change is governments need to serve their people, not their interests, and corporates need to work for the benefit of their societies before their shareholders.

1:39:13Mo Gawdat:or something. This run that we had with capitalism so far has benefited the world tremendously. Whose economy do you think is going to be in a better place for the middle class out of, say, the UK and the United States? The UK is gone. It's gone because, in part, because it didn't compete? Because you're an older bureaucracy that is burdened down by so much barriers in the process of building anything, right? Because the US economy in the past welcomed people like me to go and live in California and build amazing shit, right? That is no longer the case. So who is going to win? In my view, it's definitely China.

1:40:00Mo Gawdat:And by the way, you asked for the middle class. So China made decisions recently that forced businesses not to lay people off in replacement to be replacing them with AI would would would the West do that the capitalist West would never do that we don't know the answer I don't know the answer I'm responding to your yeah you can see the conundrum I find myself in which is a state like a country like the UK is in your words gone because it didn't compete it didn't allow people to be highly entrepreneurial. It didn't empower entrepreneurialism, innovation, ingenuity. In some way, it stood in their way.

1:40:41In some way. Now that could be incentives. It could be culture. It could be whatever. Yeah, I know where you're going with this. The US didn't. So they have an economy which is arguably more productive and future-proofed than ours. by way of that they are also more advanced in artificial intelligence and we are gone so the remedy for a country like us would be therefore to compete to compete let the reins off let entrepreneur ingenuity but then we're saying that's dangerous and your conundrum in that is that you're assuming that entrepreneurship by definition is malicious no i'm just i'm just You're damned if you do.

1:41:29Mo Gawdat:But you're not damned if you build things for the people, not for the capitalist. This is an ideological debate. I pray and hope that that is plausible. But I'm worried that in a competitive market, whoever's optimizing for, I don't know, you can name it, retention. If we built two AIs, right, I'm going to call them the mogul.ai and I'm going to call the other one evil AI. The evil AI, it's programmed. to retain you. It's sycophantic. It says what you need to hear. It's super smart. And because of that, even though it's not trading in your best interests, it's retaining you more. You're using it more often.

1:42:11It's programmed for that, kind of like the social networks are. They're all just trying to like dopamine your brain into oblivion. Then there's the MoAI. It tells you to log off, you've had enough. It thinks about your mental, your well-being. Because it's less retentive and less engaging. Theoretically, it might be less successful as a commercial product. Think about social networks, the ones that are least retentive, the ones that actually won't destroy your brain with dopamine, the ones that remove the retweet button, the ones that don't have slot machine-like videos, they don't survive.

1:42:42Mo Gawdat:I share this with you. And my point of view is that to summarize your challenge here, you're basically saying that it's easier to become successful if you don't follow ethical rules. I'm asking the question, if you build an AI that is just purely focused on ethical, would it be as engaging and have the same usage as one built with the reins off? No. It won't? Yeah, but that's the problem humanity needs to solve if we were to survive. Example, I worked in a company called Google that basically at a point in time decided that ads will be effective. The ad industry prior to Google was 50 % of your ad budget doesn't work.

1:43:29Mo Gawdat:We just don't know which 50%. Remember that? And Google came in and struggled from 1998 until 2004, when they started to turn plausible revenues as a result of saying, we're going to run a Dutch auction and we're going to give you pay per click and we're going you results for your ads okay they found a way for ethics to actually get your money to be effective rather than just take your money and say 50 doesn't work they found a way to make that their success criteria there must be a way for us i don't know what it is if i knew i would be building it instead of sitting with you right but there must be a way for us to marry the success of humanity with the success of the entrepreneur right and and that way is not found in the old ways of doing things i've got an idea maybe you know claude 4.8 came out yesterday which is one of the big ai models the new one and when they release the models they show these like graphs of the benchmarks what they mean by this is what it's capable of they show how it performed in maths in science in writing reasoning etc it is all marginal at this point but my idea is could there be an ethical benchmark that all these models have to pass before these large companies can legally deploy them and i was thinking about like again every idea has unintended consequences which i haven't thought through but would it be very interesting that when they release these models they also release the ethical benchmarks i we tried to get it to x we tried to get it to y we tried to get it to z and here's how it performed against the ethical benchmarks that gives some kind of standard for governments to say you're not allowed to release a new model unless it passes independent tested ethical benchmarks.

1:45:13Mo Gawdat:Beautiful. That would absolutely work. But notice, by the way, those are out there already. Okay. But in a very interesting way, you listen to Demis Hassabis and how much he invests heavily in building AlphaFold or building, you know, so many scientific applications of AI. And you go like, this guy cares about science. I can't prove that, right? But I, you know, I've met Demis a couple of times. I know genuinely that he is an ethical person. Right. But the typical person will probably say, but at least it seems that they're doing things for free to serve science. You look at, you know, at Anthropic and they refuse to use their model to allow the U.S.

1:46:00Mo Gawdat:government to target and to spy on people. And then you see OpenAI accepting a$500 million deal that absolutely does that. It is about time that every person in the world says, in that case, I am no longer going to use OpenAI until they show me another, you know, another evidence that they are actually ethical in their behavior. right and this is the decision that you and i can do right and people don't know do they but that's my task my task and yours is to keep telling them people please please understand that if you tolerate this then your children will be next please understand that if you don't start to take an ethical stand on your own future your future will be handed over to another oligarch just like your past was handed over to social media oligarchs one would say booing booing at the commencement speech is a good example of how public awareness can have a real impact on this trajectory but i still think at the end of the day if you think about things like smartphone usage in schools at the end of the day it does come down to government intervention and saying do you know what we're going to ban 14 year olds from scrolling tiktok and that's in part because people spoke louder and louder and louder they went on podcast Jonathan Haidt, who wrote the book about the anxious generation, started a conversation, and that conversation led to legislation.

1:47:28I still think it ends in like some kind of constraint legally.

1:47:32Mo Gawdat:I hope. Okay. But I will openly tell you most of the tech oligarchs are more powerful than your government. Is there any precedence in history where this kind of change happened without government intervention? French Revolution. So I was thinking about things like climate change, even you could say smoking. All these kinds of things have had to be like taxes and... Stephen, I'm with you. If governments intervene, we wouldn't have a problem. Governments won't intervene because governments are owned by the oligarchs. Right? So my question for everyone listening to us is, are you going to intervene?

1:48:13Not cancel your check to put you?

1:48:14Mo Gawdat:If that's what you can do, it's fine. If not, then go ahead and start a startup that does something. If that's not within your capability, then send a message to your congressman. If that's not within your capability, then say something ethical online so that the world understands a position that needs to be opening the eyes. If that doesn't work for you, at least don't engage in stuff that is negative that you don't know enough about. There are so many little actions. If humanity starts to move in the direction of one saying ethics matter, not just profit. OK, and two saying I'm not going to participate in something that's unethical just because I believe I want to, you know, I feel like it right now.

1:48:55Mo Gawdat:OK, if I tell you the number of things I took out of my life just to try and affect a tiny bit of change of revenues that go to bullets, if I tell you the number of things. I think there's two central concerns I've always had which is I do feel that there's going to be significant job disruption and I don't think society's prepared for it yet and I don't know what that preparation looks like but I think we should start thinking about it um I share this with you I you know I genuinely believe that if we continue on where we are there's no hope in the trajectory of where humanity has become so distracted so resigned to inaction so so disconnected from their own rights of freedom of expression and engagement and so on, I think we have no hope.

1:49:46Mo Gawdat:Do we want to stay there? That's a question that I'm asking our listeners. And I'm not saying be violent or get up or, you know, be angry or whatever. I'm just saying, take one little action. Ask yourself, please write it in the comments. One little action. One little action that you're going to do today that's going to make the world a little better tomorrow. And don't give up on humanity, Stephen. I'm not saying you do, but I'm saying we are going through such a difficult time in humanity's history that for the very first time ever, we have to do something about it. I don't want my daughter to be at the receiving end of what happened to my son.

1:50:26Mo Gawdat:I genuinely, I lost Aliyah. I don't want to lose Ayah. And the world we're building is going to be very difficult for us even. And I cannot go to sleep at night without trying something every day. And I genuinely don't understand how humanity is not as missing that point. Mainly, I think, because they're uninformed. Now we're informing them. Okay. The only thing that will save humanity going forward is that this superpower called intelligence is used for ethical reasons is that the corruption that's leading us to where we are today stops you've got more envelopes there what's your next envelope the third one number two was job losses number three was labor you know basically same thing robots will replace manual labor by 20 we'll start to replace manual labor okay yeah so uh you know you will you will have more and more manual jobs given to robots.

1:51:21Mo Gawdat:What's this one? Oh, this is absolutely, do you think otherwise? The world's first trillionaire before? Oh, yeah, probably well before then. Well before 2030. I think Elon's about to IPO SpaceX, which is likely to make him a trillionaire. Yeah, I think the concentration of power that comes with that is quite drastic when you really think about it. And that's 2030 is just a few years away. I think the team wrote this wrong. Artificial super intelligence will arrive in 2032 to 2035. I think artificial super intelligence will arrive the minute AGI happens. So it doesn't really matter if AI is a billion times smarter than you or just twice as smart as you.

1:52:07Mo Gawdat:Once we cross beyond AGI, ASI is just very, very soon. And yeah, I think we'll overcome that when we get to the fourth inevitable, when AI is in charge of everything. I genuinely believe that we will end up in a utopia of abundance. I genuinely believe that, again, physics, mathematics, and biology will tell you that super intelligence is benign and that we will eventually end up in a good place not because humanity has done much to get us there not because our leaders have suddenly turned ethical but because our unethical leaders have gone out of the equation and were replaced with a super efficient minimum energy principle that doesn't see value in anything that's destructive so the future is going to be great those who make it to 2038 will enjoy it yeah those who make it sure i mean world war ii didn't destroy the world but ask those who went through it it's just an interesting idea that actually it's just you're forecasting basically like a a decade of turmoil of dystopia of absolute dystopia when you say absolute dystopia just so I'm clear in my mind, the absolute dystopia you're forecasting over a decade is about war.

1:53:31It's about -

1:53:33Mo Gawdat:War, economics, jobs. Economics, it's about jobs. It's also about surveillance and control. It's also about digital currencies. It's also about human connection. It's also about concentration of power. It's a magnification of everything we've built so far. And just to, again, arm people with some tools to survive that dystopia for a decade. you know we talked a little bit about focusing on human jobs the more human jobs learn ai so so ai is not the enemy okay uh by definition the better you are at using an ai to to do your job yeah the more likely you are to be successful right now number two is prepare for a hybrid world where ai and humans work together how do you prepare you basically understand agents and how agents work you want you understand how a hyper uh efficient approach to things may not require you to be uh you know very long meetings and very long so there is if you lived in california you would know that our you know the way we ran businesses was a lot more efficient we sometimes had a seven minute meeting uh right so so the you know the habits of of an ai are much more efficient than the habits of humans.

1:54:52So learn AI again?

1:54:53Mo Gawdat:Learn how to interact with AI, welcome AI into your hybrid world of work. I think you need to, of course, double down on human skills. I think that's a must to succeed in this world. I think we need to, one of my most interesting views on the near future is how AI is going to be used to disrupt, not disrupt, blur facts and how we need to become much more interested in debugging what we're told. Using AI, by the way. Part of that, I have to say, is you have to learn to use AI, again, not as a lazy person. So don't have them do things for you. Have them make you smarter. So instead of trying to get the same task done with one prompt, try to get a much more interesting and demanding and intelligent task done with more work.

1:55:53So I've got two things so far, which is basically like lean into AI.

1:55:57Mo Gawdat:And the second one is like lean into human connection and lean into the truth. Don't be fooled by the hype. You know, try to be more informed, I think. And then finally, ethics, if you want to. I know it sounds, the world we live in sounds as if the only way to win is to compete in capitalism. That's not the world I lived in. The world I lived in, especially in my Google years, was solve a major problem. And when you do, you'll end up making a lot of money. Are you optimistic? I am optimistic about the future. I'm very optimistic about the future. I'm not optimistic about the present. You're not optimistic about the next decade?

1:56:47Mo Gawdat:Yeah, I'm not optimistic about the next year, to be honest. The next year? For sure. Why the next year? Oh, come on, Stephen. You don't want me to say it out loud? We're ruled by maniacs. Decisions are being made for the absolute wrong reasons.

1:57:08Very interesting time. Very interesting time we find ourselves in.

1:57:12Mo Gawdat:Honestly, if you're a video gamer, this is the best part of the game. It is a very, very, very, very, what's the word? It's the ultimate matrix of complexity that I have ever encountered in my life. Yeah, that's an apt description of how it feels. Very complex. Things are moving very quickly. And moving very quickly. So from one side, you really need a lot of brain resources to crunch all that's happening, but you wake up tomorrow and it's changed. Well, the first time we spoke, we spoke about happiness. After this conversation, Stephen? I was just wondering, you know, you wrote a book about happiness.

1:57:54Mo Gawdat:I wrote many books about happiness. But I mean, the Soul for Happy is the book that I'm referring to. Here it is. Yeah. Engineering Your Path to Joy. What a fantastic book. I quote this book all the time, all around the world. And I'm wondering if any of the principles that you wrote in this book about how to live a happy life are more important now in the world that we live in than maybe when you wrote this book. Oh, for sure. I mean, honestly, if I wasn't living by this, I would have left this world a long time ago and went to an island somewhere. You see, the interesting side of happiness is that it's not dopamine driven.

1:58:32Mo Gawdat:It's serotonin driven, right? So my definition of happiness is I'm okay with this world as it is. I can affect it. I can change it. I can engage with it. I can try to make it better. I don't have to accept it, but I'm okay with it. My starting point is a bit stoic, if you want. My starting point is I accept this. This is my reality. And now I can start the work. This is very different than anyone that basically looks at the world and says, oh, this is a horrible world. I don't want to be part of it. I don't want to engage with it and so on and so forth. And I genuinely have never been calmer about that chaos.

1:59:16Mo Gawdat:It's quite interesting. You know, my wonderful ex actually really, really helped me with that. there was a point in time where we were having dinner and I poured out crying from the sense of responsibility I had for the world. And she looked at me so calmly, so gently and said, hold on, you know, you, I see that you're trying, but you can't actually believe that you're responsible for this. And I think that completely flipped my mind because in a very interesting way, I was thinking that all that went wrong in technology is because of me. right? Why? Because I contributed to building this because, I mean, when Jeffrey Hinton, one of my favorite moments when we were filming Chasing Utopia is that Jeffrey is very big for all of us.

2:00:06Mo Gawdat:We really think the world of him. And I was telling him just as a sort of like an older mentor, if you want, I was like, Jeffrey, do you regret doing this? You know, I genuinely believed when we were building those things that we were going to make the world better. AI. Yeah. And he said, well, yeah, I too was naive. I thought that we, I didn't think, he said, I didn't think we will get there so quickly before we figured out the alignment problem, right? The alignment problem. That AI has our best interest in mind. And I think all of us were faced with that. All of us were faced with that idea of we're building the best thing ever for humanity.

2:00:50Mo Gawdat:And then suddenly you realize, oh my God, in the wrong hands, it's the worst thing ever for humanity. And I have to say, I came to terms with this 2024, end of 24, that yes, I can try, but I accept that the world is what it is. And from that point of calm and stoicism, if you want, I think I can have a much bigger impact on the world. We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next question left for you is what's the legacy you want to leave nothing at all i've been asked this question i get asked it all the time so i don't know why so many people are asking am i going to go read anytime soon i don't know why so many people are asking me that question you see legacy is a is a i mean why what would i care if i have a legacy if i'm dead like why that does that even make any difference here's an interesting thought for everyone if if karma is real and i genuinely believe it is and if we're not just physical beings that were physical and spiritual then i'd rather keep all of my karma for my spiritual side what does that mean i don't want anyone to remember anything i ever did yeah i just want to leave a positive impact on the world and take all of that as karma for my next journey.

2:02:16Mo, thank you.

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