We are back.
Says Who? is the new series, and there was never a question about who should open it. Mo Gawdat was the very first guest on Getting There, so it only felt right that he is the first guest of this chapter too.
Mo was chief business officer of Google X until he resigned in 2017, and he has spent the years since trying to convince heads of state, prime ministers and CEOs that AI needs to be built ethically. He says every one of them nodded and then did nothing, and that by 2024 he had to admit he was doing nothing either, he was only talking, so he built an AI of his own and gave it the mission of helping people find and nurture true love.
In this conversation with Brogan Garritt-Smith he makes his case: that AI will make most people dumber and a few people geniuses, and the difference is whether you debate the answer or ask it for the football scores; that he is borrowing 100 IQ points from his own AIs; that we are already living in the dystopia and he counts 10 to 12 years to recover from it; that the problem was never the machine but a world which decided that anything legal does not have to be ethical, so you fix yourself first and AI will magnify what is fixed. He says direct human connection is what we are built for and the internet is depriving us of it, that it sets our expectations from other people's pretending, and that after promising screens would give us more friends we produced the ultimate loneliness pandemic and are now being sold a non-human companion to cure it.
We have been told AI will make us more intelligent.
Says Who?
He explains:
Why he says AI will make most of us dumber, and what the few are doing differently
Why he says we are already in the dystopia, and how long he thinks it takes to recover