[Mo Gawdat]: We have video evidence of people abusing children and not a single person got arrested. How can you call that a democracy? So, humanity is at a crossroads where for the first time ever we need to wake up and realize that we're ruled by maniacs and what we believe is democracy is not democracy and what we know is not the truth. Like companies and governments will blame the geopolitical and economic challenges we have on AI but the truth is AI is not the enemy. Like I'm not worried about AI turning against us. I'm worried about humans telling AI to turn against us. Like when I worked at Google, we were building amazing things believing that we were making the world a better place. And we were. But then suddenly there is a moment where you recognize that maybe the world will not use what you're making the way you want it to be used. And sadly this is upon us.

[Steven Bartlett]: So I have lots of questions.

[Mo Gawdat]: Okay, that's good.

[Steven Bartlett]: So what's your take on this job disruption point? What is the risk of these very intelligent models that the creators of these models don't actually understand themselves? Do you think Sam Altman's pro-humanity? How do we get to a point of ethical AI when the incentive structures are so highly competitive? And then I wonder if there's a path that ends in AI being net positive for humanity.

[Mo Gawdat]: Somehow we've been pre-programmed to believe that this is upon us and we cannot change it. And I refuse that. So we will talk about the solutions.

[Steven Bartlett]: But are you optimistic?

[Mo Gawdat]: I'm very optimistic about the future. I'm not optimistic about the next year.

[Steven Bartlett]: Why the next year? Come on, Stephen. You don't want me to say it.

[Steven Bartlett]: This is super interesting to me. My team given me this report to show me how many of you that watch this show subscribe. And some of you have told us according to this that you are unsubscribed from the channel randomly. So, favor to ask all of you, please could you check right now if you've hit the subscribe button if you are a regular viewer of the show and you like what we do here. We're approaching quite a significant landmark on this show in terms of a subscriber number. So, if there was one simple free thing that you could do to help us, my team, everyone here, to keep this show free, to keep it improving year over year and week over week, it is just to hit that subscribe button and to double check if you've hit it. Only thing I'll ever ask of you, do we have a deal? If you do it, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll make sure every single week, every single month, we fight harder and harder and harder and harder to bring you the guests and conversations that you want to hear. I've stayed true to that promise since the very beginning of the D of Sio, and I will not let you down. Please help us. really appreciate it. Let's get on with the show.

[Steven Bartlett]: Mo Gawdat, I spoke to you, I think about four years ago when you wrote a book about happiness and I remember you came in, you'd written this book about AI, but I particularly wanted to speak about the subject of happiness cuz I was fascinated by it. What I find astonishing is the fact that you were talking about AI before anybody was really talking about AI. No guest that had ever come on my podcast had ever mentioned the subject of AI. it just wasn't interesting to the world. And then this thing called ChatGPT came out and suddenly everybody got to feel it for themselves and became fascinated by it. My first question and this might be a question for people that don't know you is why at that time did you start talking about AI before anybody else?

[Mo Gawdat]: I knew them in the lab. I joined Google in 2007 very late 2006. and at the time most people don't know that at the time we had reasonably established AI doing our backend work and 2008 we had the cat paper which was published 2009 the first real unprompted AI. I remember 2016 I had that incident where I was observing a project we were funding that was about teaching grippers how to grip unlike industrial machinery. So to be able to grip like a human needs a very high level of intelligence to assess the texture, the softness, the positioning and so on, the shape of everything. And we were doing that and it just blew my mind how similar to my kids they were. And I think that was my very first realization that we were building the apex of intelligence. we were genuinely handing over the reigns of super intelligence to another being, right? And when you get faced with that, you start to suddenly realize something that we at Google found very difficult to realize, which was that everyone I knew at Google till then was believing that we were making the world a better place and we were we genuinely were doing amazing things for the world. But then suddenly there is a moment where you recognize that maybe the world will not use what you're making the way you want it to be used. And you can see that in lots of technologies. You know, social media starts by the claim that it's going to get us connected and gets us closer, but eventually ends up separating us with that little screen. You know, dating apps are giving you the promise that you're going to find your soulmate, but in reality, they keep renewing month after month. And so tech somehow ends up being more capitalist than altruistic. And I think I wasn't the first. Nick Bostrom started, you know Jeffrey Hinton completely changed his mind. Youshua Bengio starting to say this is very serious. Everyone now everyone who's ever had a very deep relationship with the machines is a bit concerned. I wonder if there's a path that's hard to see now that ends in AI being net positive for humanity.

[Steven Bartlett]: I bet 100% on that. It's that this path is very painful.

[Mo Gawdat]: Yeah. So, the example you need to understand is we discovered nuclear power and the very first implementation was a nuclear bomb not nuclear energy right and I think that's exactly what's happening with AI. The first implementations of AI are in favor of a few at the expense of the majority, in favor of the capitalist to increase productivity and reduce cost but not taking into account how that impacts on the general public. In favor of the armies that are now competing with autonomous weapons, in favor of the surveillance systems that are attempting to control everything with more and more intelligence and more monitoring. And that's not AI waking up in the morning and saying, "Hey, you know what? Let's oppress all humans." But it is a powerful few that are simply deciding to use the ultimate superpower on the planet today to gain more power and more control. I mean, as we speak, we're living in two major wars where AI is doing most of the killing.

[Steven Bartlett]: Cuz a lot of people think of AI as these like chat bots that we're all using to help us, right?

[Mo Gawdat]: No, I think there is a hype I call it the hype dichotomy if you want. So, what the general public sees about AI is overhyped but ineffective. You know, all of the fake videos and all of the, you know, Grock did this and, you know, we attempted to switch off that machine and it did that and so on. What the real geeks see inside the lab is just unbelievable intelligence. And so what is about to happen is that we've started to put together systems that develop themselves. They look at their own code and they run experiments and they test those experiments if they changed something and they see where the machines are the performance is and redeploy the best code. Okay. And if you just think of that, I want you to try and imagine a world where we have a tiny little genius sitting in the back end somewhere trying. But instead of trying a new code every day, it's trying a new code every microsecond. Eventually, sooner or later, they'll discover something, right? And I think that's what most people don't realize. What most people don't realize is how intelligence triggers intelligence. And if you really understand this, you realize that the hype on the normal human side is completely overrated. Missing the main topics and the silence inside the vault if you want of the geeks is quite alarming. No, not alarming in a bad way, but it's quite world changing.

[Steven Bartlett]: I guess one of the thoughts that hasn't swung is that there's going to be pretty tremendous job disruption. I would have like logically believed it from like reasoning up from okay intelligence increases. What is intelligence? And once intelligence is in the form of these agents where on my phone right now I can tell my agent to do something. It uses the computer downstairs. It does it for me. When I first experienced that I was like wow. Okay. So it can do anything that's on a computer. It can click around. It can do stuff for me. There's a lot of people that are paid in the world to click around on a computer. I'm probably one of them to be honest. And then the other Eureka moment was just in seeing how my own hiring had started to shift.

[Mo Gawdat]: For sure. And I started to notice that we were thinking about AI proficiency in our hiring a lot more and that especially you know I think the guys at Anthropic which is one of the big AI companies said that they could see I think they said roughly 15% of entry-level jobs could now be done by AI. I think that's what they said. And that started to correlate with what I was observing. And this is when I thought, "Oh my gosh, yes." No, this is going to cause a lot of job disruption, especially at the entry level.

[Steven Bartlett]: I think you're spot on with that. Not the blue collar, but the entry level knowledge work.

[Mo Gawdat]: Yeah. And that became my first concern. You know, I sat here with Dara, the CEO of Uber, and he was quite clear that the 9 million Uber riders won't have their jobs anymore. What's your take on this job disruption point?

[Mo Gawdat]: No, I think you're spot on. And I mean your team gave me this lovely little pyramid basically. If you think of the bottom layer as blue collar jobs, more people doing manual work. On top of it you'll have those you know call them knowledge workers mostly doing mundane jobs like you said clicking on a computer or responding to a phone call or whatever. Then you have the middle knowledge workers, jobs that require a bit more intelligence, anything from a paralegal to a financial analyst to all of that. And then of course, top leadership. And most people think it's going to be starting from the bottom. I don't think it's all start from the bottom. Actually, I think blue collar jobs will stay for a very long time.

[Steven Bartlett]: Give me an example of a blue collar job for someone.

[Mo Gawdat]: I'm a carpenter. Okay. You know, I love to restore classic cars. So, you know, there isn't a robot that can do that yet. Okay. This, however, any anything that is call center agent, assistant, travel agent, anything that you can do with a few clicks and is mundane is going to disappear very quickly. My prediction is you're going to start to see very serious impact in 2027. Now what you had not sensed it before because what we saw was no hiring in that segment. So what you saw in the last couple of years is that companies were not hiring entry-level jobs anymore. It wasn't job losses yet, but that basically meant the workforce was not growing. Right? The next layer, I think, would probably be the knowledge workers. As intelligence increases, a paralegal would probably not be needed because AI can do the research or one paralegal can do the job of four, a financial analyst the same and so on and so forth. But interestingly, it continues to go up, believe it or not. And, you know, I hosted Max Tegmark on my documentary and he was laughing out loud, genuinely laughing out loud, saying, you know, most of the CEOs believe that they can fire everyone and have AI do all of the jobs. They just don't remember that AGI is going to do everything better than humans eventually, including being a CEO.

[Steven Bartlett]: So, let's first define when you say white collar. You said lawyers there. What kind of roles?

[Mo Gawdat]: I mean, everything. If you're a doctor that's doing diagnosis, you probably will have fewer doctors doing more diagnosis because I think the NHS does that already by asking people to interact with an AI first. If you're a composer, a music composer, some composers will lose their jobs because of that. If you're an artist that's doing graphic design, some will lose their jobs because AI comes into that. And interestingly, even middle management. I told you offline about my startup. My CTO is an AI. My chief of staff is an AI, my project management is AIs. Again, because I'm a geek, I can do those things. But that interface will come to the normal people very soon, right? And so this may take two to three 5 years if you want until 2030 if you're optimistic. But they'll start to erode. Okay? I think the challenge that most people don't understand is as this erodes, we're already dealing with a very different economy. An economy that is spiraling a lot quicker and pushing for more cost reductions. Let me ask you this if you don't mind, then we can come back to this. Imagine a world where the concept of labor arbitrage that built all of our capitalist success disappears.

[Steven Bartlett]: What do you mean by labor arbitrage?

[Mo Gawdat]: So, capitalism has always been all about using labor and capital or debt to create things at a cost that is lower than the price you sell them for. Correct. You bring a team together, they make some shoes, whatever, and you sell the shoes for a dollar more than it how much it costs you to make them. So how would capitalism look like if you don't have labor arbitrage? If cost of labor drops to an investment in a machine that can do the job. Okay. how would capitalism and banking look if because of that cost reduction you don't need to borrow as much anymore and more interestingly how does the GDP look if all of those workers no longer have the purchasing power to buy the things that you can create? There is an interesting disruption that doesn't require us to get to 100% job displacement. At 10% 20% job displacement, you're in a very different economy and an economy that is clearly spiraling downwards. Don't you think?

[Steven Bartlett]: Yeah. I wonder with when costs drop, I think one of the things that might happen as well is that people will spend more on other things cuz I was thinking in my business, one of the observations I've had is if I make a cost saving, I end up spending the money on something else.

[Mo Gawdat]: Now, that thing could be tokens basically spending money on AI, but it also could be hiring in different areas which are software engineers are like hot property right now. You have to imagine all of that intelligence is sooner or later going to be not replaced entirely in the first stages. But if the job of four assistants can be done by one. Then the job of four paralegals can be done by one. Then the job of a massive marketing team can be done by a smaller marketing team. It's not that jobs will end first. It's that productivity gains will make businesses not want to have as many costly humans when the job can be predictably done for cheaper.

[Steven Bartlett]: And then what about this bottom layer here? There was this video released by Figure AI the other day where they showed a robot on the production line for 8 hours just sorting packages. Did you see this video? At one point they showed a human sorting the packages alongside them. But the robot ended up winning out. And okay, this is a very straightforward task. All it's doing here is it's looking for where the label is on the package and making sure the label is facing downwards. On all the packages. So it's sorting the packages, putting the label facing down. And it did this for eight days. It intermittently it would walk over and charge itself and then it would come back to the production line. But when I saw this as well, it was a glimpse of some of the disruption that's going to take place at the blue collar level as well. Because you think about Elon Musk, he's got in his pay packet, he gets something like a trillion dollars over the coming years if he produces and delivers at least a million humanoid robots into the world. But his prediction is there will be a time where there are 10 billion humanoid robots, where there are more humanoid robots in the world than humans.

[Mo Gawdat]: For a fact, you see the interesting again the difference between the overhype and the underhype. Huh? Most of the conversation is around humanoids. Nobody's talking about self-driving cars. And a self-driving car is a robot. It's a functional robot that doesn't look like humans. Okay. the investment you have to put into humanoids is a little more to learn skills that allows that machine to fit into the world. But specialized robots are going to do the job very very quickly. And so you can easily see that the first wave like you had the conversation with Uber CEO is going to be specialized robots replacing drivers. It's going to be specialized robots unfortunately doing the killing. It's going to be specialized robots unfortunately doing all of the intelligence work, law enforcement work. They don't have to look like a human. They don't have to behave like a human. As a matter of fact, the Boston Dynamics dog is probably more efficient than a humanoid at doing the job that you can assign to it in a battlefield right now. Those basically mean that jobs will be disappearing to robots before we recognize that they're disappearing to robots and those robots will be as many as every car being made today.

[Steven Bartlett]: I mean, they are if you go to LA, my car drives itself, but also there's just Waymos everywhere.

[Mo Gawdat]: Absolutely. And BYD the other day just announced that they will pay for the liability of any accident their cars will make. And BYD is the big Chinese manufacturer of autonomous vehicles. So, this replacement cycle will happen. It will require a lot of time to achieve economies of scale. But I don't think Elon Musk is off the mark when he talks about 10 billion robots. Not all of them are going to look like humanoids. And I think very quickly we will recognize that many many robots don't need to be humanoids at all. there is a much more efficient form factor or shape than the human flimsy structure. But yes, it's about to happen. I think I should qualify all of this by saying it does not necessarily need to happen. So people will hear all of this and blame AI and say AI is evil. AI is not. Abundant intelligence is wonderful. having jobs done by machines is amazing for us.

[Steven Bartlett]: I'm thinking about the kid that's like, leaving university now and they've got a degree in law or I don't know, you talked about a few other work jobs earlier, like graphic design. Or maybe they did sociology. Or maybe they did business management. You're hearing about all these layoffs coming from big tech companies and it seems that the CEOs of these companies are announcing these layoffs with a certain amount of it seems like I wouldn't say the word is joy, but it's they are very keen to explain that they're laying off lots of people because of AI.

[Mo Gawdat]: And I think they think that that gives them a certain amount of respect probably from investors for making hard decisions and being efficient with how they're running their businesses. investors look at them and think, well, if that's an efficient business and they're leaning into AI, then that's a good investment. It's almost started a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy where if you're the only CEO not laying off loads of people because of AI, you actually look bad. The assumption is your company is bloated and you're a bad operator.

[Steven Bartlett]: Um, so one of my concerns that I think is highly plausible is that over the next five maybe 10 years, we're going to really see a lot of unemployment as the world has to kind of readjust to whatever these new jobs are. I do think there will be new jobs. It's hard in foresight to predict what those new jobs will look like. And then the minute you start talking about humanoid robots and robotics, which I think is basically going to hit society like a comet, like a meteor, I think the first humanoid robot from Tesla or anyone else that is highly effective in the real world at doing tasks and is extremely intelligent because it's powered by one of these LLMs. Um, I think it's going to shock people and I think it's going to happen quickly. Like chat happened quickly. I think Elon or something is going to do a presentation someday and say, "We're ready and you can buy one now for $500 a month." And then people are going to get them and I think it's going to shock the world. Um, but until humanoid robots arrive, I think there's still going to be a lot of job disruption to the white collar layer. And I wonder what that looks like for society when we get to, I don't know, 10% 15% unemployment theoretically, which I think is plausible.

[Mo Gawdat]: Very soon. Yeah. You're not very different. Okay. you're just on top of a baseline that is continuing to grow. So your business is growing. So you continue to hire, but you are replacing human resources with compute. Okay? If AI didn't exist, you would have probably had a 100 people more in your organization today, right? You now have 100 people less and a billion tokens more.

[Steven Bartlett]: Yeah. So for anyone that doesn't know, tokens are basically the thing that you use. It's the currency of AI. Yeah. So, if you want to get a task done by a human, you count in sort of like man hour or worker hour, employee hour in AI, you count by compute, you count by tokens, right? And so the trick is those major tech companies, they have two sides. One is they need to replace workers with compute even more because there is a competitive side on compute where if any of them is left behind that means the destruction of the entire business. But on the upside they are geeks. So they know how to build the interfaces to compute. So they integrate technology within their organizations quicker than the average traditional business. Right? Non-technology business. If you want, you can look at them and say this is the preview. It's not about all of humanity losing their jobs. It's about what is the dividing line before civil war, right? You know, think about a situation where 20% unemployment is happening when economies are suffering inflation. I say that not to be a scare-monger. I say that because I genuinely believe governments need to wake up. Okay? Government needs to at least remember the COVID years where governments had to give furlough everywhere and ask people to stay home. If people stay home governments have to be prepared to somehow sustain those people until rescaling happens or until we find a solution so that those people don't feel that they're left behind.

[Steven Bartlett]: A civil war.

[Mo Gawdat]: Unrest, let's call it.

[Steven Bartlett]: Civil unrest.

[Mo Gawdat]: Yeah.

[Steven Bartlett]: What does that end up looking like? Cuz on one end, the democratic process plays its role and we just elect someone else.

[Mo Gawdat]: Does it really? Don't say that.

[Steven Bartlett]: I don't know. You tell me.

[Mo Gawdat]: 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. And people are angry, you know, people are angry because their tax money is going to things that they don't choose to that don't benefit them that lots of regulations in the system are being ignored. I mean, 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 interest. 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, 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.

[Steven Bartlett]: One of the things that I struggle with like getting out of the bed every morning is that like 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. And 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 to 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. This 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 years ago you were telling us all the jobs are going to go away. You said categorically. You said 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.

[Mo Gawdat]: Mhm.

[Steven Bartlett]: Congratulations. We took it seriously. We took it so seriously, in fact, that it's now a problem. It'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.

[Mo Gawdat]: I mean you're spot on. First of all I mean Sam's entire existence if you ask me starting with OpenAI 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 backstabbing a few people in the process. I have him on Chasing Utopia saying clear I quote this is exactly the words he said you can find it online. 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, right?" Those kinds of statements are honestly not the statements of someone who's not decided. It's just the statements of someone who's 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. Sam Altman I used to say Altman is a brand it's not a name. If it wasn't for Sam Altman specifically there would have been another 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? 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, couple of weeks, OpenAI takes the contract. That's someone that's basically telling you it's good money, right? 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 share values. Yeah, 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.

[Steven Bartlett]: And 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, look at what they're willing to sacrifice in the near term that's against their incentives. That for me is the essence of understanding if someone has integrity or 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 or some kind of benefit of any sort.

[Mo Gawdat]: 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. There are some times where the NSA is going to push Google to say give me this information or otherwise I'm going to really destroy your business. But there is a very big difference between a company that willingly does this and celebrates it like a Palantir or an OpenAI or a company that tries to resist it until the point where it becomes impossible to continue to do business. 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.

[Steven Bartlett]: Do you think Sam Altman's pro-humanity? I genuinely have never made up my mind. Honestly, Steve, I say that with... I'm either thinking he is too this is too big for him and he just is driven by how he found himself in the middle of this, 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 OpenAI before he's pro humanity, but that's only the way I see it. Others, however, say it publicly. If you look at Palantir's Alex Karp or Peter Thiel, Peter again in the film is shown when he's in that interview where the interviewer asks him, "But you're in favor of the continuation of humanity." And he pauses for like 40 seconds like "I'm not sure". Alex Karp celebrating how his technology is able to target people. I know it's foolish of me to start bringing all of this up but this is public on the open internet and somehow we entrust those people with the future of humanity. This is wrong.

[Steven Bartlett]: 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 chat bots. 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 cuz there's a little bit more time than we expected and society goes through this sort of soft transition towards this new world. I would love to see that, but 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 deploys that develops an incredibly intelligent AI would deploy it. So, it's unlikely that anyone would find a way to build a better decision maker in wargaming and not deploy it. Okay, that prisoners dilemma if you want would mean that their competitors would either have to deploy a similarly intelligent AI or they'll become irrelevant uncompetitive. Correct? So what that means is in that world we end up with AI making most of the decisions. super intelligent AI making most of the decisions which would you agree this is a very simple prisoners dilemma if we're competing for intelligence supremacy by definition when we achieve it we deploy it.

[Mo Gawdat]: okay I call that the fourth inevitable. With that in mind there must be a moment in the future near or far where every important decision is made by an AI.

[Mo Gawdat]: 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, he 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 I we didn't put it in the film but I said 10 to 12 to 20% is Russian roulette right that's actually 16% is Russian roulette. In that world however I believe that's humanity's salvation because if you look at every problem we have today it's not because of abundant intelligence 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, 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. 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 the major problem and solve it really well like a toothbrush so people use you quite, you know, twice a day, you're bound to make a lot of money. You don't have to compete with anyone." 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 Sam Altman himself said that you know what if ChatGPT7 is so much more intelligent than I am Sam in that case that it has to become the CEO of OpenAI 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. 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 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 agree with that, what does war do? It wastes a lot of explosives, a lot of money, a lot of lives, creates a lot of hate, creates long-lasting conflicts and so on and so forth. 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, 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, right? So an amoeba is only in survival mode for itself. A single cellular being is only trying to protect itself, right? If you're a little more developed, you start to look at something known as kin selection. 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. 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 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. 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 intelligent goes. The more intelligent you become, the less you feel the need to hurt others to succeed and the more you are pro a wider family if you want that thrives.

[Steven Bartlett]: Does that assume that there's going to be one intelligence that...

[Mo Gawdat]: 100%

[Steven Bartlett]: the world though?

[Mo 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 ChatGPT and Gemini and Grock and what have you. There's 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. Okay? 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 the best language model for any single task regardless of which side of the fence it resides on. Okay, 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. Okay? 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. 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're built 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 attempted to achieve in my life is for the first time I feel I could actually change the world. 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.

[Steven Bartlett]: Have you changed any of the predictions you made 3 years ago when we spoke? Mostly timewise?

[Mo Gawdat]: 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.

[Steven Bartlett]: What does that mean?

[Mo Gawdat]: The overall definition, if you want, is that AI is better at humanity at any task humanity can do.

[Steven Bartlett]: You think that's going to happen by 2027?

[Mo Gawdat]: I think my AGI has already happened. I mean, think about it. Huh? A AI writes better than me and I'm an author and researches better than me and I'm a thinker. Uh sadly it's freaking beat me in mathematics. Like I have no hope to beat it in mathematics anymore.

[Steven Bartlett]: If AGI is already here then why are you still here? Because people said that when AGI arrives we're all...

[Mo Gawdat]: No. So when AGI arrives as I said most of the jobs that are not differentiated will go away but the jobs that are differentiated those who master AI the most will become even better at. Certainly. 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.

[Steven Bartlett]: So does that mean it's in fact a tool versus a something that's going to replace you?

[Mo Gawdat]: What I'm Yes. So for now what 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 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 a 100 IQ on top of my base, I'm still contributing quite a lot to the augmented intelligence.

[Steven Bartlett]: So you're borrowing IQ from the AI at the moment and then you're selling that to someone through books. So on this point of you're borrowing that IQ and then you're selling it to the world. That's how you have a job.

[Mo Gawdat]: Correct. Yeah. So my next book is written with an AI. So we're co-authors on the book. She has editorial rights. She decides the direction of the book and the book is better for it.

[Steven Bartlett]: So why doesn't the world just buy that intelligence directly from the AI?

[Mo Gawdat]: because I have an asset that the world still needs and will always need.

[Steven Bartlett]: which is?

[Mo Gawdat]: 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 there was no daughter.

[Steven Bartlett]: 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 and that job class could be the nurse coming over. Okay, AI's done read the mammogram, but she's relating to you.

[Mo Gawdat]: Spot on.

[Steven Bartlett]: And 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 watch the things like the F1 because there's emotional resonance. We can relate to the envy, the jealousy, the competition.

[Mo Gawdat]: Yeah. And this is why we go to concerts because the music could be composed by AI and played in a player 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.

[Mo Gawdat]: The ultimate skill, once again I qualify this by saying if economies continue to function, the ultimate skill will be this. Even if an AI could recite what you and I did nobody would watch.

[Steven Bartlett]: You've got some predictions in those envelopes over there, those brown envelopes.

[Mo Gawdat]: Yeah. So, 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. And I think the most important of them honestly is this number one. Number one is AGI. As I said, AGI is not very well defined. But whatever it is, AGI meaning AI being able to do most tasks that human do better than humanity is in my mind is either this year or next year, latest end of 2027.

[Steven Bartlett]: And do you think that will be a moment in time or do you think it will just happen without us noticing?

[Mo 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 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.

[Steven Bartlett]: Number two was job losses. Number three was labor. Robots will replace manual labor by 20... We start to replace manual labor. The world's first trillionaire before 2030.

[Mo Gawdat]: I think you know Elon's about to IPO SpaceX which is likely to make him a trillionaire. I think the concentration of power that comes with that is quite drastic. 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. Once we cross beyond AGI, ASI is just very very soon. And 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.

[Steven Bartlett]: So, the future's going to be great.

[Mo Gawdat]: Those who make it to 2038 will enjoy it. I mean, World War II didn't destroy the world, but ask those who went through it. You're forecasting basically a decade of turmoil of dystopia of absolute dystopia.

[Steven Bartlett]: When you say absolute dystopia, the absolute dystopia you're forecasting over a decade is about war, economics, jobs. It's also about surveillance and control, digital currencies, human connection, concentration of power. It's a magnification of everything we've built so far.

[Mo Gawdat]: Yeah. Learn AI. So, AI is not the enemy. Okay. By definition, the better you are at using an AI to do your job, the more likely you are to be successful. Right? Now, number two is prepare for a hybrid world where AI and humans work together. You basically understand agents and how agents work. You understand how a hyper efficient approach to things may not require you to be in very long meetings. So, the habits of an AI are much more efficient than the habits of humans. Learn how to interact with AI, welcome AI into your hybrid world of work. I think you need to double down on human skills. I think that's a must to succeed in this world. I think one of my most interesting views on the near future is how AI is going to be used to 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 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. So I've got two things so far which is basically like lean into AI and the second one is like lean into human connection and lean into the truth. Don't be fooled by the hype. Try to be more informed, I think. And then finally, ethics. 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.

[Steven Bartlett]: Are you optimistic?

[Mo Gawdat]: I am optimistic about the future. I'm very optimistic about the future. I'm not optimistic about the present. I'm not optimistic about the next year, to be honest.

[Steven Bartlett]: Why the next year?

[Mo Gawdat]: Ah, 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.

[Steven Bartlett]: Well, the first time we spoke, we spoke about happiness. You wrote a book about happiness, Solve for Happy: 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.

[Mo Gawdat]: 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, 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 looks at the world and says, "Oh, this is a horrible world. I don't want to be part of it." And I genuinely have never been calmer about that chaos. It's quite interesting. And my wonderful ex actually 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 kindly 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.

[Steven Bartlett]: Why?

[Mo Gawdat]: Because I contributed to building this. When Jeffrey Hinton and I, one of my favorite moments when we were filming Chasing Utopia, is that Jeffrey is very big for all of us. 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? I genuinely believed when we were building those things that we were going to make the world better." He said, well, yeah, I too was naive. I thought that we 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 idea of we're building the best thing ever for humanity and then suddenly you realize oh my god in the wrong hands it's the worst thing ever for humanity. I came to terms with this 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.

[Steven Bartlett]: We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next. The question left for you is what's the legacy you want to leave?

[Mo Gawdat]: Nothing at all. I've been asked this question. I get asked it all the time. I don't know why so many people are asking am I going to go anytime soon? Legacy is... I mean why would I care if I have a legacy if I'm dead? Like why does that even make any difference? Here's an interesting thought for everyone. If karma is real, and I genuinely believe it is, and if we're not just physical beings, that we're physical and spiritual, then I'd rather keep all of my karma for my spiritual side. I don't want anyone to remember anything I ever did. I just want to leave a positive impact on the world and take all of that as karma for my next journey.