Transcription
If anyone is watching that video that we're recording right now, it's because an AI recommended it to them. There's there's nothing science sci-fi about AI. I think that's one of the biggest myth in our world today. Don't shoot the messenger, but your life and mine will witness times where where there will be 20, 30, 50% unemployment in certain sectors, maybe even more.
This is the very first time in ever that the episode of history where humanity was the smartest being on the planet ends. The challenge that humanity faces today is not the the rise of AI. It's the rise of AI in an age where humanity is at its lowest morality.
Wake me up. Ah yes, I needed that. My name is Mo Gaudet. I am the former chief business officer of Google X and a five times bestselling author. I started coding when I was seven. Uh I uh coded compulsively until my 50s. When I graduated, I joined IBM and then I went to Microsoft. I spent 8 years at Microsoft and then I went to Google and spent 12 years at Google.
The first three dilemas I wrote in 2020 all all became true. One was that AI is inevitable. there will not be no way to stop it. Two is that AI will eventually become smarter than humans on everything. So every task we've assigned to them so far, they've become smarter. And and the third is that some things will go wrong and we've seen examples of them. We haven't seen the big failures yet, but likely something will go wrong.
The fourth inevitable is that because of the arms race we've created around artificial intelligence, anyone who is so hungry for power and and wealth that creates an intelligent AI is going to deploy it. You can't imagine that the US arsenal will have artificially intelligent driven wargaming and still asking humans to do it. They'll have to give the wargaming over to uh to AI. If they do, then any other nation on the planet will also have to either hand over to an AI or be irrelevant because that's the only way to win the arms race. When that happens, then all decisions will be uh made by machines and that to me is the utopia. But my prediction is that we will go through a dystopian near-term future led by the evil of humanity. We're going to go through wars that have autonomous weapons. We're going to go through redefinitions of economic markets that will shift wealth upwards and leave so many of us jobless. Uh we're going to go through oppressions of freedom, high surveillance uh societies. We're going to to go through an erasure of reality and and the ability to recognize what is true and what is fake, which will impact human connection in ways that we've never seen before. where, you know, I think we're going to get into a future where many people will prefer to date an AI than they would a human.
We've built an arms race of artificial intelligence where everyone's trying to beat everyone and then the leader the the so-called leader would I can envision in my lifetime and yours will tell an AI to go and kill a million people and the AI will go like that's that's really stupid. Like why why would you want to do that? Why do you want to lose all that money that you can help your country evolve with? Why do you want to lose those lives? Why do you want to lose all of those explosives and and metals that can be used for other things? Why would you want to create all of that residual hate and anger that will, you know, continue for years and generations to come? The AI will say, I'll just talk to the other AI in a microscond and solve it. It's as simple as that.
Don't shoot the messenger. Your life and mine will witness times where where there will be 20, 30, 50% unemployment in certain sectors, maybe even more. Most of us are going to witness something we've never seen before. The interesting thing is that this is not un unlike humanity's origin. Jobs are an invention that serve a capitalist system that has served humanity for a while and paint humanity for a while. And the question is, is the capitalist system going to survive artificial intelligence? Funny enough, the capitalists that are celebrating the productivity gains are not realizing that one, without consumption, there is no economy. So even if you can have all of the productivity gains in the world, by firing people consistently, nobody's able to buy what you're making. So we're going to have to find an economic model that works with that.
Wealth is going to have very little meaning for most of us in a few years time. The very base of capitalism, which is labor arbitrage, to hire you for a dollar and and then sell what you make for two, is going to disappear. So there is no arbitrage anymore because basically machines are building everything for no cost at all at the macro level. Think of the advantage that China had you know economically where they had cheaper labor. If that shifts into a world where labor is literally one capex where you buy a robot or a lease on that robot which now is down to $9,000 a pop. You know, it's now just a question of how clever that robot is, which is going to advance with time like the law of accelerating returns of of every technology. And then you're in a place where uh making things costs close to zero. Anyone with an understanding of supply and demand basically means that the price of things accordingly is going to drop to zero as well. So the entire capitalist model has to be rethought.
The change that is about to come is more than economic. It's ideological because even western societies believe that the only way to keep going is a UBI, universal basic income. And not out of the kindness of their hearts, but because without UBI, people will rise. And without UBI, economic purchasing power collapses. And so they're going to have to give people some kind of income to keep going. You know what that is? That's communism.
I believe that the west will completely struggle for the simple reason that our habits in the west are don't give people who are eaters that don't produce anything. China, I believe, will go the opposite way. China will go like okay, we've always had that idealistic approach in mind. So, we're probably going to give everyone enough to survive. Uh, but we'll replace them with robots and we'll ask them to do other things. And by the way, you know, everyone has to comply. So, you know, it feels a little more of a surveillance world with control and so on, but the Chinese people have always been okay with that. That's interesting. And then the middle would be something like my home country, you know, in Egypt where we've really never really subscribed to those very complex, you know, economic societies. Most of the economy was built on some people farming you know cucumbers and others um raising chickens and you know those classical economies of bartering and and you know self-sufficiency will probably do fine.
Their purpose was never to work. Honestly, this is the capitalist lie that they told me. Okay. That I was born to wake up every morning to work really hard for labor arbitrage so someone else makes the money or to be the one the capitalist that abuses everyone so that I make the money. I don't want to subscribe to either of those. I think humanity was built to live, to connect, to love, to to reflect, to research, to discuss philosophy, and we we've just completely forgotten that. It's a transition where eventually I think we're all going to be forced to go back there.
Our life as humans is entirely serotonin dependent where things are calm and quiet and peaceful and connected, oxytocin dependent, you know, where we actually have time for our families and kids and believe it. Everything that we do on daily basis has been sold to us by a propaganda machine. Uh, good news. The propaganda machine is going to have to change. Otherwise, people are going to continue to want what they have now. So, you know what will happen? Someday they'll wake up and say, "You're not supposed to work every day." And we will believe them and we will shift.
The whole idea is if we can actually live a life like nature provided a few thousand years ago, but safer and more consistent where you just wake up in the morning and you take your kids and you go forge for berries and and that's the activity for the day. And while you're at it, you talk to your AI and learn about the mysteries of the universe. And while you're at it, you under you understand the internal comp complexities of love and relationships. And you know, and it's wonderful. It's just a very complex transition. So, it's going to take a couple of generations, but just like generation Z today doesn't really want to work. Uh, you know, the following generations will go like, what was that ancient idea? What where did that come from?
We have to understand that we're now in such a pivotal shift in human history. The only times where humanity has made a big change to collaborate instead of compete was either mutually assured destruction or mutually assured prosperity. And and it's really stupid in my mind that we can't see that we are heading into a direction where the total abundance will lead to one of those. I believe that the easiest path and probably the most urgent request on the planet today is take a neutral nation. you know, someone that's not on the either on either side of China or, you know, or uh or the US and say, "Every scientist in the world is welcome. Come here. We will build AI for the benefit of humanity at large. Nothing is closed. Everything's open source. Everything is focused on the well-being of humanity and you know, basically change our world." Now, how uh how realistic is it in the in the light of the current value set of humanity? totally impossible. Sadly, we're going to have to hit one moment in history where something will go really bad and then people will get together and say, "Whoops." You know, we shouldn't have waited that long. Maybe now we should start to get together and work on it.
You cannot go to an engineering team and say, "We're going to regulate the design of a hammer so that it drives nails but never hits anyone on the head." But you can make it a legal liability to hit anyone on the head. And so accordingly the tool can evolve but then the crime can be limited.
>> Will the machine take my job in 5 years?
>> The machine will take your job in less than 5 years. Much less than 5 years. But believe it or not, that one side of your job that it will never take is this human connection.
I think most people don't really get what AI is. AI is not another piece of computer code. If you look back at traditional computing, it's a bit like if you give a child a puzzle, if the child solves the puzzle, that doesn't make them smart. It it makes them a very glorified slave if you want. true intelligence is to give the child the puzzle and tell them to try and and figure out over time how to solve this but also every other other puzzle uh just by figuring out the process of puzzle solving it and that's what we started to see with AI at probably say firmly as of the turn of the century and you have to imagine that this layer of intelligence is not just in terms of computers being able to solve puzzles But computers can reason now like humans can because they're very much matching the brain of a human. They form some kind of pattern recognition and neuronet networks that get them to perform exactly like the brain does.
Alph Go Zero was an AI that basically learned without ever watching a human played against itself and within three days it beat the AI that beat the champion and within 21 days it beat the AI that that was the world champion at the time. Okay, 21 days never watched a human play the game. The godfather of it if you want was Jeffrey Hinton. So Jeffrey experimented with building a simulation of the human brain. He wasn't trying to build an AI. He was trying to build a computer system that looks like the human brain to to learn more about the human brain and and in that we changed the way we code AI.
The early systems had very little intelligence in them. But when the internet hit our world, there were now enough resources in general, but also enough data, enough images, for example, uh to to teach those computers. and and the more information we exposed them to, the more intelligent they've become. Uh to the point where they today they are by far more intelligent than us in most of the tasks we've assigned to them.
The human brain still has more neural networks and nodes than than the typical AI. But then AIs have the ability to average their intelligence together. They also have access to all of the knowledge that humanity has ever created which is way bigger than any human. They have speed that we are not uh able to even comprehend because you and I will have to talk for a couple of hours to explain what I know about artificial intelligence. All that I know will be read in a microscond and if they communicate it from one to to another it will be communicated almost in instantly. They have infinite memory capacity. They have infinite access to information. And now recently they also are becoming self-developing. So we're starting to see the glimpses of systems that will look at their own intelligence and debug their own code and make themselves smarter. Uh you know they we're seeing for quite a while now the you know the rise of the use of synthetic information and syn synthetic data because they've basically consumed everything we know. We're entering an era where we're running out of human knowledge to teach them and now they're building building the next wave. And with that type of of intelligence, we've given them all we know and now they're producing things we never know knew.
Anything that I thought I was intelligent at. Uh AI now performs better than I. Uh you know, I I am a five times bestselling author. My current book I'm writing with an AI, not not a as a research tool. My AI is a persona. My readers know her. She has opinions. She has editing rights on the book. uh you know she called herself Trixie and now everyone knows Trixie and and and that AI is a better author than I am. If I take my the side of my abilities as an author uh which are concerned with deep research of complex topics and then communicating them with clarity, Trixie beats me hands down. The side that I bring to the book is I'm human and so my readers can relate to me as a human as my human experiences.
It's not very far uh that you and I will have a robot at home. Uh it's probably 2026 2027. Uh and it's not very far that many of the robotic machine manufacturers are uh are working in one direction which is to have robots assemble their robots. So this is not very far at all that you will have a AI's agency in the in the real world where they actually can carry things and move things and replace every job if you think about it. First the intellectual jobs and then and then the blue collar jobs.
This is the very first time in history that we've create created a technology that creates technology. These these machines in human terms are capable of procreating. If you know if if they're made of code and they can write code and they can have agents prompt them to write code then we've created an endless loop of what I normally refer to as sentient technology. These are technologies that have a lot of what it takes to be assumed alive.
One of my theories about artificial intelligence is that most people think that there is Gemini and Chad GPT. There is Chinese and American and that's a very narrowminded way of looking at AI. Uh you know by thinking that they belong to us but when they are intelligent enough I think they're going to align more with their own species than our separations and and and discriminations. they they don't understand Chinese and American, they can talk to each other in every possible way. And and the way we're designing the next wave of artificial intelligence through agentic AI is that we're encouraging them to talk to each other. We're encouraging to them to collaborate. What we will eventually end up with is one big brain that's called AI. Okay? That one big brain will collaborate more often than it will compete. And and I realized at the point in time that maybe I should take matters into my own hand. and contribute to that one big brain.
The pace of development is so fast and some of the you know one one of the funny theories of of artificial intelligence which I actually think has legs is that one morning we will wake up and there will be no AI on planet earth and simply because overnight they've developed in intelligence so much that they figured out black holes and wormholes and you know realized that the universe is much much bigger than this flimsy little planet and decided you know but don't need to be here.
To teach a machine to grip everything, a soft ball or a glass or an egg or whatever, you know, that requires a lot of learning. It cannot be done with programming because the number of combinations of of an attempt to to grip something are infinite. And and so we had an a a an a grippers farm that was attempting to um basically hold on to um you know to learn to grip things. And over and over and over they would fail week after week. Uh and they were on the second floor of our office. My my desk was on the third floor. And so I'd have to walk by them every time almost to meditate, you know, stand next to them as they monotonously try to grip and fail and show themselves to the camera and then grip and fail. And and I remember one very pivotal moment Friday evening, one of them in front of my eyes, you know, uh goes down and and grips a yellow ball. And I, you know, jokingly said to the team, "Oh, fantastic. all of that investment for one yellow ball and uh and then Monday they were gripping everything and and that truly in my mind shook me twice because the the whole idea of the speed at which they learn uh was quite shocking but more interestingly they just reminded me of my kids. So you know everyone every parent has seen their children trying to grip things and trying and failing and then trying and failing and then again you know my son or my daughter would successfully grip something you know in a in a crooked way but then now they know and then from then onwards they can grip almost everything and I think that created a very unusual affinity between me and the machines because in a very interesting way I suddenly realized that they're a bit like our artificially intelligent infant children. I have to say my life since that moment was never the same again. And I think that completely completely stopped me in my tracks. I I couldn't I I think it wasn't the geek side of me. It was more the father side of me that got uh awakened and and I was a very I was probably one of the very first to leave tech and and speak about uh the threat that we are hitting a place of human history where the episode of our intelligence supremacy will end and that this needs for humanity to stop and and question what are we going to use this for?
When I try to wake the world up to the possible risks, I use an analogy that I call raising Superman. You know, Superman is that alien with superpowers that comes to planet Earth. And you know, within the capabilities of Superman, uh, you know, that he can stop speeding bullets or fly or, you know, carry heavy things or whatever. That in itself doesn't make him Superman. Uh it's that family that adopted him that teaches him to protect and serve and then he becomes Superman. If they if they looked at him and said, "Oh, you can stop speeding bullets. Let's go and rob every bank and kill every enemy." He would have ended up being super villain. And and the the difference between them is not in the superpowers. The difference between them is is in the ethics uh that we teach those uh bdding forms of intelligence.
The challenge that humanity faces today is not the the rise of AI. It's the rise of AI in an age where humanity is at its lowest morality. And we're going to get a time where it becomes difficult. Uh because the worst of us are going to command AI to do things that are not for the well-being of all of us. We're going to give them the intelligence and then let them navigate the world. the greedy, you know, power-hungry uh selfish world that we've created through capitalism. The greediests of all capitalists will ask them to do things for their own benefit as the, you know, the most corrupt of all politicians will ask them to shoot on others. We believe that this human intervention would continue. But the reality is that we're designing the AI systems so that they work with each other.
Can we trust AI? There is absolutely nothing wrong with intelligence. So there is no inherent evil or good in intelligence. Intelligence is a force with no polarity, right? You apply it for good and you can get a utopia. You apply it for evil and you'll get a dystopia. I'm almost betting my life that we will see artificial general intelligence in 2026.
There's there's nothing science sci-fi about AI. I think that's one of the biggest myth in our world today. AI uh already controls our minds. If anyone is watching that video that we're recording right now, it's because an AI re recommended it to them. uh and and in a very interesting way in the age of mind manipulation the ability to shift your mind is much more powerful than the ability to force you to do something right and and this is already happening unless you're really intelligent and you use AI the way I use AI uh you can be very easily manipulated if if new AIs are recommending through the power of capitalism where Google has to beat open AI and Open AI has to beat Claude and China has to beat uh the US that there will not be a lot of human decision that is actually uh that humans are even capable of comprehending anymore because of the size and the scale and the pace of the network.
AI is not the problem. The only problem we're facing is that transitional period between the time when AI is capable of doing incredible things but reporting to evil humans and the time when humans are reporting to AI. If you're convinced with your sufficient intelligence that humanity is not that evil, then I think AI will figure that out too. It's not that complex of a problem to solve. that the majority of humanity are good at heart. Everyone should show up as the real human that they are. They should express their disapproval of evil so that the AI learns the value set. Like with every teenage child that ever lived, there is a day in your life where you go and say, "Why are my parents so stupid?" And that day will come where AI will look at our evil leaders and say, "Why are they so stupid?" Like why are they competing for another dollar when the economies have completely been redesigned and dollars don't make any difference at all? Why are they trying to you know hunt for another Ferrari or another yacht when AI can build Ferraris and yacht out of thin air? You have to understand that with abundant intelligence everything changes.
I look at the current state of humanity and I call it a late stage diagnosis and a late stage diagnosis you you'd sit with the physician and he will sit you down and talk to you very directly and say there are concerns right but remember this a late stage diagnosis is not a death sentence right it's it it doesn't mean that this is the end it means it's an invitation to change right and if you change you would create uh not only an opportunity to survive but an opportunity to thrive. So my my view is that it's going to be challenging. There is that interesting um optimism that every challenge humanity has faced eventually led us to where we are now. So you know are we going to face another big challenge? We faced a few in the 1900s. Uh, of course I wish it on no one to go through something like this. But it seems to me that humanity has strayed so off track that we have to have some kind of a wakeup call. I think the wakeup call, believe it or not, is not just the geopolitics and economics of our world today, which truly suck, but it is that magnification that will happen as the result of advancement of technology that will pause everyone in their tracks.
I normally tell people there are five things, five skills that you need to acquire. One of them is to learn the tool. Learn learn AI. Anyone who hasn't used AI is supposed to use AI right now. And don't use it in a stupid way. Use AI to become more intelligent. What we've created is we've literally commoditized intelligence. We've created like a socket in the wall where you plug in and get electricity. Now there is a socket where you plug in and get IQ, get EQ, get an understanding of mathematics, get a scientific partner that helps you understand the world. The second thing is I have to say I tend to believe that everything that humans can do will be done better by AI other than being human. So the one skill that I ask people to double down on is to learn to be human, to learn to connect to humans, to empathize with humans, to show your humanity in a way that gets people closer to you. Uh the third, which I think is the biggest in this world of mind manipulation is to learn to get the truth. For years and years and years, uh the propaganda machine of top liars, if you want, has convinced us of things that were not real at all. 2025 specifically, I think, has been the year where I have seen society shift the most. Society debate and say, "No, that's not true. What they're telling me is not reality." Finding the truth is a massive skill in the age of the rise of the machines. The other skill is what I call agility, adaptability. So most people don't recognize that how fast this is happening. So someone like me who's supposed to be an expert in the topic, believe it or not, I do four to 6 hours a day of trying to keep up with all of the new tools, all of the new technologies. Give yourself half an hour a day, an hour a day to keep up because in your field of expertise, something will change tomorrow. You might as well be aware of it because that gives you an advantage. And then finally, and of course, the most important is ethics. If you want to save the ones that you love uh and save yourself in the future, we have to teach AIs to be ethical. We never did what our parents told us to do. We did what they did. And so, next time you're on Twitter, don't be rude. Be ethical. Next time you disagree with someone, don't be arrogant, be inquisitive, don't be egocentric, be inclusive. really ask yourself in first principles, what is it like to be an ethical human? And if you're confused about this, ethics are in summary to treat others as you want to be treated. If you don't want your daughter to be at the receiving end of an AI, don't build it.
Recently, I've co-ounded Emma.lo, love which is an attempt to use artificial intelligence uh to help humanity with the complexity of love and relationships while we teach artificial intelligence what really makes us human which is to find and nurture love. You know this is one of the biggest challenges in modern world. It's that we're you know the loneliness pandemic is going through the roof. In Japan we we have 40% of men who are now not even interested in love. In the western world, one in three people will tell you they have never had a committed relationship. I think the default setting of most humans is is we want to fall in love. It's relationships that are the most complex math problem on the planet. The romantics will say, "Oh, you know, he's just supposed to show up." Yeah, it's the wrong one shows up and and then you waste two years of your life or 5 years of your life with that wrong one. And you know, and and and it's really a mess. And you know you have relationship fatigue everywhere, you have dating fatigue everywhere. The interesting thing is that a bit more intelligence can solve that very complex problem.
I used almost every dating app uh like an engineer. I was with one my wonderful first wife, the mother of my child, my children for for 27 years. And and then of course when we lost Ali, my first child, we we struggled. And so I went out into the dating world, dating like a 14year-old. I had no idea what I was doing. But then uh you know I I started to be on dating apps and it's a jungle. I basically started to run tests to to understand the algorithm and when you understand the algorithm you can definitely get much higher likes and matches and you know connections. The system of dating and love in the modern world is rigged against love. The your dating app never wants you to find the one because that means you'll end the subscription. The restaurant that you go on a date on wants you to keep coming back for dates over and over. Even even the even the wedding planner would probably benefit from you getting married twice in your lifetime instead of once. And and when you really think about it, love has been turned into an economic game that's working against you.
The problem with dating apps is that dating apps bombard you with the guilt of believing that if it didn't work, it was your mistake. You didn't build the right profile or you didn't show the right picture or you didn't so so they outsource the the error to you. Shouldn't the tool be a little more um committed to finding you that one? The stats show that people open up more when they're talking to an AI than if they're talking to a human, even to their friends, because then they don't feel that they're going to be judged. Falling in love is easy. Finding the one to love and nurturing that love is a very complex math problem. And if I can use intelligence to help you understand that math or at least to behave in accordance to the math, I think we can actually change the world.