Have you ever wondered how far off we are from the movies that portray Artificial Intelligence?
Well A.I. is in our daily lives far more than we realize. Today’s guest is no stranger to A.I., having been the former Chief Business Officer of Google X. Mo Gawdat is the author of the international bestselling book Solve for Happy. After a long career in tech, Mo is the perfect person to get a peek behind the curtain and talk about A.I. and our future with it.
Mo has written a new book Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World that we’re going to be discussing in-depth. In this episode, we dive deep into Artificial Intelligence, the ways A.I. will affect our future, what we need to know about A.I. as it plays a bigger role in society, and so much more!
I’m excited to have Mo back on the show! During his first visit, we talked about Solving for Happiness. If you’re interested in the future of artificial intelligence, then you’re going to love this episode!
Who Is Mo Gawdat?
Mo Gawdat is the former Chief Business Officer of Google X, and author of the international bestselling book Solve for Happy. He’s also the host of the popular podcast, Slo Mo: A Podcast with Mo Gawdat, and founder of One Billion Happy. After a long career in tech, Mo made happiness his primary topic of research, diving deeply into literature and conversing on the topic with some of the wisest people in the world.
In 2014, after the tragic loss of his son Ali, Mo poured his findings into his book, Solve for Happy. His mission to help one billion people become happier, #OneBillionHappy, attempts to honor Ali by spreading the message that happiness can be learned and shared. In 2019, Mo co-founded T0day, an ambitious project that aims to reinvent consumerism for the benefit of consumers, retailers, and our planet. In 2020, Mo launched his successful podcast, Slo Mo: A Podcast with Mo Gawdat, in which he conducts interviews that explore the profound questions and obstacles we all face in the pursuit of purpose in our lives.
A.I. is a fascinating topic, so let’s jump right in!
What Is AI?
When we hear the term Artificial Intelligence or A.I., I think the majority of people automatically assume it means “robots” — which is usually what the movies show us. Before Mo shares his expertise with us, let’s make sure we all have a clear definition of A.I. As an example, Tesla has revealed their humanoid Tesla Robot, which is planned to help people perform their mundane daily tasks like shopping.
“The Tesla Bot appears to be a person that can move and walk, [but] it’s the software behind a Tesla bot where the intelligence resides. [We] don’t call it software anymore, it’s intelligence.” – Mo Gawdat
What most people don’t realize is that the real thinking about A.I. started in 1956 at the Dartmouth Workshop. Almost 60 years ago, A.I. was being theorized about. But nothing happened until the turn of the century when we discovered something called deep learning — which is now seen as a form of intelligence. Deep learning is multiple sets of algorithms that seek to develop multiple levels of capability. It allows the A.I. program to be aware and capable of operations simultaneously in the digital and the physical world, giving it control over everything with a conscious mind.
Mo witnessed this first hand while still at Google when they published a white paper based on how they “taught” machines to watch YouTube.
“We didn’t tell them what to look for on YouTube. We just told them to watch it and tell us what [they] found and what happened. Eventually, one of them sort of raised its hand and said, ‘I found something that appears so frequently on that thing of yours, YouTube.’ We said, ‘show us.’ There was a cat.” – Mo Gawdat
Once they confirmed with A.I. that this was indeed a cat, in next to no time you could find every cat on YouTube. That was the beginning of A.I.’s deep learning specifically with Google and YouTube.
Think about all the computations A.I. has to go through to understand what a cat looks like. Are you looking at a cat from its profile or from the top? Is it a kitten? Is it black or striped? Yet these machines were capable of finding all of them.
Deep learning is the turning point for A.I. because, with enough algorithms, the machine will continuously try to find something. So how quickly will A.I. influence our daily lives?
The Rapid Rise of AI’s Influence
With limited knowledge of where A.I. exists in society, most of us might think that artificial intelligence is only happening in a lab somewhere because we can’t see it. However, that’s far from the truth, and A.I. is growing at a staggering rate.
“Records predict that A.I., the machines, will be smarter than humans as soon as 2029. This is eight years from today, and yet it is not spoken about. Intelligence is our superpower and there is going to be a more intelligent being of our own making introduced to our world by 2029.” – Mo Gawdat
It might sound crazy, but we’re not aware that machines are already smarter than we are in every single task we’ve ever assigned to them. The world champion of jeopardy is the machine Watson. And the world champion for chess is IBM Deep Blue after beating the then number one Chess Grandmaster, Russian Garry Kasparov. Even now, the most complex strategy game called Go, thought to be the last frontier for A.I., has been successfully overcome with AlphaGo. You can watch the incredible story of how this was achieved on YouTube’s documentary AlphaGo – The Movie.
Part of A.I’s rapid success is the ability to continuously use the lessons learned from losses based on the rules and then has the ability to play against itself and become smarter than a world champion in a matter of weeks.
So is this all doom and gloom or are there positives to look forward to from here?
