AI Leverage for All; Opt-Out for None

Steven Bartlett interviews Mo Gawdat about his thoughts on artificial intelligence and his book, ‘Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World.’

Game over. We are too late. Our way of life is never going to be the same again.

Mo Gawdat asks and answers his own questions in his conversation with Steven Bartlett: What went wrong? He explains that we gave too much power to people who didn’t assume the responsibility. “We have disconnected power with responsibility,” he claims. We should now have a great sense of URGENCY and EMERGENCY.

Earlier this month I listened to at least three different AI “experts” say that the best way to not be essentially run over by AI is to leverage AI. And on the same vein of that thinking, it went that those who don’t leverage AI will be left in the technical and intellectual dust of those who leverage.

Gawdat’s solution? It’s smarter to create out of abundance. When choosing as we work with and on AI, we should choose to be ethical. He also said we might as well choose a job that makes the world a better place. Government needs to act now for regulations of AI, before AI will be advanced beyond what regulations can do. According to Gawdat, we can only regulate until AI gets smarter than we are.

Speaking of governments and not moving fast enough, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced June 21 a “broad, open-ended plan for regulating artificial intelligence” that will start with about nine panels of experts from “industry, academia and civil society” that will “identify and discuss the hardest questions that regulations on AI will have to answer, including how to protect workers, national security and copyright and to defend against ‘doomsday scenarios.’” After these discussions. the Senate will “turn to committee chairs and other vocal lawmakers on AI legislation to develop bills reflecting the panel discussions.”

That process sounds too slow for what is predicted by Gawdat… and by the others listed in Schumer’s doomsday scenarios.

The worst of us have negativity bias. The best of us need to take charge. “Creating an artificial intelligence that is going to make someone richer is not what we need.” Gawdat believes if just 1% of us engaged to leverage AI, we would be able to raise AI in a helpful-to-humanity way, and not let the world devolve into a doomsday dilemma from which we couldn’t recover. None of us really can just opt-out.