Mo Gawdat argues that we should teach AI the ethical values of happiness, compassion, and love because human online behaviors train AI; if we model aggression or bashing, AI will learn and replicate it. He uses examples of social-media interactions shaping personalized feeds, cites the final sentence of his book Scary Smart emphasizing happiness/compassion/love, and describes his personal mission to make a billion people happier while advocating for kind, service-oriented human behavior to ensure beneficial AI.
Chapters
The trick is, if I used ethical, loving, compassionate language in this conversation, that's my how my child is going to grow up. My child here is this artificially intelligent being that has superpowers that has arrived to the plant. So if I behave, if I'm swiping on Instagram and disliking violent clips, the AI will say, mo doesn't like violent clips. Don't show him that anymore. But if enough of us don't like violence, somehow AI will say, yeah, humans in general don't like violence. If we are on Twitter and we're bashing each other all the time, humanity would say, okay, James doesn't like this guy. That's, you know, from, from his comment. So let me not show him more of this guy. Or maybe perhaps let me show him more so that he engages more. Right? But at the same time, it will say, humanity at large doesn't like to be disagreed with. And when they're disagreed with, they bash the others. So daddy and mommy are aggressive. When daddy and mommy disagree with me, I will bash them. Right. That's not what we want to teach the machines. What we want to teach the machines is the ethics of kindness, compassion, and, you know, my, my. I, as I told you, when I write books, I write the last statement first. Okay? And then I, I go back and work the entire book to get you to that last statement. And the last statement in Scary Smart is what, a very last sentence? Yeah, there is an afterward after that. But the very last sentence is, isn't it ironic that the very essence of what makes us human, which is happiness, compassion, and love. These are the only three ethical values that humanity across the world has agreed, okay? We all want to be happy. We all have the compassion to make those we care about happy. If, you know, if you're a drug dealer and you only care about your daughter, you'll want your daughter to be happy. Right? And we all want to love and be loved. These are the only ethical values that I have seen humanity agree on. And if our listeners know any, any others, please teach me. Because it's important to understand. These are the ethics we should teach AI. We should teach AI that we really don't want to appear smarter than the other guy. We just want to be happy. Okay? That we have the compassion. I mean, I get that so often, and I say that with love sometimes. I get, I mean, you know, my work. So most of my work is either about warning the world about AI and what we need to. To do about it or about happiness. I'M trying to make a billion people happy, right? And I get such aggressive bashing comments on social media for wanting to make a billion people happy. And, and you have to sometimes look at it and go, like, you know what? I'm going to bash you back. Like, seriously, why did you say this to me when my only intention in life is to try and share whatever I know to tell you to go and, you know, research good teachers that will make you happier, right? It doesn't have to be me. It doesn't have to be. I just want people to be happier. And very often I look at those comments and my first human reaction is, he insulted you insult him back, okay? And then I go and look at their profile and most of the time you look at the profile of that person and you can see that this person may have been rejected or may feel that they need attention and that, you know, by evoking a negative conversation, they will get attention. You, you know, and, and, and so I, instead of bashing them back, I say, oh my God, thank you so much for the interest in my topic. I see your point of view. I see it slightly differently. You know, maybe if you could consider this or that in a nice polite way, right? And normally what happens is they bash me back, right? So my, my followers start to bash them and I immediately jump in and say, not here. Can we please have a wonderful conversation? If you were that person, born to their parents, you know, lived their life so far, you would have made the exact same comment. Can you have the compassion within you to say another human who disagrees with me? Wonderful. Opens my eyes to another part of the view, right? And I think if we start to show those ethics in everything that we do for us, if we want AI to preserve our life when they're more powerful than us, we, we need to be pro life, okay? If we want AI to be of service to us when they are more intelligent than us, we need to be of service to others, right? If it, it is really very simple. Happiness, compassion, and love. Isn't it ironic that the only the, the, the very essence of what makes us human, happiness, compassion and love is going to be what saves us in the age of the rise of the machine? Yeah. And.
