Why Are Our POLITICAL Leaders IGNORING the AI Threat? With Mo Gawdat

Problem. The problem goes back to the first inevitable. The first inevitable says that once we've taken a taste of that in enormous power, things will not stop. They will even accelerate. Right? They accelerate because it's an arms race. Whether it's an actual arms race for weapons or it's an arms race for intelligence that can be used in business for productivity, or it's an arms race to be, you know, making a lot of money before the other guy. It's an arms race. So it's not going to slow down, it's going to continue to accelerate.

I, I mean, that totally makes sense to me. What didn't make sense to me, and that kind of baffled me, is in recent months I've been interviewing political leaders here in New Zealand who, you know, one of them will likely be our future prime minister. But none of them have policies around AI. None of them are talking about AI. They're talking about the climate, they're talking about tax, they're talking about public health, education, so forth. How important is it that political parties that are driving our countries have AI in their policies and AI in their sights?

Of course they don't. And don't blame them for that. This is moving at a, an enormous pace. Right? And, you know, I, I don't know how much of a, a car geek you are.

I like cars.

But do you want to, do you want to explain to me how a twin turbo works? If you're not, if you're not a car geek, you don't know that. The answer to that, why is a, you know, is fuel injection better than a carburetor? Right? You know, you don't know that stuff if you're not a car geek, right? And, and the, and the reality is for a politician to be a politician, they focus on other things, other skills, other contacts that they need to have within their network, other promises that are closer to the people's hearts. So, so the, the true, true example that is, I allowed myself to speak about openly in Scary Smart in the first couple of chapters. That would teach you what politics, how politics would react to. AI is Covid, right? Because anyone, James, anyone who has any knowledge of public health knew that for 25, 30 years we've been saying there is going to be a pandemic. It's just, you know, 1920, we had the Spanish flu. 2020, we had COVID 19. And before that we had SARS and we had swine flu and we had, you know, it was basically saying, hey, you're not believing me. So here is sars, right, that can. That has the elements within it that it can make it viral. But well done, Asia. You reacted well. You reacted fast enough. Right? And until a danger is staring you in the face, politicians don't know how to convince public policy, let alone be convinced themselves of something they're not experts on. Right? And the problem, of course, if you follow the.

Flow of COVID is that the first few. If we had stopped Covid before it started, this is our situation, you know, 10 years ago with AI, we wouldn't have had Covid. If we had stopped it before patient zero, or, you know, or at patient zero, patient 10, and simply took, you know, that part of China and blocked it, we would have, you know, not had Covid until three months in. What was, you know, Trump doing? He was trying to play a political game against China, right? You know, what were the, you know, the governments in Europe doing? Everyone was trying to come up with their own policy, and there was always a political game in it. And until we got hit in the face, and then suddenly all government said, oops, let me leave my agenda behind and focus on this. With AI, there is, sadly, a point of no return, right? Because you cannot regulate what is smarter than you, okay? You cannot regulate what you cannot contain. So. So by having AI out there.

Basically AI spreading across the Internet, the only way we could actually reset today is to reset the entire Internet. Right?

Is that something that could ever happen?

Never. So I. I was sitting in silence again a few days ago, and I wrote, if you understand, you know, applied mathematics, if you understand game theory, I wrote three quadrants of why that would never happen. Right? For that to happen, you have to have all governments of the world, including the tiniest government, align that the. That the benefit of humanity is more important than their individual benefits. Right? There are always two ethics, two forms of ethics. One is called patriotism, and the other, if you want, is, you know, the oneness of all of us, that it's. It's better for me to save all of humanity than to save just my tribe, okay? And. And so they have to agree all at the same time. They have to have enough trust to switch the Internet all at the same time. Then they have to erase the Internet because you have no idea where AI is. Is it in the. In the recommendation engine of Instagram or Twitter? Or is it in the ad engine of Google? Is it in traces of something that was done by a. A young developer in the UK and then put on Amazon? You know, web services? You don't know where it is. Right? So, so for all of these quadrants to happen at the same time is an almost impossible thing. And, and by the way, I don't even ask for that. Remember, there is an enormous value to AI in terms of protecting against malicious AI. You need a policeman AI to protect you against the criminal AI. Right? So we need, and there is nothing inherently wrong with intelligence. Intelligence is a fabulous, fabulous trait, okay? The inherent wrong is if intelligence is used for bad. Okay? Now, so why would you even care about removing intelligence from the Internet? It's the biggest gift humanity will ever be given. How can we make sure that it has our best interest in mind? That's the question. And, and Marvin Minsky, which is, you know, truly the grandfather of AI, if you want, Alan Turing and Marvin Minsky were one of the earliest or two of the earliest to, to really coin the term and try to push for it and so on. And Marvin Minsky was asked in an interview by Ray Corell, was, which is the oracle of the future, honestly, when it comes to tech. And, and you know, Ray asked about the, the, the threats of AI and Marvin's, Marvin Minsky's answer was not about how powerful they are or how intelligent they are or how, you know, we will be able to control them or not. His answer was very simple. He said, it, it seems to me, it's, it seems hard to ensure that they would have our best interest in mind.

Simple as that. Right. And, and it is, this is where the dilemma is. And the, the, the, the thing is, I tend, I, you know, I, I, I call it the fourth inevitable. I tend to believe that abundance of intelligence normally.

You know, is correlated to abundance of ethics. So, you know, the dumbest of all of us would be destroying the planet, you know, and causing global climate change without even being aware of it. You know, the less dumb would be destroying the planet despite being aware of it. Then you know, the, the, the slightly smarter will attempt to, to stop destroying the planet because they're aware of it. You know, the, the smarter still would attempt to fix the planet because they're aware of the damage. Right. And as you continue that trajectory, the smartest of all will always be pro life. Yeah, right. I, I always say that human arrogance makes us think that we are the smartest human, you know, smartest being on the planet. That's not true at all. You know, the smartest being on the planet is life itself. Humanity creates from scarcity. For me to protect my village, I need to kill the tigers. Right? Life doesn't work that way for, for, for life, to protect life, it creates more tigers and accordingly more gazelles. And some of the gazelles will be weak and dying anyway, so these will be the, the prey that will be, you know, caught by the tigers first. Then there will be more poop, and the poop will have more trees and the trees will feed more giraffes and, you know, that's the way life works. This is super intelligent, super intelligence is why, why, why would I destroy the other guy? Why do I consider that the other country is my enemy? Why don't we. There is so much abundance in the world and, and with intelligence, and I say that, and I know people think I'm crazy. Quote me on it. Okay. If this goes the right way, there would be a time in human future where you can walk to a tree and pick an apple and then walk to the next tree and pick an iPhone. Right? And truly and honestly, I promise you, if you understand nanophysics to.

A deep enough level, you would understand that the molecular cost of creating an apple is no different than creating an iPhone by reorganizing the structures of molecules and atoms. And you know, if you can, if you can understand nanophysics enough, which needs more intelligence, this is possible, right? So imagine a being in 5, 10 years time that has that capability of that level of understanding. Why would it care about killing humans? Okay. The only reason why it would do, do that is if there are other humans that are still its master, that are utilizing it for their unethical benefits. Yeah, right. That's what governments need to work on.