This is a short transcript excerpt from a Wellness Force podcast interview with Mo Gawdat. Gawdat argues that technology itself is not inherently wrong; rather human vices—especially ego and greed—and a lack of ethics cause harm. He warns that AI will surpass human intelligence (predicting by 2029) and urges a broader ethical code and a shift in values toward what the planet truly needs.
Chapters
The turning point in the book that completely flipped my view of everything upside down was a sentence that I wrote where I basically said there's absolutely nothing wrong with the machines, absolutely nothing wrong with the machines, but there is a lot wrong with us. Technology has always been a double edged sword. The core problem at the very core of humanity, I think extends one layer deep than consciousness, which is ethics and aligning to what truly makes us human, of what makes us human. There are many vices and many virtues. We took a few of those vices, particularly ego and greed, I believe. Okay. And made them the descriptive characters of the modern world that we live in. This is the truth of humanity today. The truth of humanity today, if you asked me, is that we prioritize things we don't need over things that actually are the core of who we are. And we do it in a hyper masculine way. And so you give a hyper masculine being the task of doing something and it does it really well and it does a lot of it, and it does it all the time, okay? But the truth is we don't need any of this. And if you actually had allowed a bit more feminine into our world today, it would say, why are we doing this? Why? Why are we building an iPhone 17 on the expense of a tree when we actually need the tree a lot more than the iPhone 17? So consciousness is a layer of becoming aware of how bad we've come, but it needs to be backed up with a code of ethics that goes beyond just what is legal into what is needed for the planet to survive. It's not hitting most of the people that are building AI that they are making us obsolete. By 2029, the smartest being on the face of planet Earth is not going to be a human anymore. We have to start asking ourselves, what does that mean? What does it mean when we are no longer the smartest being on the planet? Because that's the topic that needs to be spoken about.
