Something funny happened as I was watching Google X's former chief business officer Mo Gawdat, on the Google-owned platform YouTube, outline his exact take on the AI dystopia he thinks is coming. The host began to ask Gawdat about the idea AI will create new jobs, then the video halted while Google ads served me a 15-second clip showing someone using Microsoft CoPilot to do their job.
When Gawdat returns, he begins his answer by talking about the idea of the West transitioning into service or knowledge economies: people, as he puts it, who "type on a keyboard and use a mouse." Oh dear. Gawdat's economics lesson concludes that "all we produce in the West is words [...] and designs. All of these things can be produced by AI."
One thing is impossible to deny: the business world is very interested in the idea of replacing humans with AI and, where it can be done, will not hesitate to do so. There's also the fact that every big tech company is pushing AI into their products and our lives.
The AI industry has something of a stock line about its technology replacing existing careers: AI will simultaneously create new jobs we can't even imagine, and people will start working in those fields. But Gawdat doesn't buy that line, and in straightforward language calls the whole idea "100% crap" (thanks, Windows Central).
Gawdat left Google to form an AI startup, Emma.love, and cites this company as an example of what he's talking about: the app was apparently built with only two other developers, a job that Gawdat reckons would have taken "over 350 developers" without AI assistance.
"Artificial general intelligence is going to be better than humans at everything, including being a CEO," says Gawdat, referring to the idea that the industry will eventually produce an AI model capable of reasoning and more intelligent than humans. "There will be a time where most incompetent CEOs will be replaced.”
Gawdat's spin on this, however, is that society has to undergo a paradigm shift in how we think about our lives: "We were never made to wake up every morning and just occupy 20 hours of our day with work. We’re not made for that. We defined our purpose as work. That’s a capitalist lie."
Tell me more, comrade! Gawdat generally seems to hold a rather low view of executives and their priorities, pointing out that the AI future is subject to human "hunger for power, greed, and ego” because the tools themselves will be controlled by "stupid leaders." I'm not sure I'd characterise Elon Musk as stupid, but I doubt I'm alone in thinking I'd rather not have him in charge of re-arranging society.
"There is no doubt that lots of jobs will be lost," says Gawdat. "Are we prepared to tell our governments, this is an ideological shift similar to socialism, similar to Communism, and are we ready from a budget point of view? Instead of spending a trillion dollars a year on arms and explosives and autonomous weapons to suppress people because we can't feed them."
Gawdat runs through some beermat maths, offering an estimate that $2.4-2.7 dollars is spent on military hardware every year, a fraction of which could solve a problem like world hunger, or lift the global population out of extreme poverty. Then we get into the truly starry-eyed stuff like universal healthcare worldwide and the end of war, with Gawdat saying for AI these things would be "simple decisions."
Hmm. I'll have some of what he's smoking.
Gawdat's take on AI starts out more persuasive than many others I've seen, but when it gets onto the more fantastical ramifications the caveat is simply enormous. If the singularity happens and AI just takes over running the planet then, sure, all bets are off: who knows whether we'll end up with dystopia or utopia. But that day may never come and, until then, there will still be human beings somewhere pulling all the levers. And as history shows, time and again, humans can be horrendous at making simple decisions: and that's rarely good for the rest of us.
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