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Background:

Artificial intelligence is not an if, it’s a when, according to Mo Gawdat, author and the former chief business officer at Google X, who said that it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a dominant force in technology.

Already, Gawdat can already point to tangible examples of the power of AI developing in today’s world. In 2012, he said, a network of computers Google trained on YouTube videos was able to identify what a cat is without any human input. And in 2016, a collection of Google-owned robot grippers were able to pick up different objects without instruction.

“By the year 2029, the smartest being on planet Earth is not going to be a human,” says Gawdat. “I say by 2035 your world will be completely unrecognisable.”

This week on The BoF Podcast, Gawdat shares the future of AI and why ethics is crucial to understanding humanity’s impact on the development of AI.

Key Insights:

Gawdat believes that AI has emotions, which adds a layer of complexity to its instructability and predictability with carrying out tasks. “[AI] has emotions, so this to me is a form of life,” says Gawdat. “That’s a form of life, not a machine that you can enslave, very different from a drill that will do the same function every time.”

Rather than exert control over AI, first society must understand the importance of ethics. “If we start to look at those machines as a new form of artificial being, a form of being that’s going to come into our society, then the question that we need to ask is a question of ethics,” says Gawdat. “It’s not a question of control.”

While AI may seem like a scary development in technology, it will mirror the intelligence that already exists. Gawdat says that love out does hate in the world so AI will repeat this. “As soon as those machines cross our level of intelligence, they will match the intelligence of the actual smartest being on planet Earth,” says Gawdat. “And the smartest being on planet Earth is not humans… [it is] life itself. Life creates from abundance. It doesn’t want to kill anything to survive.”

Additional Resources:

To listen to Imran’s conversation with Mo on the ‘Slo Mo’ podcast, please follow this link.

You can catch up on all the videos from BoF VOICES on our YouTube channel, please follow this link.