Mo Gawdat

I joined Google in 2007, very late 2006.

And at the time, most people don't know that at the time we had reasonably established AIs doing our backend work.

And 2008, we had the CAT paper, which was published 2009.

The first real unprompted AI.

I remember 2016, I had that incident where I was, you know, observing a project we were funding that was about teaching grippers how to grip machines.

unlike industrial machinery.

So to be able to grip like a human needs a very high level of intelligence to assess the texture, the softness, the positioning, and so on, the shape of everything.

And we were doing that, and it just blew my mind how similar to my kids they were.

And I think that was my very first realization that we were building the apex of intelligence.

We were genuinely handing over the reins of superintelligence to another being, right?

And when you get faced with that, you start to suddenly realize something that we at Google found very difficult to realize, which was that

Everyone I knew at Google till then was believing that we were making the world a better place, and we were.

We genuinely were doing amazing things for the world.

But then suddenly there is a moment where you recognize that

maybe the world will not use what you're making the way you want it to be used.

And you can see that in lots of technologies.

You know, social media starts by the claim that it's going to get us connected and gets us closer, but eventually ends up separating us with that little screen.

You know, dating apps are giving you the promise that you're going to find your soulmate, but in reality, they keep renewing month after month.

And so tech somehow ends up being more capitalist than altruistic.

And I think I was, I wasn't the first.