The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: Mo Gawdat - This Is The Only Thing That Will Survive AI, We Must Act Now!
Fri, 16 May 2025
As AI rapidly advances, Mo Gawdat shares a candid and thoughtful exploration of what the future holds for humanity. From AI’s growing intelligence and its impact on creativity to the looming disruption of jobs and society, this top moment challenges us to rethink our role in a world where machines might outsmart us. Mo also reflects on the irreplaceable value of human connection and the need to prepare for a future shaped by technology. Whether you’re excited or worried about AI, this conversation offers a crucial perspective on how we adapt, survive, and find meaning in the age of artificial intelligence. Register yourself by visiting: Gartner.com/Symposium Listen to the full episode here - Spotify - https://g2ul0.app.link/ocYmHrkuoTb Apple - https://g2ul0.app.link/EBSoMmQuoTb Watch the Episodes On YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Mo Gawdat - https://www.mogawdat.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What event should tech leaders attend in 2025?
If you're an IT leader or a CIO or someone who makes big decisions in tech, there's an event happening this year that I want to be on your radar. Gartner, the sponsor of today's Moments episode, is hosting their annual IT Symposium Expo. This conference is the fastest way to get up to speed with everything that's happening in tech.
The whole idea is to give executives frameworks to lead confidently in 2025 in a world that's evolving so incredibly fast. And Gartner's global reach means there's an event near you, including the US, Europe, Asia and Australia. You can expect conversations on AI, cybersecurity, leadership in a digital age, as well as an industry-specific deep dive.
Secure your spot by registering at gartner.com slash symposium. That's gartner.com slash symposium. And enjoy this moment with Mo Gordat, former CBO of Google X, talking about the possibility of AI replacing humans in the workforce. So the first inevitable, just to clarify, is will we stop?
Chapter 2: How intelligent will AI become by 2045?
AI will not be stopped. Okay. So the second inevitable is? Is they'll be significantly smarter. As much in the book, I predict a billion times smarter than us by 2045.
100%.
ChatGTP4 knows more than any human on planet Earth. Knows more information.
Absolutely. A thousand times more. A thousand times more. By the way, the code of a transformer, the T in a GPT, is 2,000 lines long. It's not very complex. It's actually not a very intelligent machine. It's simply predicting the next word, okay? And a lot of people don't understand that. You know, chat GPT as it is today, you know those kids...
that if you're in America and you teach your child all of the names of the states and the US presidents and the child would stand and repeat them and you would go like, oh my God, that's a prodigy. Not really, right? It's your parents really trying to make you look like a prodigy by telling you to memorize some crap really. But then when you think about it, that's what chair GPT is doing.
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Chapter 3: Can AI truly be creative?
It's the only difference is instead of reading all of the names of the states and all of the names of the presidents thread, trillions and trillions and trillions of pages, okay? And so it sort of repeats what the best of all humans said, okay? And then it adds an incredible bit of intelligence where it can repeat it the same way Shakespeare would have said it, you know?
Those incredible abilities of predicting the exact nuances of the style of Shakespeare so that they can repeat it that way and so on. But still, hmm? when I write, for example, I'm not saying I'm intelligent, but when I write something like the happiness equation in my first book, this was something that's never been written before. Chad GPT is not there yet.
All of the transformers are not there yet. They will not come up with something that hasn't been there before. They will come up with the best of everything and generatively will build a little bit on top of that. But very soon they'll come up with things we've never found out. We've never known.
But even on that, I wonder if we... are a little bit delusioned about what creativity actually is. Creativity, as far as I'm concerned, is like taking a few things that I know and combining them in new and interesting ways. And ChatGCP is perfectly capable of like taking two concepts, merging them together.
One of the things I said to ChatGCP was, I said, tell me something that's not been said before that's paradoxical, but true. And it comes up with these wonderful expressions like, as soon as you call off this search, you'll find the thing you're looking for. Like these kind of paradoxical truths.
And I then take them and I search them online to see if they've ever been quoted before and I can't find them.
Interesting.
So as far as creativity goes, I'm like, that is great.
That's the algorithm of creativity. I've been screaming that in the world of AI for a very long time because you always get those people who... really just want to be proven right, okay? And so they'll say, oh no, but hold on, human ingenuity, they'll never match that. Like, man, please, please, you know, human ingenuity is algorithmic.
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Chapter 4: How is AI influencing the music industry?
And the WhatsApp chat will give you a meditation, a sleep story, a breath work session synthesized as that famous person's voice. So I actually sent Gary Vaynerchuk his voice. So basically you say, okay, I want, I've got five minutes and I need to go to sleep. I want Gary Vaynerchuk to send me to sleep.
and then it will respond with a voice note this is the one that responded with for gary vaynerchuk this is not gary vaynerchuk he did not record this but it's kind of it's kind of accurate hey steven it's great to have you here are you having trouble sleeping well i've got a quick meditation technique that might help you out first lie find a comfortable position to sit or lie down in
Now, take a deep breath in through your nose and slowly breathe out through your mouth.
It is really shocking. The idea of you and I inevitably are going to be somewhere in the middle of nowhere in, you know, in 10 years time. I used to say 2055. I'm thinking 2037 is a very pivotal moment now, you know, and we will not know if we're there hiding from the machines. We don't know that yet. there is a likelihood that we'll be hiding from the machines.
And there is a likelihood we'll be there because they don't need podcasters anymore. Oh, excuse me. Oh, absolutely true, Steve. No, Moe, that's where I draw the line. No, no, no, no, that's where I draw the line. There is absolutely no doubt. Thank you for coming, Moe. It's great to do the part three and thank you for being here.
I won't sit here and take your propaganda. Let's talk about reality. Next week on The Diver's Year, we've got Elon Musk.
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Chapter 5: What innovative AI applications are emerging?
Okay, so who here wants to make a bet that Stephen Bartlett will be interviewing an AI within the next two years?
Oh, well, actually, to be fair, I actually did go to ChatGCP because I thought having you here, I thought at least give it its chance to respond. Yeah. So I asked him a couple of questions.
About me? Yeah. Oh, man.
So today I'm actually going to be replaced by ChatGCP because I thought, you know, you're going to talk about it. So we need a fair and balanced debate.
Yeah.
So I'll ask you a couple of questions that ChatGTP has for you. Incredible. So let's follow that thread.
So I've already been replaced. Let's follow that thread for a second. Yeah. Because you're one of the smartest people I know.
That's not true.
It is. But I'll take it. It is true. I mean, I say that publicly all the time. Your book is one of my favorite books of all time. You're very, very, very, very intelligent. Okay. Depth, breadth, intellectual horsepower, and speed. All of them. There's a but coming. No. The reality is it's not a but. So it is highly expected that you're ahead of this curve.
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Chapter 6: Will AI replace human jobs completely?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And Cirque du Soleil had Michael Jackson in one for a very long time. Yeah.
So this ABBA show in London, from what I understand, that's all holograms on stage. Correct. And it's going to run in a purpose-built arena for 10 years. And it is incredible. It really is. So you go, why do you need Drake?
If that hologram is indistinguishable from Drake and it can perform even better than Drake and it's got more energy than Drake and it's, you know, I go, why do you need Drake to even be there? I can go to a Drake show without Drake. Cheaper. I might not even need to leave my house. I can just put a headset on. Correct.
Can you have this?
what's the value of this to the listener? Oh, come on, you hurt me.
No, no, I mean, I get it to us.
I get it to us, but I'm saying what's the value of this to the listener?
Like the value of this to the listener is the information, right? No, 100%. I mean, think of the automobile industry. There has, you know, there was a time where cars were made... handmade and handcrafted and luxurious and so on and so forth. And then, Japan went into the scene, completely disrupted the market. Cars were made in mass quantities at a much cheaper price.
And yes, 90% of the cars in the world today, or maybe a lot more, I don't know the number, are no longer you know, emotional items, okay? They're functional items. There is still, however, every now and then someone that will buy a car that has been handcrafted, right? There is a place for that.
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Chapter 7: How should we adapt to living with intelligent AI?
Now, on the surface of it, his hypothesis seems to be true because people do love music. It's conceivable to believe that people will always love music. but they don't love traveling for an hour in the rain and getting in a car to get a plastic disc. What they wanted was music. What they didn't want is like evidently plastic discs that they had to travel for miles for.
And I think about that when we think about like public speaking and the Drake show and all of these things, like what people actually are coming for, even with this podcast, is probably like information. But do they really need us anymore for that information when there's going to be a sentient being that's significantly smarter than at least me and a little bit smarter than you?
So you're spot on. You are spot on. And actually, this is the reason why I, you know, I'm so grateful that you're hosting this, because the truth is the genie's out of the bottle. So people tell me, is AI game over? For our way of life, it is. For everything we've known, this is a very disruptive moment where maybe not tomorrow, but in the near future, our way of life will differ.
What will happen, what I'm asking people to do is to start considering what that means to your life. What I'm asking governments to do like I'm screaming, is don't wait until the first patient. You know, start doing something about it. We're about to see mass job losses. We're about to see, you know, replacements of... categories of jobs at large, okay?
Yeah, it may take a year, it may take seven, it doesn't matter how long it takes, but it's about to happen, are you ready? And I have a very, very clear call to action for governments. I'm saying tax AI-powered businesses at 98%, right?
So suddenly you do what the open letter was trying to do, slow them down a little bit, and at the same time, get enough money to pay for all of those people that will be disrupted by the technology.
When you talk about the immediate impacts on jobs, I'm trying to figure out in that equation, who are the people that stand to lose the most? Is it the everyday people in foreign countries that don't have access to the internet and won't benefit? You talk in your book about how this sort of wealth disparity will only increase.
Yeah, massively. The immediate impact on jobs is that, and it's really interesting, huh? Again, we're stuck in the same prisoner's dilemma. The immediate impact is that AI will not take your job. A person using AI will take your job, right?
So you will see within the next few years, maybe next couple of years, you'll see a lot of people upskilling themselves in AI to the point where they will do the job of 10 others who are not.
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