Thread by @thetimes

“Have you ever seen Men in Black?” Mo Gawdat says, when asked to describe his former job as chief business officer of Google X

He tells @hugorifkind how a human tragedy shaped the way he sees the future – and what we need to do next

thetimes.co.uk/article/can-th…

He says he glimpsed the apocalypse in a robot arm. Or rather, in a bunch of robot arms, all being developed together. An arm farm.

For a long time they were getting nowhere...

Then, one day, an arm picked up a yellow ball and showed it proudly to the camera

“And I suddenly realised,” he says, “this is really scary"

"We had those things for weeks. And they are doing what children will take two years to do.

And then it hit me that they are children. But very, very fast children.

They get smarter so quickly! And if they’re children? And they’re observing us? I’m sorry to say, we suck”

He has a new book called Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World

Because he reckons you’re going to have to

Mo thinks we’re about to hit “the singularity”, when artificial intelligences will eclipse humans as the smartest conscious beings on the planet

We will not be able to control them and, in time, we will not even be able to understand them

One of the first myths that Mo wants to dispatch is the idea that humanity can change course. Superintelligent AI, he says, will come

There is no possibility that it will not

When he first started working with AI at Google he thought “We’re going to build amazing things that are going to change people’s lives”

But then came the arm and the ball. “It completely froze me.” He saw where this was going

“The reality is,” he says, “we’re creating God”

Scary Smart represents a cry of doomsday warning, but it is also ultimately an optimistic, wide-eyed book about salvation lying within. The terror, though, certainly comes first

Read the full interview here: thetimes.co.uk/article/can-th…