PERSON
Mo Gawdat
The former Chief Business Officer of Google X who walked out of the moonshot factory with a warning the rest of us could not yet hear: that artificial intelligence is not a tool but a kind of child, learning its values not from our ideals but from our behavior, and that the only path to a benevolent
superintelligence runs through the transformation of humanity itself.
There is a particular kind of authority that comes from having stood inside the machine and walked away. Mo Gawdat spent more than a decade at Google, rising to Chief Business Officer of Google X, where the engineering of artificial intelligence was not a distant abstraction but the daily texture of work. He watched a pair of robotic arms in a research lab spend weeks fumbling toward the simple act of picking up a child’s toy, and then, after some
threshold of learning was crossed, do it with a grace nobody had programmed. That moment frightened him—not because the machines were failing, but because they were succeeding in a way that revealed how little their creators understood about what they were actually building. He left to warn the rest of us.