Mo Gawdat

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.