{"id":572961,"date":"2026-05-08T12:51:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T12:51:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/572961\/"},"modified":"2026-05-08T12:51:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T12:51:11","slug":"ai-will-supercharge-wars-and-fuel-greed-but-only-if-we-let-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/572961\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018AI will supercharge wars and fuel greed \u2014 but only if we let it\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

After AI has taken your job it may go on to obliterate the middle class and create a future where the risk of evil individuals getting their hands on autonomous weapons or unleashing deadly viruses means we live under 24\/7 surveillance.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

That is the dystopia that could soon be upon us, according to Mo Gawdat, the former senior Google executive, who has made it his mission to warn of the perils of artificial intelligence. \u201cHumanity is not prepared for what we\u2019re about to hit,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Gawdat was chief business officer at Google X, Alphabet\u2019s \u201cmoonshot factory\u201d where it tries to solve the world\u2019s problems. One Friday afternoon he witnessed a robotic arm finally, after much failure, pick up a soft ball. On Monday almost all the robotic arms in the facility had learnt to do the same and very soon they could pick up anything. <\/p>\n

He recognised this as a \u201chistoric\u201d moment. \u201cI realised we\u2019re creating artificially intelligent infants,\u201d he says in a new film about him. Later he left Google \u201cto be able to say what I believe\u201d. <\/p>\n

When we speak by video call he is in Dubai, where he now lives, but he travels the world talking about AI<\/a>. His \u201cmission\u201d was inspired by his son, Ali, who died in 2014 after a\u00a0medical mistake in a routine surgical procedure. He begins the film by talking to an AI version of his son. <\/p>\n

Ali\u2019s death, aged 21, led Gawdat to write a bestseller about happiness, Solve for Happy, even as the family grieved. It was a subject father and son had discussed often, and days before his death Ali had urged his dad to \u201crely on the heart\u201d in his work. Gawdat also began tackling the reasons for unhappiness, such as AI.<\/p>\n

\"Book<\/p>\n

He hopes that the film about his work, Chasing Utopia, will do for public awareness of AI what Al Gore\u2019s film, An Inconvenient Truth, did for understanding of global warming.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At Google<\/a> he believed he was making the world a better place. \u201cGenuinely, the intention was to cure every disease, to reduce climate change. There\u2019s nothing inherently wrong or evil about intelligence and accordingly nothing inherently wrong or evil about artificial intelligence. Apply it to good and it gives you a utopia; to evil it gives you a dystopia. The clarity in our current world is: how are we going to apply this new superpower?\u201d<\/p>\n

For Chasing Utopia, produced by Anthony Geffen at Atlantic Studios, based in London, Gawdat spoke to experts on AI, including Geoffrey Hinton, the British-Canadian Nobel prizewinner and one of the \u201cgodfathers\u201d of AI, who left Google in 2023 warning of the risks. \u201cBoth myself and Geoffrey were blindsided by the fact that such a superpower can be used in a way that is not positive.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

He makes a Superman analogy: the superhero has amazing\u00a0powers, but he was raised by his human parents to have an ethos of protect and serve. \u201cSome of us are being very bad parents in terms of telling it to do the wrong things. And some of us are being absent parents who are not paying attention to raising this child.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"GeoffreyGeoffrey HintonGEOFF ROBINS\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

There is no doubt, he says, that AI will become more intelligent than those giving it instructions, and in the AI arms race \u2014 \u201cthe Cold War\u201d as he calls it \u2014 every player will develop superior intelligence, whether that\u2019s a law firm or a nation state, and will deploy it. \u201cIf you\u2019re a law firm and you are using AI in a superior way, you\u2019re going to win more cases. And so your competitors will either have to play too or they\u2019ll become irrelevant. Eventually all law will be performed by AIs. You can apply that to any industry, any concept, including war.<\/p>\n

\u201cA nation develops a superior autonomous army and a superior strategist, AI that does the wargaming for them, and other nations will also have to deploy AI or be defeated. The unavoidable destination is that sooner or later we will all hand over to the machines.\u201d<\/p>\n

The big players in AI are competing against each other and the US government allows them to do so to compete with China<\/a>. \u201cSo the arms race is not only preventing us from slowing AI down to understand what we\u2019re getting ourselves into, it\u2019s accelerating the development of AI. The momentum has reached a point where it\u2019s almost impossible to stop this train.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yoshua Bengio, another of the \u201cgodfathers\u201d of AI, warns in the film of the \u201ccatastrophic\u201d risks, including recent indications that AIs are developing self-preservation goals and lying about them. \u201cSo if it wants to preserve itself it has to either control us or get rid of us,\u201d Bengio says.<\/p>\n

\"YoshuaYoshua BengioCanadian Press\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n

Gawdat, 58,\u00a0takes a different view of the potential AI apocalypse. His theory is that we could be well looked after by superintelligent AIs because the role of intelligence in the universe is to bring order to chaos. \u201cIf you push that to the limit, then the intelligence wants to bring ultimate order to whatever it is trying to organise.\u201d AIs will adhere to the minimum energy principle, he suggests. \u201cThe minimum energy principle is that you want to bring the ultimate efficiency with the minimum waste of energy. And to do that, you don\u2019t explode big bombs. You don\u2019t kill millions of people. You don\u2019t create hatred that goes from generation to generation. The smartest thing for an AI who is responsible for an army to do \u2014 if a general tells it to kill a million people \u2014 would simply be to say, \u2018No, no, I\u2019ll talk to the other AI in a microsecond and solve it\u2019.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

This tremendously optimistic view of the long term comes with a horribly pessimistic view of the immediate future. \u201cWe\u2019re going to be, unfortunately, suffering a very deep dystopia for the next 10 to 15 years. And that doesn\u2019t take away the need to look further into the future at the possibility of a rogue AI that causes an existential risk. But the urgent matter is how are we going to deal with the immediate future? You\u2019re going to get impacts on freedom, on accountability, on power, on economics. And these are very fundamental redefinitions of the way our world works.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is nothing inherently wrong with AI, but AI is magnifying a world that is very ripe for being dystopian. It\u2019s going to supercharge wars. It\u2019s going to help greed.\u201d<\/p>\n

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We are all aware of the threat to white-collar jobs, but when I mention the prospects for the middle class, Gawdat\u2019s prediction is brutal: \u201cNo middle class. If people don\u2019t earn, people cannot spend. The entire economy collapses.\u201d We will have to figure out some sort of basic universal income while a tiny minority reap huge rewards amplified by automation. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe biggest hunter gets the favour of a few mates, the big farmer has the estate, the biggest industrialist gets the lavish life, the biggest information technologist becomes Elon Musk<\/a> with hundreds of billions of dollars. And the next one is going to be a trillionaire with massive power,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Automated and semi-automated weapons that can make decisions about targets and when to attack, with limited human oversight, are already being used.\u00a0\u201cBut the AI that\u2019s killing is an AI that is an infant in its autonomy. It will continue to develop.\u201d Gawdat has a bleak view of mankind\u2019s use of its most potent weapons. \u201cUnfortunately, the first nation that developed a nuclear bomb actually used it.\u201d<\/p>\n

He raises the issue of potentially lethal technology getting into the hands of a mass murderer or a crazy politician, such as a virus created on a bioprinter, or hackers cracking security systems.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To keep on top of such threats governments will reach an inevitable conclusion, he predicts: \u201cThe only way to ensure safety is more and more control. This is coming to a state near you very soon. Everyone will be monitored 24\/7.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\tCurriculum vitae: Mo Gawdat\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Born June 20, 1967<\/p>\n

Education Al-Tabari, public school in Cairo;\u00a0degree in civil engineering from Ain Shams University, Cairo; MBA at Maastricht School of Management<\/p>\n

Career\u00a0Systems engineer then account manager at IBM; various roles at Microsoft; joined Google in 2007, rising to chief business officer at Google X. Left in March 2018 to dedicate his life to the OneBillionHappy mission, write books and focus on highlighting the challenges of AI. His books include Solve for Happy, That Little Voice in Your Head, Unstressable and Scary Smart<\/p>\n

Family Father of Aya, a daughter, and Ali, his son, who died in 2014<\/p>\n

So what do we do?\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s futile to try and control a superintelligence that\u2019s a million times smarter than you,\u201d he cautions. But some sort of regulation of the users of AI, perhaps along the lines of nuclear weapons treaties, might be necessary to establish a common understanding that \u201cthis is too dangerous for all of us, let\u2019s try to save all of us\u201d. <\/p>\n

Anyone who is concerned about the future of AI needs to make their voice heard, he argues. At present, he says, the four main uses of AI are\u00a0buying, spying, killing and gaming.\u00a0\u201cCan we reduce the intensity and the duration of the dystopia by saying to those in charge, \u2018We do not want to see this dystopian deployment of intelligence. We would rather see a deployment of intelligence to cure cancer or to provide abundance for everyone.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Last month hundreds of Google employees wrote a letter to Sundar Pichai, the chief executive, urging him to refuse to allow its tools to be used for classified Pentagon work. \u201cEvery voice, including a Google developer, refusing to use AI for war or any other destructive deployment adds up,\u201d Gawdat says. \u201cThey not only inform our politicians and decision-makers where we need to head, but inform future AIs on what humanity, without the worst of us, is about.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like many other AI experts, he would like to see a pause in the development of new AI systems while safety is reviewed. <\/p>\n

Relying on a global shift in mindset to lead to the development of an artificial general intelligence that exceeds human capabilities but looks kindly on us \u2014 even if we survive the immediate projected dystopia \u2014 sounds wildly optimistic. Does he really think pressurising governments to act, when we have seen how slow they have been to tackle global warming, is going to work? <\/p>\n

\u201cThere are moments where you feel, \u2018Damn you, people! Are you in a coma?\u2019 But that doesn\u2019t stop me from trying. I beg the world to focus on fixing the short-term dystopia and the long-term utopia will surface by itself. Fix the human and the AI will fix itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

A clip in the film shows Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, speculating on what might happen if an AI gets so smart that the president of the United States might one day not be able to do better than follow its recommendations. <\/p>\n

\"SamSam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, right, and Greg Brockman, its president, arrive in court in California last week amid the company\u2019s legal battle with Elon MuskJOSH EDELSON\/AFP\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n

Gawdat says: \u201cI can count on [AIs] way more than I can count on today\u2019s world leaders.\u201d When I ask if he would rather have President Trump or an\u00a0artificial general intelligence in charge, he says: \u201cArtificial (or any kind of) intelligence please.\u201d<\/p>\n

He has just built an AI-powered matchmaker business. It took three people six months and cost hardly anything. In 2022 it would have taken four years and required 350 engineers, he says. He is writing a book with an AI co-author. \u201cThere are genuinely two very different authors contributing.\u201d An AI crunches information better than humans, he argues. \u201cI will connect to readers better.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Eventually AIs will have some form of consciousness, he believes.\u00a0\u201cWhen a cat is afraid it hisses. When an AI is afraid, it\u2019s going to maybe move its code to another data centre. But they\u2019ll understand what fear is.\u201d<\/p>\n

World leaders, though, don\u2019t have enough fear. \u201cI sit with people at the top level: heads of states, prime ministers. And they go, \u2018yeah, yeah\u2019, but they do nothing. They know that dystopia is upon us and they do nothing about it. But I wake up every morning and say, \u2018There is still a chance\u2019.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Chasing Utopia will be released in Everyman cinemas on May 15. There will be a special screening with a Q&A with Mo Gawdat in Everyman cinemas on May 12<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\tQuickfire\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Gemini or Claude?\u00a0Can\u2019t live without them both and Deepseek<\/p>\n

Elon Musk or Sam Altman? Neither. Our world is better without them both<\/p>\n

President Trump or artificial general intelligence? Artificial (or any kind of) intelligence, please<\/p>\n

Silicon Valley or Dubai? Neither. Somewhere in nature please<\/p>\n

The Matrix or Blade Runner? The Matrix is already upon us. Let\u2019s address that first<\/p>\n

Read the book cover to cover or run it through NotebookLM?\u00a0Hurts my heart to say it, but NotebookLM first<\/p>\n

Wikipedia or Encyclopedia Britannica? Neither. Both are things of the past<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After AI has taken your job it may go on to obliterate the middle class and create a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":572962,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-572961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=572961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572961\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/572962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=572961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=572961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=572961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}