Is There a Future for Algorithms?

If you were scrolling through your newsfeed in late September 2021, you may have caught this splashy headline from The Times of London that read, “Can this man save the world from artificial intelligence?”. The man in question was Mo Gawdat, an entrepreneur and senior tech executive who spent several years as the Chief Business Officer at GoogleX (now called X Development), Google’s semi-secret research facility, that experiments with moonshot projects like self-driving cars, flying vehicles, and geothermal energy. At X, Mo was exposed to the absolute cutting edge of many fields — one of which was AI. His experience seeing AI systems learn and interact with the world raised red flags for him — hints of the potentially disastrous failure modes of the AI systems we might just end up with if we don’t get our act together now.

Mo writes about his experience as an insider at one of the world’s most secretive research labs and how it led him to worry about AI risk, but also about AI’s promise and potential in his new book, Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World. He joined me to talk about just that on this episode of the TDS podcast.