Artificial intelligence is bigger than climate change, warns Mo Gawdat.

An Egyptian entrepreneur and writer who once led Google/Alphabet’s semi-secretive research division is very stressed about artificial intelligence (AI) but claims he has a solution to slow down its rise. 

Mo Gawdat, a former top executive of Google X in 2007-2010, says in an interview on “The Diary of a CEO” podcast that AI “is beyond an emergency” and “it's the biggest thing we need to do today, bigger than climate change.” 

Gawdat believes that “something incredibly disruptive” will happen within the next two years, affecting the entire planet at a scale overshadowing the climate change. Among the AI-driven events to expect during this timeframe are cybercrime tools like deepfakes and the mass job loss as a result of automation. 

Both deepfakes and automation are already affecting humans’ lives, but this is only the beginning, he warned, without explaining why he thinks the catastrophe will happen in two years.

In another podcast called “Secret Leaders”, the businessman said AI would come to look at humans at one point as “scum” that deserved not to exist, creating ultimately killing machines to deal with our civilization. 

While things look bad for people indeed by Gawdat’s terms, the expert has a proposal how to slow down the rise of AI: taxing the Silicon Valley giants as hard as possible.

"I have a very clear call for action for governments. I'm saying tax AI-powered businesses at 98 percent so suddenly you do what the open letter was trying to do, slow them down a little bit, and at the same time get enough money to pay for all of those people that will be disrupted by the technology," Google X’s ex-CEO suggested, describing the measure as a prelude for negotiations with the big techs.

Gawdat is one of the latest technology experts who has joined the many voices demanding a pause on major AI experiments and the regulation of the AI industry.

In 2021, Gawdat published the book "Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World."