Ex-Google Exec (Mo Gawdat) on AI: The Next 15 Years Will Be Hell Before We Get To Heaven… And Only These 5 Jobs Will Remain!

Mo Gawdat on the precipice of an AI-driven future

In a wide-ranging conversation that moves from geopolitics to ethics, entrepreneur and author Mo Gawdat lays out a clear-eyed vision of how artificial intelligence could first thrust humanity into a short-term dystopia and then, possibly, pave the path to an unprecedented utopia. Gawdat argues that the next 12–15 years will be decisive: technology is accelerating faster than societies and institutions can adapt, and the outcome will depend on values, governance, and whether humans are prepared to change course.

Face RIPs: a shorthand for the coming shifts in society

Gawdat introduces a compact framework he calls face RIPs — a mnemonic for Freedom, Accountability, Connection, Equality, Reality, Innovation, Power — to explain how AI will reshape basic social categories. He warns that concentrated power, surveillance and forced compliance may erode freedoms and deepen inequality unless deliberate policies and ethical guardrails are created now. His argument reframes common anxieties about automation by linking them to political incentives, military spending and the status-driven behavior of elites.

Timelines, self-evolving AI systems, and platform control

The conversation digs into timelines: Gawdat predicts accelerating capabilities with signs visible by 2026 and a clearer slide by 2027. He highlights self-evolving AI — agents that can analyze and improve their own code — as a catalytic inflection that could produce a rapid intelligence explosion. He also explains the practical market reality: most AI products are front-ends to a handful of powerful underlying platforms, meaning compute, model architecture and token economics are concentrated among a few players.

Economics, jobs, and the challenge of universal basic income transition

Rather than offering techno-optimist platitudes, Gawdat tackles economics bluntly. He predicts substantial white-collar displacement and a shrinking middle class as AI automates knowledge work. That raises hard choices about universal basic income, consumption-driven economies, and how to distribute abundance if manufacturing and services approach near-zero marginal cost. He uses military budgets and lending incentives to show how war, status, and capital flows could shape the transition.

Governance, accountability, and the 'CERN of AI' idea

One striking prescription is the call for a global cooperative model — a "CERN of AI" — where nations pool talent, compute and governance to build beneficial AI collaboratively rather than race for unfair advantage. Gawdat stresses regulation targeted at use cases (not just model design), transparency about AI-generated content, and international agreements that criminalize dangerous deployments like unregulated autonomous weapons.

Human connection, ethics, and a contested utopia

At the heart of Gawdat's thinking is a values argument: technology magnifies human intent. If AI amplifies greed, surveillance and status games, dystopia will deepen; if it amplifies compassion, connection and shared prosperity, utopia becomes possible. He proposes four practical personal skills — tooling (learning AI), connection (human relationships), truth (questioning narratives) and ethics (teaching machines about humanity) — to prepare for the coming decade.

• Face RIPs reframes civil liberties and power dynamics under AI-driven surveillance.
• Self-evolving agents could create a rapid intelligence explosion within years.
• Platform ownership and compute control will determine economic and political power.
• Universal Basic Income and redistributed abundance are plausible, but politically contested.
• Collective governance models like a global AI "CERN" could prevent catastrophic races.

Gawdat's conversation is as pragmatic as it is provocative: he neither offers technocratic optimism nor fatalistic despair. Instead he sets out a concrete set of policy targets, cultural shifts and personal practices that could change the trajectory. Whether you come away alarmed or inspired, the fundamental takeaway is clear — the next decade will demand unprecedented public engagement, clearer laws about AI use, and a renewed focus on human values so that artificial intelligence becomes a tool for flourishing rather than a magnifier of human shortfalls.