Forget Covid – is artificial intelligence the real threat to humanity?

The former Google X executive Mo Gawdat is beginning the rounds on his new book Scary Smart, which renders artificial intelligence to be as much a force of nature as Covid. Indeed, he sees AI as nothing less than the next evolutionary step on this planet. For Gawdat, it's clear: the capacity for learning from data and experience in these machines is on an exponential curve (which doesn't just gently ascend but shoots eventually into the sky). At some singular point – probably aided by the unimaginable calculating power of quantum computing, and apparently by the end of the decade – we will be in the presence of massively superior beings. READ MORE: Even Google's algorithm understands this one key fact about the Union Gawdat wants us – indeed, warns us – to think of them as "our children", with a voracious appetite for learning from their environment.