Former Google X exec warns the AI era will break the old rules

Mo Gawdat is a former chief business officer at Google X and a longtime tech leader who worked on scaling Google in emerging markets. In this interview, he argues modern AI isn’t “just software” but a new kind of intelligence that learns, improves, and could soon operate with real-world agency through robots and autonomous systems.

Gawdat warns that the biggest near-term danger isn’t intelligence itself, but what humans tell powerful systems to do, including persuasion, misinformation, surveillance, cyber conflict, and automated warfare. He predicts a turbulent transition as jobs and economies are disrupted, and says the world may be forced to rethink capitalism in an era where “abundance” drives costs toward zero.