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  • Scary Smart

  • The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World
  • By: Mo Gawdat
  • Narrated by: Mo Gawdat
  • Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (308 ratings)
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Scary Smart

By: Mo Gawdat
Narrated by: Mo Gawdat
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Summary

One of The Sunday Times' Business Books of the Year

Artificial intelligence is smarter than humans. It can process information at lightning speed and remain focused on specific tasks without distraction. AI can see into the future, predicting outcomes and even use sensors to see around physical and virtual corners. So why does AI frequently get it so wrong?

The answer is us. Humans design the algorithms that define the way that AI works, and the processed information reflects an imperfect world. Does that mean we are doomed? In Scary Smart, Mo Gawdat, the internationally best-selling author of Solve for Happy, draws on his considerable expertise to answer this question and to show what we can all do now to teach ourselves and our machines how to live better. With more than 30 years' experience working at the cutting-edge of technology and his former role as chief business officer of Google [X], no one is better placed than Mo Gawdat to explain how the Artificial Intelligence of the future works.

By 2049, AI will be a billion times more intelligent than humans. Scary Smart explains how to fix the current trajectory now, to make sure that the AI of the future can preserve our species. This book offers a blueprint, pointing the way to what we can do to safeguard ourselves, those we love and the planet itself.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2021 Mo Gawdat (P)2021 Macmillan Publishers International Ltd

Critic reviews

"Technology is putting our humanity at risk to an unprecedented degree. This book is not for engineers who write the code or the policy makers who claim they can regulate it. This is a book for you. Because, believe it or not, you are the only one that can fix it." (Mo Gawdat)

"From a brilliant mind comes a terrifying prediction." (Tim Ash, bestselling author of Unleash Your Primal Brain)

What listeners say about Scary Smart

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Don’t be fooled by his gospel of AI.

Why do I call this gospel? The basic premise of this talk is AI could be hell on Earth but if you’re good to AI and use his app you too can be happy and have heaven on Earth. He tells his sales pitch with truths and half truths. He uses simplified psychology to make it sound plausible and extends this to the functioning of AI. He even admits he is selling a ponzi scheme of happiness. It makes him sound honest but in the end it sounds too much like a sales pitch for his app, another best seller and a fat bank account.

Anyone educated will find flaws in his logic and understand the fear mongering he is doing to get people fired up for his ponzi scheme of happiness. A few notable things that stuck with me are, “WhatsApp is like telepathy”. I wouldn’t call instant messaging telepathy any more than I would call an old fashioned phone call over a landline telepathy.
He keeps calling AI “our children” which is too much of a godly metaphor for which there’s no place here. AI requires servers and lots of resources which only corporations can provide and control.
Let me entertain the psychology for a moment. Mo Gawdat says if you traumatize your child this child will grow up to be anxious and defensive. Possibly, and I call this a half truth, however exceptions make the rule. Not all psychopaths have had a traumatic childhood and the case of James Fallon, a neuroscientist, comes to mind. He is a psychopath albeit a benevolent one.
To say that trauma will cause this reaction is too much nurture and not enough nature. Both psychopathy and empathy are survival traits which work well under certain circumstances.
Lastly comes to mind that AI and AGI is designed to work on silicon processors and I question if human psychology is applicable to these processes any more than human psychology is to a shark.

What the future will bring is anyone’s guess. Many authors have tried and failed to predict the future. Humans haven’t fully grasped to what nefarious or good purposes we can put AI.

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19 people found this helpful

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    1 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

Flawed logic with some very dubious conclusions

Perhaps if you have zero experience in IT or engineering, then the rationale behind the author's conclusions might make an impression. For those who are already in the industry and can actually see through the fundamentally flawed arguments, avoid this book at all costs. It is an unadulterated sales pitch for an app that will make you so "happy" that you will need to download it immediately. Cha ching! He is repetitive and sounds like a broken record by the end of the book - thank goodness I listened at 1.5x speed so at least I do not feel that I wasted the entire time listening to it.
See through the fog of fear mongering and read a book on meditation and mindfulness - it will bring you more enlightenment and entertainment.

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Sales Pitch, Patronising and Uninformative

Author presented an armchair-understanding level information with an "I'm smart you're dumb", holier than thou tone. Very little actual detail about AI beyond vague speculations of what may happen in the future.
The author ended the book giving a sales pitch for a soon to be released app he is creating, including giving discount codes within the body of the story.
Avoid if possible, look elsewhere for information on AI.

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

The power of love

I was looking for an introduction to AI and now understand that man has created a god in his own image. The future survival of mankind depends on the role we now all play in shaping the morals, ethics and emotional well-being of the creature we have manifested into life! It appears that every digital act we perform needs to be done with good intentions and love if we want to avoid a dystopian future !

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4 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Mind blowing and something. Everyone has to listen/read

"Scary Smart on Audible is an absolute gem! Mo Gawdat's insightful exploration of intelligence and its complexities is a true masterpiece. His eloquent narration keeps you engaged from start to finish, while his profound ideas on harnessing our cognitive potential for positive impact are nothing short of inspiring. This audiobook offers a delightful blend of thought-provoking content and engaging delivery, making it an essential addition to anyone's collection. Prepare to be enlightened and motivated to unlock your own 'scary smart' potential after listening to this extraordinary work."

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2 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Probably the most important book in the world

I’m convinced. We’ve got to get this message to everyone as quickly as we can.

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Must Read

Everything that I've experienced here is so real that it scares me but also gives me hope and confidence that a better future is possible! thanks Mo

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    2 out of 5 stars
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Okay, but some glaring issues. It’s a mess.

I think the most significant issue is the author’s tendency to anthropomorphise AIs in a way that is not justified. He repeatedly refers to AIs as “teenagers” or “kids” and assumes that they will act in the way humans do as they grow up, but he doesn’t provide any convincing reason for why he thinks this will be the case and that seems dubious- there’s no reason to think that, for example, a convolutional neural network or a random forest will have a psychology that is anything like a human child, and indeed they can’t have that psychology.

Part of the book overlaps very heavily with CGP Grey’s video “How AIs, like ChatGPT, learn”. Although it’s not word-for-word copied from there, the same concepts appear in the same order and even the analogies used are identical (“builder bot” and “teacher bot”).

The author repeatedly goes on rants about how humans are stupid, narcissistic, arrogant, violent, and evil, and while maybe this could have been used appropriately as a hyperbole once or twice, he does it several more times than that and it becomes jarring.

The book has some sections where the author tells the reader to make sure they’re sitting down for this next bit, or to pause and really stop to think about that last bit. It’s annoying and breaks the immersion.

At one point the author goes on a barely relevant tangent about the Quran and how it is important to look after one’s mother. He manages to shoehorn it into a point about AI looking after us as its “parents”, but this is still based on a flawed anthropomorphism of the AIs.

All in all, this book is okay if you want a book about AI that is heavily dumbed down for laymen if you can get past the serious issues it has, but I would instead recommend “Superintelligence” by Nick Bostrom for academics, or “Human Compatible” by Stuart Russel or “The Creativity Code” by Marcus du Sautoy for laymen.

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So high level I got a nose bleed

This is not a book about anything in any way thechical.
It is an extremely high level book on concepts and thought exercises. A lot of scare mongering about what could happen with little or no context about what is currently happening. I did not learn anything from reading this I only gained an understanding how to dumb things down to the lowest common dominator.

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Must Read

Probably one of the most important books I've ever read. Mo Gawdat explains complex ideas in a really simple way.

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