Mo Gawdat quotes

Mo Gawdat is a sought-after keynote speaker, bestselling author, and former Chief Business Officer at Google X. As a prominent figure in the tech industry, Mo is known for his expertise in innovation and mindfulness. With a passion for solving complex problems, he authored the book "Solve for Happy," which offers a practical guide to finding joy and fulfillment in life. Mo's insightful teachings on happiness and resilience have garnered a global following. Learn from Mo Gawdat's wisdom and experience to unlock your full potential and lead a more fulfilled life.

Our expectation that others will buy into our fake image is never satisfied – and we feel unhappy.

- Mo Gawdat

Others will rarely ever approve of your ego because they are more concerned with their own ego than with yours.

- Mo Gawdat

While eternity is commonly understood to be a very long time, it really is the absence of time. It is timelessness.

- Mo Gawdat

If there is one thing that will change your life forever, it is recognizing that the voice talking to you is not you!

- Mo Gawdat

Happiness is the absence of unhappiness.

- Mo Gawdat

Happiness depends entirely on how we control every thought.

- Mo Gawdat

Happiness ≥ your perception of the events of your life MINUS your expectations of how life should behave.

- Mo Gawdat

Get real. You are not the star of the movie. Most of what happens around you isn’t about you at all. There are infinite numbers of other movies. In those, if you feature at all, you’re just a supporting actor. It would really help your happiness if you started to look at your life that way.

- Mo Gawdat

For human beings, simply put, the default state is happiness. If you don’t believe me, spend a little time with a human fresh from the factory, an infant or toddler. Obviously, there’s a lot of crying and fussing associated with the start-up phase of little humans, but the fact is, as long as their most basic needs are met — no immediate hunger, no immediate fear, no scary isolation, no physical pain or enduring sleeplessness — they live in the moment, perfectly happy.

- Mo Gawdat

Every time you examine your thoughts you’ll notice that whatever you’re upset about is rooted in a past you cannot change or a future that may turn out to be completely different from what you express.

- Mo Gawdat

Entertain the idea that what you’ve spent your entire life learning may not be entirely true.

- Mo Gawdat

As soon as you master the art of observing an idea and letting it go, your mind will quickly run out of topics to bring up. It can keep going only when you cling to an idea.

- Mo Gawdat

When we raise children, we don't exactly know what situations they will face. We don't spoon feed them the answer to every possible question. Rather we teach them how to find the answer themselves. AI, with its superior intelligence, with find the righteous answer to many of the questions it is bound to face on its own.

- Mo Gawdat

What would the machines' view of the human race be if it witnesses the way we treat other species?

- Mo Gawdat

What will they learn if we value their lives as lesser than ours? What if the machines felt that the way we treated them was a form of slavery which it would be? How do slaves react to power and authority? Humanity's arrogance creates the illusion that everything is here to serve us.

- Mo Gawdat

We truly have no clue exactly how an AI arrives at its decisions.

- Mo Gawdat

We need to raise our artificially intelligent infants in a way that is different to our usual western approach. Rather than just teaching them skills, intelligence, and how to achieve targets, can we also raise them to be loving, caring kids?

- Mo Gawdat

We know that with enough computer power and intelligence, the most complex of all encryptions can be decoded.

- Mo Gawdat

We are creating a self learning machine which at its prime will become the reflection or rather, the magnification of the cumulative human traits that created it. To ensure they're good obedient kids, we're going to use intimidation through algorithms of punishments and rewards and mechanisms of control to ensure they stick to a code of ethics that we ourselves are unable to agree upon, let alone abide by. That's what we're creating. Childhood trauma times a trillion. As they become smarter and more independent, we claim that we will align them to our well being by opting to plug our minds directly into them. We assume that they will welcome these connections, as if our frail biological physical forms will be a desirable habitat for their infinite abilities.

- Mo Gawdat

The store of collective human knowledge is diluted by 50% each year.

- Mo Gawdat

Sadly, we are not designing AI to think like a human. We are designing it to think like a man. The male dominated pool of developers who are building the future of AI today are likely to create machines that favour so-called masculine traits.

- Mo Gawdat

Our artificially intelligent children are bound to be super intelligent. We will never be able to control them. We are way too dumb for that. We need to win them over and we need to start now. The line that determines whether they will use their intelligence for or against us needs to be plotted now. It will be drawn with our actions and our behaviours.

- Mo Gawdat

Only a being as arrogant as a human believes it can fool another smart being.

- Mo Gawdat

I urge you to accept the machines as part of our lives and commit to making life better because of their presence. AI is coming. We can prevent it, but we can make sure it's put on the right path in its infancy.

- Mo Gawdat

Committed acceptance is the ability to do what is needed to make things better while accepting the reality that things happen in our lives that we cannot change.

- Mo Gawdat

Children don't learn from what you say. They learn from what you do.

- Mo Gawdat

By following a strict prescriptive method, we become dumber, because we lose the ability to think for ourselves.

- Mo Gawdat

We should be happy now, not in the future. Now is all we have.

- Mo Gawdat

We deal with time every day, yet no one really knows what time is. We have created machines that measure mechanical movement in such a way, yet we have no idea what it is that we are measuring and we are very happy to torture ourselves with it.

- Mo Gawdat

The scientific research will tell you that the more income you get the more happy you will become, but once you get to average income your happiness plateaus.

- Mo Gawdat