Silicon Valley Girl: AI, Tech and Career Growth - Most Replayed Moment: Ex-Google X Chief Reveals Why College Is Over in 10 Years

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

What if the smartest thing you could do for your kidsin the age of AI is not send them to college?Mo Gawdat is the former Chief Business Officer at Google X,where he spent over a decade running business innovationsbefore becoming one of the world's leading voices on AIand its impact on humanity.In this Moment, Mo Gawdat reveals why he believes collegewon't exist in ten years, the four skills every kid needsto prepare for an AI-first world, and his prediction thatAGI is arriving this year.Listen to the full episode here!Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/episode/1tMNXqcvziqiV1xgT032ih?si=zB4Lk1A4TduntKVsSzSq9QApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/il/podcast/silicon-valley-girl-ai-tech-and-career-growth/id1819090545?i=1000758651130Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/E0Q96IKXx6Q?si=BfISl1WByxtLJBpwLinks:⁠⁠⁠⁠𝕏 : ⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/siliconvalleymm⁠⁠⁠🔗 Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/⁠⁠⁠💼 LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko⁠⁠⁠

So if we need to solve this intelligence problem, do you think universities is the right way? What's going to happen to education in general? I think education is over. Completely over. Like that's it? I mean, education used to be the technology that enabled learning. That technology moved from one to one relationships between a tutor and a student to one to a few in a church format or a mosque format or whatever. then it became online, then it became, right?

But the truth is now you're going to outsource. Who remembers the arithmetic tables today? Even I, you do? Yeah, yeah. All of us who love mathematics, we still remember all of those things. We love to do them. But if I told you 67.4 divided by 33.375, I can do it in my head, but I won't. Right?

I'll take my calculator out and do it. And I think that's what's going to happen. that extension of humanity, you now for the first time are given an extra connection to extra memory, to an archive of all human memory and knowledge, to a math engine that sadly, as much as I hate to say it, is better than me now, to a deep learning and deep search that, you know, that can do things that probably my old brain cannot do anymore. But again, it just takes away your ability to think. But my calculator took away my ability to do those complex arithmetic in my head.

But don't you think having that ability taught you how to think? Correct. Kind of structured your brain, right? Correct. This is why I'm very grateful to the university for not allowing us to use a scientific to a third year. Exactly. That's why I think.

Do you think? But we don't have that. We don't have that for our younger generations. day. They are growing with AI. So they can either copy a chat of their girlfriend and drop it in Chad GPT and say, what do you think? And Chad GPT will say, ah, she's an asshole, right? Or they can actually become smarter. So one of the things I keep suggesting in education, and I do that with lots of universities, is I say, exams should be over. Okay? So think of it this way. We wanted in our past to develop children that could solve problems, say, or, you know,

than IQ of 140. 140 is quite good. If you get 170, that's amazing. I worked with people who are in the 200s. Incredible intelligence, but very narrow focused. I think we should from now on take people and their AIs and say the target is 300, the target is 500, the target is 500, the target is 700, elevate humanity by allowing people to use those machines as an extension of their limited memory of their limited processing speed, of their limited bandwidth, and allow them to write books better, to do research better. So I woke up literally, I'm not kidding you, three Sundays ago with an idea that is just taking me over.

So I decided to write, but this time I decided to write in a different format. I decided my books are going to be 140 pages long instead of 300 pages long, and I'm writing it in four weeks. That's a very... I couldn't have, and I'm actually literally 20 pages away from the end of the book. Wow. Right? And the reason why is because I still write 10 hours a day when I'm highly motivated.

But damn, the amount of research and references and comparative analysis and number crunching. And remember, I'm not gullible. I don't go to the AI and say, what do you think of this? I go and say, I'm thinking of this. find me everything for and against. Okay? Give me a report that I can read in... I love that problem. Yeah.

Everything for and against. And now I'm smarter. And then I rewrite it and give it to another AI. Who's going to teach our kids to do that? Who taught our kids to use their iPhones? But no, you found a great way to use it, right? What you're describing is incredible. But I don't think an average kid in the U.S. would just do that.

So somebody has to tell them. And that's... You know why that is? Because we want those kids to be stupid. We don't teach them how to... So you have to think of the bigger system. The bigger system does not want intelligent people anymore. I think they just can't adapt that fast.

Everyone can, for sure. So do you think, like my kids are four and six years old right now, do you think I should be saving for their college or... Absolutely not. There's not going to be college at all. In 10 years already? 100%. I feel like we're not that fast as humanity is not that fast to adapt.

I feel like... So, look, colleges like software. The capability of someone becoming very intelligent without college is going to be there for everyone. However, Harvard will continue to want to make money, so they're going to continue to market to everyone. I didn't go to Harvard, not because I couldn't, but because what a waste of time. And I know they're going to attack me now, but what a waste of time. I'm a very highly specialized person, okay, who has intelligence in a very, very narrow space,

who invested his entire life in that narrow space, like a proper scientist should. And so the idea here is the following. The idea is that we're going to continue to brand ourselves as MBAs and PhDs. A brand, right? That's going to continue for a while. Remember, however, that the purchasing power of the few who can continue to do that is going to become less and less available across society. And for most of the rest of us, again, you have to ask yourself the question. If you thought of the big picture, the helicopter view of this, why would capitalism want to educate you at all if it's the end of labor?

What should I be teaching my kids? I told you four things. One is they need to be the absolute leaders of AI. I'm so sorry to be the messenger on this. It's important, however, for people to wake up. Yeah. Okay? So one is be the absolute best.

AI is your friend. It's not your enemy. It's those who use it badly that are your enemy. So be the absolute best at it. Master it more than anyone else. That's number one. Number two is learn agility. You know, whatever I told you today,

maybe in February, that will be different. So I personally spent four hours a day to stay up to date, but I'm a techie and a geek and I need to understand the architectures and systems and so on. I think everyone should have at least an hour a week to stay updated on AI within their system. I have a separate AI YouTube account. So when I go into that separate account, the AI basically...

It feeds me AI. Okay, so that's number two, agility, agility, agility, and respond. Don't be scared because the cost of AB testing now is zero. That's number two. Number three is ethics, ethics, ethics, ethics. Build AIs for good. Insist on government supporting AIs for good. Refuse that governments are using AI for targeting and surveillance and weapons, autonomous weapons, and these are getting priorities in terms of government spending.

And stop believing what you're told. Okay, these are the four top skills of the world that we live in. I will say this one more time. Intelligence is a force with no polarity. AI is not good and it's not evil. It's an opportunity available to every one of us. If you use it for good, it's the good of all of humanity. If you use it for evil, it's the destruction, the dystopia of all of humanity.

Now I call the problem that we have at hand, I call it raising Superman. Okay? You have this alien being that came to play. planet Earth, has superpowers. Its superpower is intelligence, most valuable power in the universe, right? And, you know, those superpowers didn't make that young infant Superman. If the parents that adopted him told him to steal from every bank and kill every enemy, you would have become supervillain. We don't make decisions based on our intelligence. We make decisions based on our value set as informed by our intelligence. And this, in my mind, is the most definitive moment

in human history. Why? Because all of this is coming online. It's coming online way faster than people think. My absolute prediction is that AGI is this year. The interfaces to AGI are not going to be available this year, but the capabilities of AI being smarter than us in most things are already there. We're not going to be able to get them to run a company yet. We need the interfaces for that. That may take a few years. But they will have the capability if we interface them ourselves. Now, what does that mean? It means that we have to start talking about those things in this new world and new economy. Now, before we end up on the dystopia only, remember, my absolute belief is that after those 12 years, we're going to end up in a utopia that's

biblical in nature. Why, believe it or not? Because of something in my writing, I refer to as the fourth inevitable. The first three inevitables in, you know, I wrote that in 2020 is that AI is absolutely going to happen, is going to progress until it's smarter than all of us, and that a few mistakes will happen on the way. These were the three first inevitable. The fourth inevitable is that because of the arms race we've created around artificial intelligence, anyone who develops a superior AI capability is going to deploy it. And those who don't will become irrelevant.

And so as a result, as we continue to progress AI, the only answer in game theory is that we will deploy the AI that we develop. And so we will simply create an environment where AI is in charge of everything. If you're a low firm and your competitor deploys AI lawyers and you don't, you're going to lose. You can either deploy AI lawyers or leave the market. Either way, AI is going to become the lawyer. in a year, in five years, and ten years, forget time. Yeah. Because if I told you there was a, you know, a media coming to planet Earth, you wouldn't tell me, you know, when.

Well, it's important if it's my lifetime or... Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you expect that it will be in your lifetime, it doesn't matter really if it's in a week or two weeks, right? Now, what I'm trying to say here is this. If everything is handed over to AI, then with that simple understanding of physics, you'd understand that AI will be benevolent. In the absence of evil humans that tell it what to do, greedy humans, fearful humans, angry humans, egocentric humans, in the absence of that, let me try to explain it.

If you think of physics as a result of entropy, that our world is designed for chaos, right? Our universe is designed for chaos. then the role of intelligence is to bring order to that chaos. That's the only thing that intelligence does. It organizes things together so that it looks like this so we can use it as a microphone. And the more intelligent you become, the more you follow what in physics we call the law of minimum energy or the minimum energy configuration. So basically, the most intelligent people I've ever worked with are not only trying to solve the problem.

They're trying to solve the problem with the least harm or the least waste. with the least utilization of resources, with the least waste of time and so on and so forth. The more intelligent you are, the less you want to waste. And so if you give a dumb person a political problem, they'll say, okay, let's go invade another country. If you give a very intelligent person a political problem, they'll look into the depths of it

and find the least harmful, the least wasteful approach, the minimum energy principle. Right? And so if we hand over to AI the force inevitable sooner or later, okay, they are in charge of everything. There will be a day where a general will tell the AI, go kill a million people over there. And they will go, like, why? This is so stupid. I'll talk to the other AI in a microsecond and solve it. We have to pass the dystopia to get to that utopia. Okay. And to pass that dystopia, as I said, there are four skills for us as individuals,

But there is a skill for us as a society to insist that every AI is deployed ethically, to invest only in ethical AIs, to use only ethical AIs, to show our children that ethical AI is the only AI that is welcome. If you want to stay ahead in the AI era, follow Silicon Valley Girl podcast on your favorite platform. New episode every week on AI careers and how to not get left behind. Thank you.