Books
That Little Voice In Your Head: Adjust the Code That Runs Your Brain
Mo Gawdat
To fix a machine, first you need to find out what’s wrong with it. To fix unhappiness, you need to find out what causes it.
That Little Voice in Your Head is the practical guide to retraining your brain for optimal joy by Mo Gawdat, the internationally bestselling author of Solve for Happy. Mo reveals how by beating negative self-talk, we can change our thought processes, turning our greed into generosity, our apathy into compassion and invest in our own happiness.
This book provides readers with exercises to help reshape their mental processes. Drawing on his expertise in programming and his extensive study of neuroscience, Mo explains how – despite their incredible complexity – our brains behave in ways that are largely predictable. From these insights, he delivers this user manual for happiness.
Inspired by the life of his late son, Ali, Mo Gawdat has set out to share a model for happiness based on generosity and empathy towards ourselves and others. Using his experience as a former Google engineer and Chief Business Officer, Mo shares his 'code' for reprogramming our brain and moving away from the misconceptions modern life gives us.
That Little Voice in Your Head is available now.
Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World
Mo Gawdat
'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
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 Intelligence 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 bestselling 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 thirty 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.
In this “powerful personal story woven with a rich analysis of what we all seek” (Sergey Brin, cofounder of Google), Mo Gawdat, Chief Business Officer at Google’s [X], applies his superior logic and problem solving skills to understand how the brain processes joy and sadness—and then he solves for happy.
In 2001 Mo Gawdat realized that despite his incredible success, he was desperately unhappy. A lifelong learner, he attacked the problem as an engineer would: examining all the provable facts and scrupulously applying logic. Eventually, his countless hours of research and science proved successful, and he discovered the equation for permanent happiness.
Thirteen years later, Mo’s algorithm would be put to the ultimate test. After the sudden death of his son, Ali, Mo and his family turned to his equation—and it saved them from despair. In dealing with the horrible loss, Mo found his mission: he would pull off the type of “moonshot” goal that he and his colleagues were always aiming for—he would share his equation with the world and help as many people as possible become happier.
In Solve for Happy Mo questions some of the most fundamental aspects of our existence, shares the underlying reasons for suffering, and plots out a step-by-step process for achieving lifelong happiness and enduring contentment. He shows us how to view life through a clear lens, teaching us how to dispel the illusions that cloud our thinking; overcome the brain’s blind spots; and embrace five ultimate truths.
No matter what obstacles we face, what burdens we bear, what trials we’ve experienced, we can all be content with our present situation and optimistic about the future.
