Livestream: Equation for happiness is what the doc ordered

The team under Mo’s leadership designed innovative business models analogous to the disruptive technologies X created – like artificial intelligence and self-driving cars. 

In his talk regarding his book, he explains how the default setting for a human being is being happy. And Mo uses a simple equation to define happiness i.e. happiness equals the manner how ‘you think about the events in your life’, minus your expectations of how life should behave. 

He brings up the case of Ali, his son, best friend and mentor who helped Mo develop his happiness equation. Unfortunately, Ali, who Mo describes as the happiest person he knew succumbed to a preventable human error on the operating table, in the aftermath of an appendix inflammation. 

Mo talks about his life which turned upside down in the blink of an eye, planning a happy vacation with his family, charting out itineraries and long terms plans to losing his son at a very young age. 

He talks about a struggle that he undergoes to this day, of having lost his child and how he had every reason to be miserable for as long as he chose to. But then, Mo remembers Ali’s memorial when thousands of well-wishers walked in grief stricken, would come up to Mo, and how he would go on to console them and explain Ali’s model of happiness to them. 

The guests would then walk around the house admiring Ali’s pictures and leave their smiling and reassured. Inspired by his friends, Mo went on to set a tall order for himself, to make 10 mn people happy with his book - Solve for Happy , a tribute to his son, and a mission to share Ali’s model with those around the world. Mo has since then revised his target and set a new objective to make a billion happy. 

In another subsequent video, Mo goes on to explain how the apex of AI will lead to the creation of a singularity, a moment when a computer becomes smarter than a human being. While it may sound like a conspiracy theory, Mo prophesies that by 2029, AI will surpass human intelligence. And the learnings assimilated by machines can be used by them to the advantage of humans or even to their downfall. 

Mo believes that the values we communicate to our children will inform the ethics and patterns of machines, just like an 8-month-old child. Through billions of observations, the system evolves. So, it’s imperative the system learns the right values, like that of empathy, and more than anything, the notion of happiness.