#1079 - Tristan Harris - AI Expert Warns: “This Is The Last Mistake We’ll Ever Make”
4/2/20262 hr 8 min
Tristan Harris is a tech ethicist, entrepreneur, and a speaker. Are we sleepwalking into disaster? AI is unlocking massive progress, but the dangers hiding beneath the surface are exactly what experts fear most. So what’s coming… and could it spiral beyond our control? Expect to learn why AI is distinct from other kind of technologies, what the Ali Baba rogue AI catastrophe that should scare everyone is, how worried Tristan is about the impact of AI deepfakes and misinformation campaigns, what’s happening with the AI safety discussion, if we should be skeptical of AI companies pushing just as hard but pretending that they’re not, the end result that AI companies are looking for and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get up to 20% off Timeline powered by Mitopure, now at a lower price, at https://timeline.com/modernwisdom Get up to $350 off the Eight Sleep Pod 5 at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get 160+ biomarkers tested for just $1/day, plus an extra $25 off at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsChris Williamson· Host0:00
What is the journey of how you arrived thinking about the problems of AI?
Tristan Harris· Guest0:04
[sighs] Um, well, most people know me or our work through the film The Social Dilemma, and I used to be a design ethicist at Google in 2012, 2013. So that basically meant how do you ethically design technology that is gonna reshape, especially the attention and information environment of humanity? So it's like there I was at Google, it was 2012, 2013. This is in the heat of the kind of social media boom. I think Instagram had just been bought by Facebook. My friends in college started Instagram, so, like, I was part of this cohort and milieu of people who really built this technology that the rest of the world just thought was natural. Like, this is just drinking water. Like, I just drink Instagram. I just live in this environment. And so while, like, I saw billions of people enter into this psychological habitat, that I knew the handful of, like, five or six people that were designing and tweaking it and making it work a certain way.
Chris Williamson· Host1:04
Architected it, yeah.
Tristan Harris· Guest1:04
Yeah, exactly. And I think that that's just, like, a fundamental thing I want people to get is, you know, you think of technology like it just lands and it's just inevitable, and there's just nothing we can do, and it just comes from above, and it's like there are human beings making choices. And, you know, as someone who grew up in the era of, you know, the Macintosh, like my co-found-- So I have a nonprofit called the Center for Humane Technology. My co-founder, Aza Raskin, his, his father invented the Macintosh