Tristan Harris
speaker
1,019 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 17 Sep
Tristan Harris’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Hey everyone, this is Tristan Harris, and welcome to your undivided attention.
So the conversation you're about to hear I recorded while I was in Berlin, just a few blocks away from the Stasi Museum, which is dedicated to the history of East Germany's surveillance state.
What struck me about the kind of surveillance that's on display is just how laborious it all was.
Every file had to be recorded.
It had to be examined by a person.
Every tape was listened to and transcribed by hand.
Every informant was someone who had to be recruited, paid, and managed.
It was expensive and time consuming work.
And it reminded me of an argument that my friend Yival Harari made in a TED talk in two thousand eighteen.
That democracy prevailed over fascism and communism in the 20th century, not because of any inherent advantage, but because the technology of that age favored open democratic societies.
It was simply too difficult, too costly to centralize power with pre-digital technology.
But you've all warned that with the rise of AI, that calculus might flip.
that it might actually become far more efficient to run highly centralized authoritarian governments.
Найс лета, I worry that we're starting to see exactly what you vol was worrying about.
Right now, police across all levels of government, from small town sheriffs to massive federal agencies, are adopting AI technology at a staggering rate, and they're using it to build out the kind of efficient centralized surveillance state apparatus that you've all warned about.
So take for example, you know, the recent deployment of hundreds of thousands of automated license plate readers or ALPRs across the country from companies like Flock or Axon.
And on their face, these cameras are just there to help police track cars by license plates.
But as you hear in this conversation, they actually are just the most visible frontier of an AI-powered digital dragnet that gives police the ability to analyze extraordinary amounts of data about private citizens.
So today on the show we've invited two experts on how police are using AI technology today and what we can expect in the near future and what protections we need to create now before it's too late.
Andrew Ferguson is a law professor at George Washington University who studies how policing technology collides with constitutional law.
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