Tristan Harris

Well, you are conjuring a thought experiment from Nick Bostrom, which I'm sure you're aware of.

And the paper you're referring to is the Vulnerable World Hypothesis, in which he says that as we discover more and more technologies that in a decentralized way have the capacity to destroy things, so like your example of

If it turned out that microwaving sand created a nuclear reaction that blew up the entire world and we publish that knowledge and it spread virally on social media, how many minutes, hours, or seconds would it take before the world blew up?

And then the only answer to a distributed, available to everybody destructive capacity would be a global totalitarian society that monitors and surveils everyone and what they're doing.

So you prevented mass destruction, but you got 1984 Big Brother, and that's an uncheckable power that people cannot fight back against.

I am very worried about mass surveillance.

I think that what happened with Anthropic is hopefully bootloading a global immune system to the risks of AI-enhanced mass surveillance.

Because in a way, Big Brother could have never happened without AI.

When you have an AI that can process every camera and every face and all of the emails and text messages that are flowing through everything, and you can actually ask the question as a state, who are the number one threats in my society that I need to suppress?

And it tells you and summarizes instantly who those people are, synthesizing all these data streams.

How can you fight back against an uncheckable power when it knows all of your secrets?

Yeah.

You can't.

So we're faced with very tough choices on both ends.

And I did this in a TED Talk I gave this last year called The Narrow Path, that we have to avoid both outcomes.

We have to somehow be committed to finding the narrow path between

you know, decentralizing destructive power in everyone's hands without responsibility, without a commensurate wisdom or responsibility in which you get chaos or catastrophes, or over centralizing that power in uncheckable ways in which you get runaway dystopias.

And we have to find something like a third attractor to quote Daniel Schmachtenberger or a narrow path that seeks to avoid both these outcomes.

You could say that that is outside the laws of physics or not possible, but

But I think what's important is to be committed to and living from the place where we would be finding that path, because the only chance that we would have of finding it would be requiring that everyone was living in service of it.