Tristan Harris

And he said, mark my words, AI is far more dangerous than nukes.

And he said this in like, what was it, 2015, 2016?

Like way before people were taking AI seriously.

Like back then, AI was just...

recommending what other product you should get on Amazon and doing facial recognition for toll booths and bridges and stuff like that.

And ironically, the paperclip maximizing example did make people sound ridiculous and insane.

That then got really, you know, diminished.

And what's the word I'm looking for?

It just made people, it was used to tarnish people's reputation if you talked about paperclips.

But it's funny because people say, oh, like the AI is going to – for people that don't know the example, it's like there you are and the AI is going to be told to maximize paperclips.

And then the way it will figure out how to do that is figuring out any strategy, which means like turning every atom in the universe to paperclips, which means like, you know, melting all the humans down and getting them to – it's just taken to this extreme.

And it sounds totally sci-fi.

But if you actually ask a baby AI called social media that's pointed at your brainstem, figuring out just what video to get you to watch that keeps you on the screen, and you say maximize engagement, well, conflict and rivalry and civil war is really good for engagement.

So in a way, we have been maximizing a paperclip called attention and eyeballs for a long time, and it's driving up division and rivalry everywhere around the world, and democracies are backsliding everywhere around the world.

And it's driving up confirmation bias all around the world.

And the point isn't that the baby AI of social media hates you or hates your well-being or hates your connections or hates your democracy.

It's just that it doesn't care about anything other than whatever keeps your eyeballs.

And that little baby AI that was just figuring out which photo or video to throw in front of your nervous system was enough to completely transform everything, everything, everything about how our society worked.

And I saw that, by the way, and I'm not some kind of like, it's not like I especially see the future, but in 2013, it was so obvious to me, if you take these incentives really far in a decade, I can tell you where you're going to live in.

And the thing that I want people to feel is if you can see the incentive, you can, and you have that clarity, you can confidently say, okay.