Tristan Harris

We outsourced all the manufacturing to this country and it produced everything super, super cheap.

But what did that do?

It hollowed out the middle class.

So I just want to make a parallel because we're told right now that these companies are racing to build this world of abundance.

And we're going to get this unbelievable, you know, Elon Musk says we're going to get universal high income.

And the metaphor here is instead of China being the new country that pops up in the world stage, now there's this new Dario Amadei, the CEO of Anthropic, this new country of geniuses in a data center that appears on the world stage.

And it has a population of a billion AI beings that work at superhuman speed, don't whistleblow, generate new material science, new engineering, new AI girlfriends, new everything.

And it generates all that for super cheap.

And so just like the free trade NAFTA story, we got all the cheap goods, but it hollowed out the middle class.

Well, now we're going to get all the cheap products and development and science, but it's also going to hollow out the entirety of our country.

Think of it like a new country of digital immigrants, right?

You know, Yuval Harari makes this metaphor.

It's like when you see a data center go up in Virginia and you're sitting there, what you should see is like 10 million digital immigrants that just took 10 million jobs.

I think that people just need to unify these stories.

And one other sort of visual for this is like the game Jenga.

The way we're building our AI future right now is like if you look at the game Jenga, if you look at the top of the tower, you know, we're putting a new block on the top, like we're going to get 5% GDP growth because we're going to automate all this labor.

But how do we get that 5% GDP growth?

We pulled out a block from the middle and the bottom of the tower.

That's job security and a livelihood for those tens of millions of people that now don't have a new job.

Because who's going to retrain faster?