Tristan Harris

The idea that we need guardrails with AI companions that are talking to children is not a radical proposal.

Imagine I set up a shop in San Francisco and say, I'm a therapist for everyone and I'm available 24-7.

In general, it's like we've forgotten the most basic principle, which is that every power in society has attendant responsibilities and wisdom.

Licensing is one way of matching the power of a therapist with the wisdom and responsibility to wield that power.

And we're just not applying that very basic principle to software.

And as Marc Andreessen said, when software eats the world, what we mean is we don't regulate software.

We don't have any guardrails for software.

So it's basically like stripping off the guardrails across the world that software is eating.

Yeah, I mean, what people need to get, again, is how did we predict all the social media problems?

You look at the incentives.

So long as you have a race for eyeballs and engagement in social media, you're going to get a race to who's better at creating doom scrolling.

In AI companions, what was a race for attention in the social media area becomes a race to hack human attachment and to create an attachment relationship, a companion relationship,

And so whoever's better at doing that is the race.

And in the slide deck that the character.ai founders had pitched to Andreessen Horowitz, they joked, either in that slide deck or in some meeting, you can look up this online, they joked, we're not trying to replace Google.

We're trying to replace your mom, right?

So you compare this to the social media thing.

The CEO of Netflix said in the attention era, our biggest competitor is sleep, right?

Because sleep is what's eating up minutes that you're otherwise not spending on Netflix.

In attachment, your biggest competitor is other human relationships.

So you talk about those young men.