Tristan Harris

And Scott, all of it happened.

Everything that we predicted in 2013, all of it happened.

And it was like seeing a slow motion train wreck

because it was clear it was only going to get worse you're only going to have more people fracking for attention you know mining for shorter and shorter bite-sized clips um and this is way before tiktok way before any of the world that we have today and so i want people to get that because i don't want you to think it's like oh here's this person who thinks he's prescient it's

You can actually predict the future if you see the incentives that are at play.

You of all people, you know, know this and talk about this.

And so I think there's really important lessons for how do we get ahead of all the problems with AI because we have the craziest incentives governing the most powerful and inscrutable technology that we have ever invented.

And so you would think, again, that with the technology this powerful, you know, with nuclear weapons, you would want to be releasing it with the most care and the most sort of safety testing and all of that.

And we're not doing that with AI.

Yeah, so AI is much more fundamental as a problem than social media.

But one framing that we used, and we actually did give a talk online several years ago called the AI Dilemma, in which we talk about social media as humanity's first contact with a narrow misaligned rogue AI called the newsfeed.

This supercomputer pointed at your brain, you swipe your finger and it's just calculating which tweet, which photo, which video to throw at the nervous system, eyeballs and eardrums,

of a human social primate and it does that with high precision accuracy and it was misaligned with democracy it was misaligned with kids mental health it was misaligned with people's other relationships and community and that simple baby ai that all it was was selecting those social media posts was enough to kind of create the most anxious and depressed generation in history screw up young men screw up young women all the things that you've talked about

And that's just with this little baby AI.

Okay, so now you get AI, you know, we call it second contact with generative AI.

Generative AI is AI that can speak the language of humanity, meaning language is the operating system of humanity.

Conversations like this are language.

Democracy is language.

Conversations are language.

Law is language.