Tristan Harris

And when I came to work the next day, there was 150.

You know, in the top right on Google Slides, it shows you the number of simultaneous viewers.

And it had 130-something simultaneous viewers.

And then later that day, it was like 500 simultaneous viewers.

And so obviously, it had been spreading virally throughout the whole company.

And people from all around the company emailed me saying, this is a massive problem.

I totally agree.

We have to do something.

And so instead of getting fired, I was invited and basically stayed to become a design ethicist, studying how do you design in an ethical way?

And how do you design for the collective attention spans and information flows of humanity in a way that does not cause all these problems?

Because what was sort of obvious to me then, and that was in 2013, is that if the incentive is to maximize eyeballs and attention and engagement, then you're incentivizing a more addicted, distracted, lonely, polarized, sexualized breakdown of shared reality society.

Because all of those outcomes are success cases of maximizing for engagement for an individual human on a screen.

And so it was like watching this slow motion train wreck in 2013.

You could kind of see that there's this kind of myth that we can never predict the future.

Like technology could go any direction.

And that's like, you know, the possible of a new technology.

But I wanted people to see the probable, that if you know the incentives, you can actually know something about the future that you're heading towards.

And that presentation kind of kicked that off.

start to in the social dilemma you talk a lot about ai and algorithms yeah but when did you different kind of it we used to call that um the ai behind social media was kind of humanity's first contact between a narrow misaligned ai that went rogue because if you think about it's like there you are you open tiktok and you see a video and you think you're just watching a video but what when you swipe your finger and it shows you the next video you're

At that time, you activated one of the largest supercomputers in the world, pointed at your brainstem, calculating what 3 billion other human social primates have seen today, and knowing before you do which of those videos is most likely to keep you scrolling.