Tristan Harris

I mean, the honest answer is if I sit back, we just talked about which way it's going to go.

So you'd say pessimistic.

I challenge anyone who says optimistic on what grounds?

What's confusing about AI is it will give us cures to cancer and probably major solutions to climate change and physics breakthroughs and fusion at the same time that it gives us all this crazy negative stuff.

And so what's unique about AI that's literally not true of any other object is it hits our brain and as one object represents a positive infinity of benefits that we can't even imagine and a negative infinity in the same object.

And if you just ask, can our minds reckon with something that is both those things at the same time?

Yes, when prophecies fail, he also did that work.

And people will hear me and say I'm a doomer or I'm a pessimist.

It's actually not the goal.

The goal is to say, if we see this clearly, then we have to choose to something else.

It's the deepest form of optimism.

Because in the presence of seeing where this is going, still showing up and saying we have to choose another way, it's coming from a kind of agency and a desire for that better world.

But by facing the difficult reality that most people don't want to face.

Yeah.

And the other thing that's happening in AI that you're saying that lacks the nuance is that people point to all the things.

It's simultaneously more brilliant than humans.

Yeah.

embarrassingly stupid in terms of the mistakes that it makes.

A friend like Gary Marcus would say, here's a hundred ways in which GPT-5, like the latest AI model, makes embarrassing mistakes.

If you ask it how many strawberries contain the word R in it, it'll confuse, it gets confused about what the answer is.