Tristan Harris

Which is exactly what we have to get good at.

AI is like a rite of passage.

It's an initiatory experience because if we run the old logic of having a narrow boundary analysis, this is going to replace these jobs that people didn't want to do.

Sounds like a great plan.

But creating mass joblessness without a transition plan where a billion people won't be able to put food on the table.

AI is forcing us to not make this mistake of this narrow analysis.

What got us here is everybody racing for the narrow optimization for GDP at the cost of social mobility and mass sort of joblessness and people not being able to get a home because we aggregated all the wealth in one place.

It was optimizing for a narrow metric.

What got us to the social media problems is everybody optimizing for a narrow metric of eyeballs at the expense of democracy and kids' mental health and addiction and loneliness and no one –

Knowing it, you know, being able to know anything.

And so AI is inviting us to step out of the previous narrow blind spots that we have come with and the previous competitive logic that has been narrowly defined that you can't keep running when it's supercharged by AI.

So you could say, I mean, this is an optimistic take because AI is inviting us to be the wisest version of ourselves.

And there's no definition of wisdom in literally any wisdom tradition that does not involve some kind of restraint.

Think about all the wisdom traditions.

Do any of them say, go as fast as possible and think as narrowly as possible?

The definition of wisdom is having a more holistic picture.

It's actually acting with restraint and mindfulness and care.

And so AI is asking us to be that version of ourselves.

And we can choose not to be, and then we end up in a bad world.

Or we can step into being what it's asking us to be and recognize the collective consequences that we can't afford to not face.