Tristan Harris

They become the useless class, to borrow a term from Yuval Harari, the author of Sapiens.

In fact, he has a different frame, which is that AI is like a new version of digital.

It's like a flood of millions of new digital immigrants, of alien digital immigrants that are Nobel Prize-level capability, work at superhuman speed, will work for less than minimum wage.

We're all worried about immigration of the other countries next door taking labor jobs.

What happens when AI immigrants come in and take all of the cognitive labor?

If you're worried about immigration, you should be way more worried about AI.

It dwarfs it.

You can think of it like this.

I mean, if you think about – we were sold a bill of goods in the 1990s with NAFTA.

We said, hey, we're going to – NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, we're going to outsource all of our manufacturing to these developing countries, China, Southeast Asia, and we're going to get this abundance.

We're going to get all these cheap goods.

It will create this world of abundance where all of us will be better off.

But what did that do?

Well, we did get all these cheap goods.

You can go to Walmart and go to Amazon and things are unbelievably cheap.

But it hollowed out the social fabric.

And the median worker is not seeing upward mobility.

In fact, people feel more pessimistic about that than ever.

And people can't buy their own homes.

And all of this is because we did get the cheap goods, but we lost the well-paying jobs for everybody in the middle class.