Tristan Harris

I have to start another company that's all about safety.

And so, and ironically, that's how OpenAI started.

OpenAI started because Sam Altman and Elon looked at Google, which is building DeepMind, and they heard from Larry Page that he didn't care about the human species.

He's like, well, it'd be fine if the digital god took over.

And Elon was very surprised to hear that.

He said, I don't trust Larry to care about AI safety.

And so they started OpenAI to do AI safely relative to Google.

And then Dario did it relative to OpenAI.

And as they all started these new safety AI companies, that set off a race for everyone to go even faster and therefore being an even worse steward of the thing that they're claiming deserves more discernment and care and safety.

There's this thing that happens in this conversation, which is that people, they just feel kind of gutted and they feel like once you see it clearly, if you do see it clearly, what often happens is people feel like there's nothing that we can do.

And I think there's this trade where like either you're not really aware of all of this and then you just think about the positives, but you're not really facing the situation.

Or if you do face the situation, you do take it on as real, then you feel powerless.

And there's like a third position that I want people to stand from, which is to take on the truth of the situation and then to stand from agency about what are we going to do to change the current path that we're on.

So social media, let's just take that as a different example.

Because people look at that and they say it's hopeless.

Like there's nothing that we could do.

This is just inevitable.

This is just what happens when you connect people on the internet.

But imagine if you asked me, like, you know, so what happened after the social dilemma?

I'd be like, oh, well, we obviously solved the problem.