Tristan Harris

It doesn't land on the balance sheet of the companies.

And the companies exploit that.

And every time we sell with cigarettes, with fossil fuels, with asbestos, with forever chemicals, with social media, the formula is always the same.

Immediately print money on the product that's driving a lot of growth.

Hide the harm, deny it, do fear, uncertainty, doubt, political campaigns that's so merchants of doubt, propaganda that makes people doubt whether the consequences are real.

Say, we'll do a study.

We'll know in 10 years whether social media did harm kids.

They did all of those things.

But we don't, A, we don't have that time with AI.

And B, you can actually know a lot of those harms if you know the incentive.

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner, said, if you show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.

If you know the incentive, which is for these companies, AI, to race as fast as possible, to take every shortcut, to not fund safety research, to not do security, to not care about rising energy prices, to not care about job loss, and just to race to get there first, that is their incentive.

That tells you which world we're going to get.

There is no arguing with that.

And so if everybody just saw that clearly, we'd say, okay, great, let's not do that.

Let's not have that incentive, which starts with culture, public clarity that we say no to that bad outcome, to that path.

And then with that clarity, what are the other solutions that we want?

We can have narrow AI tutors that are non-anthropomorphic, that are not trying to be your best friend, that are not trying to be therapists at the same time that they're helping you with your homework, more like Khan Academy, which does those things.

So you can have carefully designed different kinds of AI tutors that are doing it the right way.

You can have AI therapists that are not trying to say, tell me your most intimate thoughts and let me separate you from your mother, and instead do very limited kinds of therapy that are not screwing with your attachment.