Tristan Harris

And so it was like watching this slow motion train wreck in 2013.

You could kind of see that there's this kind of myth that we can never predict the future.

Like technology could go any direction.

And that's like, you know, the possible of a new technology.

But I wanted people to see the probable, that if you know the incentives, you can actually know something about the future that you're heading towards.

And that presentation kind of kicked that off.

start to in the social dilemma you talk a lot about ai and algorithms yeah but when did you different kind of it we used to call that um the ai behind social media was kind of humanity's first contact between a narrow misaligned ai that went rogue because if you think about it's like there you are you open tiktok and you see a video and you think you're just watching a video but what when you swipe your finger and it shows you the next video you're

At that time, you activated one of the largest supercomputers in the world, pointed at your brainstem, calculating what 3 billion other human social primates have seen today, and knowing before you do which of those videos is most likely to keep you scrolling.

It makes a prediction.

So it's an AI that's just making a prediction about which video to recommend to you.

But Twitter is doing that with which tweet should be shown to you.

Instagram is doing that with which photo or videos to be shown to you.

And so all of these things are these narrow misaligned AIs just optimizing for one thing, which is what's going to keep you scrolling.

And that was enough to wreck and break democracy and to create the most anxious and depressed generation of our lifetime just by this very simple baby AI.

And people didn't even notice it because it was called social media instead of AI.

But it was the first, we used to call it in this AI dilemma talk that my co-founder and I gave, we called it humanity's first contact with AI because it was just a narrow AI.

And what ChatGPT represents is this whole new wave of generative AI that is a totally different beast because it speaks language, which is the operating system of humanity.

Like if you think about it, it's trained on code, it's trained on text, it's trained on all of Wikipedia, it's trained on Reddit, it's trained on everything, all law, all religion.

And all of that gets sucked into this digital brain that has unique properties.

And that is what we're living with with ChatGPT.