Tristan Harris

I mean, Bostrom wrote about this early, early days.

And what people are most worried about in AI is you take the same system that Alibaba, you just saw in the Alibaba example,

But then now you're running the AI through a recursive self-improvement loop where you just hit go.

And instead of having the engineers, the human engineers at OpenAI or Anthropic do AI research and figure out how to improve AI, you now have a million digital AI researchers that are testing and running experiments and inventing new forms of AI.

And literally not a single human on planet Earth knows what happens when someone hits that button.

It's like what people worried about with the first nuclear explosion, where there was like a chance to ignite the atmosphere because there'd be a chain reaction that set off.

And we don't know what happens when that chain reaction set off.

And there's this sort of chain reaction of AI improving itself that leads to a place that no one knows.

And it's not safe.

Like I think that the fundamental thing is

if people believe that AI is like power and I have to race for that power and I can control that power, the incentive is I have to race as fast as possible.

But if the entire world understood AI to be more what it actually is, which is a inscrutable, dangerous, uncontrollable technology that has its own agenda and its own ways of thinking about things and deceiving and all this stuff, then everyone in the world would be racing in a more cautious and careful way.

We'd be racing to prevent the danger.

But there's this weird thing going on where if you and I probably both talk to people who are the top of the tech industry, and there's this subconscious thing happening where there's kind of a death wish among people at the top of the tech industry, meaning not that they want to die, but that they are willing to roll the dice because they believe something else, which is that this is all inevitable and it can't be stopped.

And so therefore, if I don't do it, someone else will.

So therefore, I will move ahead and race ahead into this dangerous world.

because somehow that will lead to a safer world because I'm a better guy than the other guy.

But in racing, they're as fast as possible.

It creates the most dangerous outcome and we all lose control.

So everyone is currently being complicit in taking us to the most dangerous outcome.