Tristan Harris

You get new material science, you get new energy, you get all this amazing stuff as you're moving closer to this dangerous cliff.

And so you can think of AI as the ultimate devil's bargain.

It's funny because Peter Thiel is giving lectures on the antichrist and how people who are trying to somehow say that AI is problematic, those people are the antichrist is what he claims.

But I think he's saying that because he knows that the real antichrist is AI.

It's the thing that makes it look like it's here to solve all of our problems.

And there are narrow forms of AI, by the way, that can solve many problems.

But the current development path of releasing the most powerful and scrutable technology in history, faster than we've deployed any other technology, that's already demonstrating HAL 9000 sci-fi behaviors, and we're releasing it under the maximum incentive to cut corners on safety.

Like, it's not that the blinking cursor of chat GPT is the existential threat.

It's that that arms race, what I just described, that is the existential threat.

And I think that everyone should be able to see that.

And then after this conversation, you know, you finish hitting play on this YouTube video, you feel overwhelmed and you go back to AI and then you ask it a question and it helps you figure out why your baby's burping.

And you're like, that's awesome.

And you forget everything that you and I just talked about because it was super fucking helpful.

And so this is the test of ultimate modern wisdom, is how do you step into a version of yourself that is capable of being clear-eyed and stabilizing a view of the asteroid?

The asteroid is coming to Earth.

There's these weird gravitational effects that it has before it gets here, like suddenly nudification apps happen, and suddenly deepfakes happen, and suddenly people start losing their jobs.

Those suck.

Those are really bad problems.

But the bigger asteroid...

Every day that I do this work, my colleagues and I, we joke, it's like the film Don't Look Up.