Tristan Harris

Like the stuff that we thought only existed in sci-fi movies is now actually happening.

And that should be enough evidence to say we don't want to do this path that we're currently on.

It's not that some version of AI progressing into the world is directionally inevitable, but we get to choose which of those futures that we want to have.

Are you hopeful, honestly?

Honestly.

I don't relate to hopefulness or pessimism either because I focus on what would have to happen for the world to go okay.

I think it's important to step out of, because both hope or optimism or pessimism are both passive.

You're saying, if I sit back, which way is it going to go?

I mean, the honest answer is if I sit back, we just talked about which way it's going to go.

So you'd say pessimistic.

I challenge anyone who says optimistic on what grounds?

What's confusing about AI is it will give us cures to cancer and probably major solutions to climate change and physics breakthroughs and fusion at the same time that it gives us all this crazy negative stuff.

And so what's unique about AI that's literally not true of any other object is it hits our brain and as one object represents a positive infinity of benefits that we can't even imagine and a negative infinity in the same object.

And if you just ask, can our minds reckon with something that is both those things at the same time?

Yes, when prophecies fail, he also did that work.

And people will hear me and say I'm a doomer or I'm a pessimist.

It's actually not the goal.

The goal is to say, if we see this clearly, then we have to choose to something else.

It's the deepest form of optimism.

Because in the presence of seeing where this is going, still showing up and saying we have to choose another way, it's coming from a kind of agency and a desire for that better world.