Tristan Harris

And so the real question that AI is forcing us to ask is what is the wisdom needed to wield the technological powers that whether AI is part of it or not, that we're going to increasingly gain.

And, you know, I reference this all the time, but it's just such an accurate fundamental problem statement by E.O.

Wilson.

that the fundamental problem of humanity is we have paleolithic brains that don't update very well to new information and think things are sci-fi and go into denial and overwhelm and blah, blah, blah.

We have medieval institutions from the 18th century, and we have godlike technology that makes the 24th century technology crash down on 21st century society.

That's what AI is.

It's a joke from Ajaya Khotra, who's in the film, by the way.

And so if we're to solve this equation, this problem statement that E.L.

Wilson lays out, the way I always think about it is we need to embrace the reality of our Paleolithic brains.

That's what wisdom is.

We know that we get overwhelmed and we go into denial, so we work with that.

We have systems and practices to recognize when that's about to happen and ask, what do we need to hold a difficult reality together?

That's embracing our paleolithic brains.

We need to upgrade our medieval institutions.

We should be using 21st century technology to make faster updating, self-improving governance.

Instead of creating recursively self-improving AI, we should be creating self-improving governance.

Audrey Tang, the former digital minister of Taiwan, has pioneered what that would look like.

That democracies could be using tech to find the unlikely consensus opinions of everybody.

One of the things that's going to exist in the next few months is a national dialogue on AI facilitated by technology where people can add their own ideas about how AI should be governed.

And when you vote and you click, it's going to reveal the most popular consensus opinions about what should happen about these different issues.