Tristan Harris

I grew up in a world that, you know, a world that mostly worked.

You know, I grew up in a magical time in the 1990s, 1980s, 1990s.

And, you know, back then using a computer was good for you.

You know, I used my first Macintosh and did educational games and learned programming and it didn't cause mass loneliness and mental health problems.

And,

you know, break how democracy works.

And it was just a tool and a bicycle for the mind.

And I think the spirit of our organization, Center for Humane Technology, is that that word humane comes from my co-founder's father, Jeff Raskin, actually started the Macintosh project at Apple.

So before Steve Jobs took it over, he started the Macintosh project and he wrote a book called The Humane Interface about how technology could be humane.

and could be sensitive to human needs and human vulnerabilities.

That was his key distinction, that just like this chair, hopefully, is ergonomic.

If you make an ergonomic chair, it's aligned with the curvature of your spine.

It works with your anatomy.

And he had the idea of a humane technology like the Macintosh that works with the ergonomics of your mind.

that your mind has certain intuitive ways of working.

Like I can drag a window and I can drag an icon and move that icon from this folder to that folder and making computers easy to use by understanding human vulnerabilities.

And I think of this new project that is the collective human technology project now is we have to make technology writ large humane to societal vulnerabilities.

Technology has to serve and be aligned with human dignity rather than wipe out dignity with job loss.

It has to be humane to child socialization process so that technology is actually designed to strengthen children's development rather than undermine it and cause AI suicides, which we haven't talked about yet.

And so I deeply believe that we can do this differently, and I feel responsibility in that.