Tristan Harris

what what letter grade would we give ourselves in holding on in like stewarding that tech you know we had better living through chemistry in the 1930s dupont chemistry uh and that was great we invented all sorts of new materials but we also generated forever chemicals and it would it would currently cost more than the gdp of the entire world to clean up the entire mess of forever chemicals

You know, we created social media thinking if we give the world access to information at our fingertips and connect people with their friends, this is going to create the most enlightened and informed society than we ever have.

And clearly that didn't go that in the way that we wanted it to.

So now AI is like the exponentiation of just technology invention writ large, because what makes AI different from all other forms of technology is

is that intelligence is the basis of all of our new science, of all of our new technology, of all of our new military development.

So if you automate intelligence, you're going to automate an explosion of new science, new technology, new military technology.

And if you have more power and more intelligence, but you don't have the wisdom to wield it, that's obviously not going to go well.

Why can't wisdom be programmed too?

Uh, well, in some ways you could say that it can be, uh, it's just that it's, it's not that like wisdom comes from the ether.

You have to, it's about asking critical questions about how should the technology be designed?

So for example, like, do we have to have our entire internet environment have autoplaying videos that swipe one after another?

No, we don't have to have that.

We can have a totally different design paradigm where no one's autoplaying videos.

wisdom would be understanding that the human psychological, the Paleolithic brain that we are born with has these vulnerabilities in our dopamine system, and we could design to not hijack that dopamine system.

And just imagine for a second, just to like, there's a huge conversation we're having, but if you just imagine that one little change.

So here's today, everyone has autoplaying videos, infinitely swiping, brain rotting everybody, brain damaging everybody 24-7.

Test scores are massively down for basically all around the world because of this phenomenon.

It's very, very clear that the technology and social media is driving that.

If you make this one little change of no autoplaying videos...

And it means also no, you know, no infinite swipe dating apps that are getting you into a slot machine with player cards of people.