Tristan Harris

I think something that people need to get is it's not like there's a plan for how to make all this go well.

This technology is being released in a paradigm-undermining way.

It's undermining the paradigm of economic assumptions and societal assumptions that have made the post-World War II order.

this is a this is such a deep fundamental change to the restructuring of everything our economic system our relationships um our information environment it's not just like adding a new technology in the mix it's like fundamentally changing the structure of the entire world you would think that if we're about to do that we would do that with more careful more caution care wisdom and restraint than we have with any technology we've ever deployed if we knew we're about to undermine the paradigm

But because of this arms race dynamic, we are deploying it faster than we deployed any technology in history and therefore undermining these things faster than we can have a plan.

The outcome.

This is this is it going well.

Exactly.

This is, quote, the best case scenario.

We have an aligned AI or something that's not wrecking society, that's not maximizing paperclips, that's not misaligned with well-being, but that is still doing such a good job of all this that it takes over all the economic labor.

in the economy, not just economic, every company that has a CEO, it's like, well, do I want the CEO to run the company?

Or if I have a super intelligent AI that can process more information than the CEO and has been trained on everything in the history of business, at some point that AI is going to be taking over.

And so at every little nodule in the economy, like every decision maker, every boardroom, every military leader, every strategy leader, every president, at some point the temptation will be, if I think about it in a narrow way,

temptation will be to swap in an ai for that person and that leads to what we call the gradual disempowerment scenario which is the scenario not where like ai wakes up and kills everybody but that we have gradually lost control as a species because we're outsourcing all the decisions to these alien brains that we installed because they outperform the human brain

When you define their role in a narrow way of just like, are they better at generating revenue than the human was?

Are they better at generating code than the human programmer I had?

Are they better at generating a financial analysis than the human?

Are they better at making someone feel good in the short term, like an AI therapist versus a human?

Going to war.

Going to war.