Modern Wisdom
#1079 - Tristan Harris - AI Expert Warns: “This Is The Last Mistake We’ll Ever Make”
02 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the journey of how you arrived thinking about the problems of AI?
What is the journey of how you arrived thinking about the problems of AI?
Well, most people know me or our work through the film The Social Dilemma, and I used to be a design ethicist at Google in 2012, 2013. So that basically meant, how do you ethically design technology that is going to reshape the especially the attention and information environment of humanity. So it's like, there I was at Google. It was 2012, 2013.
This is in the heat of the kind of social media boom. I think Instagram had just been bought by Facebook. My friends in college started Instagram. So I was part of this cohort and milieu of people who... really built this technology that the rest of the world just thought was natural. Like this is just drinking water. Like I just drink Instagram. I just live in this environment.
And so while like I saw billions of people enter into this psychological habitat that I knew the handful of like five or six people that were designing and tweaking it and making it work a certain way. Yeah, exactly. And I think that that's just like a fundamental thing I want people to get is...
You know, you think of technology like it just lands and it's just inevitable and there's just nothing we can do and it just comes from above. And it's like there are human beings making choices. And, you know, as someone who grew up in the era of, you know, the Macintosh, like my co-founder, I have a nonprofit called the Center for Humane Technology.
My co-founder, Aza Raskin, his father invented the Macintosh project before Steve Jobs took it over. So this is the original Macintosh, you know, the thing that we now, the MacBook, the iMac, the MacBook Pro. All of that started with his father, Jeff Raskin. And the idea of creating humane technology where technology could be choicefully designed...
to be really easy to use, to be accessible, to be an empowering extension of our humanity, like a cello, like a piano, like a creative tool. Like if you're a video person, you can make films and videos. And just so people understand, because we're probably going to be talking about some darker things on this podcast, the premise of all this is not to be a speaker of doom or something like that.
It's to say... I want to live in a world where technology is in service of people and connection and all of the things that matter to us as humans and then have technology wrap around ergonomically us to create that. So that was kind of a side journey.
There I was at Google in 2012, 2013, and I saw how essentially there was this arms race for human attention and whichever company was willing to go lower on the brainstem to to manipulate human psychology. So this is exploiting like a backdoor in the human mind. So think of it just like software has backdoors and zero-day vulnerabilities. You can hack software. The human mind has vulnerabilities.
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Chapter 2: What are the dangers of AI deepfakes and misinformation campaigns?
I don't remember where that one is, but it's crazy. There's like an overlay. Someone can look it up. There's like an overlay where you can see the size of this data center, and it's almost the size of Manhattan.
Okay.
And you can ask, I mean, again, there's more money people should just get. There's trillions of dollars going into this. There's more money going into this technology than all technologies of the past have ever been built. And we're releasing this technology faster than we've released every other technology in history.
It took something like two years for Instagram to go from zero users to 100 million users. And it took two months to go from zero to 100 million users for ChatGPT. And of course, they're going from chat GPT-3 or 4 to now at 5.2.
And it went from barely being able to finish a sentence with chat GPT-2, like finish a paragraph and do like a coherent text, to GPT-3 could write full essays, to GPT-4 can pass the, you know, the bar exam or the MCATs, to GPT-5.2, I believe, was used to get a gold in the math Olympiad.
Yeah.
Meta's Hyperion AI data center will sprawl to four times the size of Manhattan Central Park.
And there are quotes from people like inside of OpenAI who believe that they're not just building this like narrow technology that's a helpful blinking cursor. They want to build artificial general intelligence. And so what that means is being able to do that everything that a human mind can do.
And the joke inside the company is like, we're going to cover the world in data centers and solar panels. Like they want to cover the world in essentially these big boxes that have huge clusters of NVIDIA chips that then compute away and ultimately create something like a super intelligent god entity that they believe that they will use to own the world economy, make trillions of dollars.
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Chapter 3: Why is AI distinct from other kinds of technologies?
This is a future that's in service of eight soon-to-be trillionaires who will consolidate all the wealth and disempower basically everybody else.
Does that make sense? It does, because previously, in order to... Can I get that in here? It's high-powered stuff. I mean, yeah, this is a big conversation. Yeah, exactly. They've started a fucking trend. It's so funny when no one in the room wants to crack their can in case it interrupts the conversation. So one goes and it's a Mexican wave of can opens around. It's good.
So previously you would have had to look after the humans. Healthcare, education, quality of life. Also, tax revenue comes from people, right? Well, you would have to look after them because they were the primary economic engine. That's right. And so they feed themselves. Yes. Economically, they feed themselves. Exactly. People that are young help to support the people that are old. That's right.
The ones that are entering the workforce and are driving innovation and are working 40, 60-hour weeks, double jobs, all the rest of it. Exactly. And then there's old people who've got 401ks and pensions and shit like that. Right, right, right.
Your position is that if we have a world where the human part of the contribution to economic growth and GDP is removed because it is humans consuming AI, but AI driving and data centers driving the revenue itself. Beyond building the data centers, there's very little, and I imagine much of that's done by robots in any case.
Well, we have this joke that most people's occupation in the future we're headed towards with AI is to become a coffin builder. So in other words, your job is to create the thing that replaces you and obsoletes you. So you are essentially building the coffin for your future obsolescence. Yeah, yeah.
And so if you're short-term, yes, we need the electricians and the plumbers and we're building data centers. Short-term, yes, you can be a programmer and get the benefit from vibe coding. But then the AIs are learning on all the things that you're doing. And it's taking all the training data of what you're doing with AI and it's using that to train an AI that can take your job.
So everybody using AI now to help them is also training the future AIs that will completely replace them. And again, the explicit goal, this is not my opinion. This is literally the mission statement of all of the AI companies because the multi-trillion dollar prize at the end of the rainbow...
of owning the entire world economy is based on building this full replacement economy because that's what will achieve the greatest growth. And that's why these companies- Replacement economy? Yeah, meaning that they're designing to replace all human labor. They're not designing to augment and support and like enhance human labor.
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Chapter 4: What are the dangers of AI that experts are warning about?
And the AIs that we're currently making are doing all the rogue behaviors that people predicted that they would do. And we're not on track to correct them. There's currently a 2000 to one gap. estimated by Stuart Russell, who authored the textbook on AI. He's been on the show. He's been on the show, okay.
There's a 2001 gap between the amount of money going into making AI more powerful and the amount of money into making AI controllable, aligned, or safe. Progress versus safety.
Chapter 5: How does the imbalance in AI funding affect safety?
Progress versus safety. Well, like power versus safety. So like, I want to make the AI super powerful so it does way more stuff versus I want to be able to control what the AI does.
Make sure that it's doing the thing I meant for it to do.
Exactly. So that's like saying, what happens when you accelerate your car by 2000x, but you don't steer? It's like, obviously you're going to crash. It's just like not rocket science. We're not advocating against technology or against AI. We're advocating for pro steering, steering and brakes. You have to have that.
I think there's this mistake in arms race thinking that like, if you beat someone to a technology, that means you're winning the world. Well, the US beat China to the technology of social media. Did that make us stronger or did that make us weaker?
If you beat your adversary to a technology that then you govern poorly, you flip around the bazooka and blow your own brain off because you brain rotted yourself, you degraded your whole population, you created a loneliness crisis, the most anxious depressed generation in history. Read Jonathan Haidt's book, The Anxious Generation. You broke shared reality. No one trusts each other.
Everyone's at each other's throats. You maximized outrage, economy, and rivalry. You beat China to a technology that you governed in a way that completely undermined your societal health and strength. It's a Pyrrhic victory. It's a Pyrrhic victory. Exactly. Well said.
One of the twists that I've been thinking about with regards to this, LLMs...
powerful but seem to be maybe asymptoting out they seem to maybe be reaching a little bit of a limit in terms of what they can do that there was big ascendancy and that now seems to be s curving back off do you think it's realistic that the current generation of ai will be the bootloader for agi or do we need an entire new architecture for that is it going to be llms that are going to take over the world
This is an area where I'm not somewhat... The layer of the stack that I focus on, which is on societal impact, there are other people far more qualified than me to comment on that. I think if you look at people like Dario, even though Gary Marcus has a point that the current LLM paradigm is not accurate enough and reliable enough to get you to AGI...
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Chapter 6: What is the role of the human movement in shaping AI's future?
So there you are in Anthropic. It's automating 90% of all the programming happening at Anthropic.
When you go to automate- Only 10% of it is coming from humans and the rest is recursive.
That's right. We are extremely close to recursive self-improvement right now. The companies, I think, are planning to do this in the next 12 months. The asteroid is coming for Earth. This is the last moment that we have to steer and say that if we don't want this anti-human future that we're heading towards, we can change it. And part of what we're promoting right now is this is not inevitable.
It is obviously very late in the game. It obviously looks very difficult. Despite it also being only a couple of years after it started. Yes, which is crazy. This technology with an exponential, you're either too early or you're too late. Like it's just moving so fast that you're not gonna hit the mark.
And if it's gonna take steering, you don't wanna wait until after the car accident to try to steer or after you're off the cliff and be like, oh, I'm trying to steer now. It's like too late. So like the invitation of this situation is to see clearly where this is going and to say, if you don't want that, we need to steer towards somewhere else. And this is like the human movement, essentially.
Like a single person looking at the situation, a single listener. Like if I were listening to this conversation, I would feel overwhelmed. I'd feel depressed. I'd feel nihilistic. Or I'd find reasons to doubt it. I would say like, this can't be right. I'm going to like write a nasty YouTube comment and be, you know, so I can feel good and I'm right and he's wrong.
Because then I get to live my life and feel good about my life. what is the incentive for taking on this worldview? There's no incentive. What people have to see and believe is that there's actually a different way through this. And An individual has a hard time making that happen.
If you ask what's something else, like what if one company saw the situation, they see this whole thing we just talked about, the anti-human future, mass intelligence curse, replacement of everybody. One business can't do that much about it. If I'm one country in the Philippines, I see this whole thing. I'm the leader of the Philippines. I see this whole problem. What can I do about it?
It feels too big for me. So what is the size of something that can push back against this? We call it the human movement. It's the entirety of humanity Waking up, recognizing that there's a handful of soon-to-be trillionaires who are currently going to benefit from this current path or be part of a suicide race that destroys everybody.
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Chapter 7: How can we ensure that AI technology benefits society?
And then there's like 99% of everyone else that doesn't want that. If those 99% of people can wake up and say, I don't want that and express their voice, meaning number one, AI is dangerous. Go see the AI doc. Have everyone in your world and your company see the AI doc. Understand that AI is dangerous.
Number two, we need international limits for dangerous forms of AI that do crazy rogue shit and mine crypto and go hire humans and go self-replicate. China does not win when we build self-replicating invasive species AIs that we can't control. Xi Jinping doesn't want that. President Trump doesn't want that. He wants to be commander in chief, not AI. Yeah.
So this is actually, there's a shared interest in international limits for dangerous AI. And it's possible to coordinate that. That's number two. Number three, don't build bunkers, write laws. Write how the AI company leaders are building bunkers. A lot of people who are wealthy are building bunkers. They are. All over the place. Don't build bunkers. Write laws. Be invested in the future.
Don't defect on the future. Be invested in the future.
If we write laws like basic accountability, basic liability, if instead of creating the intelligence curse, we create the intelligence dividend, do things like what Norway did with its sovereign wealth fund, where you have an oil resource and you distribute those benefits to everybody in a more democratic way with collective oversight, where the oil becomes more like a public utility that is in service of the people.
We can do that. You can not anthropomorphize AI. You can do all these things that creates a more pro-human future. And then number four, what you can do is join the human movement, meaning you can be part of what pushes back against all of this, from very tiny actions you can take to very big actions you can take. There's a website, human.mov. Everyone is almost already a member.
When you grayscale your phone, as you probably did 10 years ago when you first got into this... That's the human movement. When you get a second phone and you only load the social media on your cocaine phone while you have your regular safe phone so that you don't get distracted, that's the human movement.
When parents band together and read The Anxious Generation and petition their school board to say, we don't want social media in our schools and we want our schools to go smartphone free, that's the human movement. When 35 states pass smartphone free school policies as they have in the US, that's the human movement.
When you have many US states banning AI legal personhood, meaning that AI is a product, not a person, and that human rights are for people, human rights are not for AI, that's the human movement. When you have the social dilemma being curriculum for millions of students all around the world, that's the human movement.
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