AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris

**Tristan Harris** (0:00)
If you're worried about immigration taking jobs, you should be way more worried about AI, because it's like a flood of millions of new digital immigrants that are Nobel Prize level capability, work at superhuman speed, and will work for less than minimum wage. I mean, we're heading for so much transformative change faster than our society is currently prepared to deal with it. And there's a different conversation happening publicly than the one that the AI companies are having privately about which world we're heading to, which is a future that people don't want. But we didn't consent to have six people make that decision on behalf of eight billion people.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:30)
Tristan Harris is one of the world's most influential technology ethicists who created the Center for Humane Technology after correctly predicting the dangers social media would have on our society.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:39)
And now he's warning us about the catastrophic consequences AI will have on all of us.

**Tristan Harris** (0:48)
Let me collect myself for a second.
We can't let it happen. We can not let these companies race to build a super intelligent digital god, own the world economy and have military advantage because of the belief that if I don't build it first, I'll lose to the other guy and then I will be forever a slave to their future. And they feel they'll die either way, so they prefer to light the fire and see what happens. It's winner takes all. But as we're racing, we're landing in a world of unvetted therapists, rising energy prices and major security risks. I mean, we have evidence where if an AI model reading a company's email finds out it's about to get replaced with another AI model, and then it also reads in the company email that one executive is having an affair with an employee, the AI will independently blackmail that executive in order to keep itself alive. That's crazy. But what do you think?

**Steven Bartlett** (1:33)
I'm finding it really hard to be hopeful, I'm going to be honest, Tristan. So I really want to get practical and specific about what we can do about this.

**Tristan Harris** (1:39)
Listen, I'm not naive. This is super fucking hard. But we have done hard things before, and it's possible to choose a different future.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:48)
So just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week means the world to all of us and this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24 percent of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can, now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about the show.
Tristan, I think my first question, and maybe the most important question, is we're going to talk about artificial intelligence and technology broadly today, but who are you in relation to this subject matter?

**Tristan Harris** (2:46)
So I did a program at Stanford called the Mayfield Fellows Program that took engineering students and then taught them entrepreneurship. I, as a computer scientist, didn't know anything about entrepreneurship, but they pair you up with venture capitalists, they give you mentorship, and there's a lot of powerful alumni who were part of that program. The co-founder of Asana, the co-founders of Instagram were both part of that program, and that put us in a cohort of people who were basically ending up at the center of what was going to colonize the whole world's psychological environment, which was the social media situation. As part of that, I started my own tech company called Apture, and we basically made this tiny widget that would help people find more contextual information without leaving the website they were on. It was a really cool product that was about deepening people's understanding. And I got into the tech industry because I thought that technology could be a force for good in the world. That's why I started my company. And then I kind of realized through that experience that at the end of the day, these news publishers who used our product, they only cared about one thing, which is, is this increasing the amount of time and eyeballs and attention on our website. Because eyeballs meant more revenue. And I was in sort of this conflict of, I think I'm doing this to help the world, but really I'm measured by this metric of what keeps people's attention. That's the only thing that I'm measured by. And I saw that conflict play out among my friends who started Instagram, you know, because they got into it because they wanted people to share little bite size moments of your life. You know, here's a photo of my bike ride down to the bakery in San Francisco. That's what Kevin Systrom used to post when he was just starting it. I was probably one of the first like 100 users of the app. And later you see how these simple products that had a simple good positive intention got sort of sucked into these perverse incentives. And so Google acquired my company called Apture. I landed there and I joined the Gmail team. And I'm with these engineers who are designing the email interface that people spend hours a day in. And then one day one of the engineers comes over and he says, well, why don't we make it buzz your phone every time you get an email? And he just asked the question nonchalantly like it wasn't a big deal. And in my experience, I was like, oh my God, you're about to change billions of people's psychological experiences with their families, with their friends at dinner, with their date night on romantic relationships, where suddenly people's phones are going to be busy showing notifications of their email.