The peril (and promise) of AI with Tristan Harris: Part 1

Hello and welcome to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. Okay, artificial intelligence is going to change everything, not just about business or entrepreneurship, but Everything or At least we think so. I do, and a lot of it excites me.

Breakthroughs and curing diseases, or maybe even solving climate change. But A lot of it. really freaks me out, too. Like how it might become impossible to know what's true and what's not, what's real. And what's fake.

And because trust is the invisible force that allows our societies to work. AI could completely undermine all of it. Now we've had a lot of conversations about AI on the show in the past year and we're gonna have many, many more. And this week and next, we have a really important guest, and I really hope you all spend some time really listening to these episodes. Many years before anyone noticed, the

Tristana Harris warned about the perils of social media, and by and large, He was proved right. even helped make a film about it. You might have seen it, it was called The Social Dilemma. Tristan is one of the founders of the Center for Humane Technology, and his roots in the tech world run deep. And today

He's sounding the alarm about AI. Now, to be clear, he's not anti-AI, but Tristan is really worried about the pace of its growth. Because in a very short period of time, he argues we're gonna lose control over it. Today we're gonna run part one of my conversation with Tristan, and next week we'll have part two.

Anyway. Tristan grew up in the Bay Area and he was a technology kid through and through. He even wrote fan mail to Steve Wozniak, one of the co-founders of Apple. And actually one of Tristan's co-founders at the Center for Humane Technology is deeply connected to that early obsession with Apple. And I'm honored today to say that my co-founder, Aza Raskin, his father was Jeff Raskin, who started the Macintosh project. At Apple, you know, along with Steve Jobs, who later took over the project. And I think there's an ethos. that both he and I come from of the original days of Silicon Valley.

that is aspirational, you know, in which computers can be a bicycle for the mind, a bicycle for human creativity. extending human expression. Um I think sometimes we can get class to doomers. But the risk side of AI. We only do that because we care about the vision where technology actually is in service of humanity. And to do that, we just think we have to fix the incentives. Yeah.

You Eventually started your own. This is in the Two thousands, the mid two thousands called Apture. Mm-hmm. And this was a

it was like a hyperlink. You would like click over a hi hover over a hyperlink and you would get like Other information, right? More or less. Can you describe what that company did? Yeah. I started Apture in 2007 and it was Going back to the original ethos of what the internet and hyperlinking was supposed to be about.

You know, you could say when people click on this button or click on this image or click on this text, I want the computer to speak this out loud. Or to issue a dialogue prompt, or to play this song, or to play the piano. And it was the first really creative idea of This interlinked, what if everything was connected to everything else in the most visually expressive multimedia. educational

Inspiring. Beautiful. Way. So then I learned a lesson though. Because while I was interested in kind of reinstantiating this original

inspiring ethos of multimedia and Teaching and education. into the internet. The way that Apture, which is a you know, a for profit company, we raised venture capital, we had investors, uh, and our progress, our our success was measured not And the number of children who are inspired by cool

media that they got to learn and watch and click on. But our progress was measured in the form of engagement. You know, we did deals with the Washington Post, the New York Times. The economist and They would ask us one question.

Which was how much did you increase the amount of time people spent on my website? Aka how many Ad views impressions did you increase? And that's when you know I really saw I think the fallacy that that leads and guides both the social media work that we're we became known for with the social dilemma and our work with AI.

Which is there's all these positive stories we want to tell ourselves about what we're building. But the question that determines which future we'll end up in. is the incentives. And Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner, just passed away. He had a very famous quote we reference in our work that

He said, If you show me the incentive. I'll show you the outcome. Yeah. When people ask themselves the question, like which way is AI gonna go? Was it gonna be the promise or is it gonna be the peril? How are we gonna know? Well,

The point is that the way that we'll know which future we get is by where the incentives, where the profit motive, where the you know, status and reputation is all conferred to. And that's what we have to change. We're gonna talk a lot about AI in this conversation, but I wanna go back to around two thousand eleven when Apture Apture was acquired by Google and you started to work at Google.

And it was around I think around this time that you really started to focus on this idea of attention and to become more troubled by it. Something that is now just uh you know it's an article of faith. We now know that the attention economy is a term and we now know that tech companies make money from Yeah. you know, media does, YouTube does, this show does, right? Um but you were thinking about this a long time before others were as a Yeah.

How how did those ideas begin to kind of percolate in your mind? Well I again starting with my experience at Apsure. I realized that for you know, for our company to be s successful, we had to increase the total amount of time people spent on the Washington Post and New York Times.

And that there obviously isn't an infinite amount of human attention out there. It's almost like planetary boundaries, right? Can you run infinite economic growth on a finite planet forever? Well, so long as economic growth has environmental externalities or depletes finite resources, you can't do it forever unless you keep making scientific breakthroughs on every dimension. So You know, I think similar to that, you can't run infinite growth of every company demanding more attention per quarter per year. Forever. with a finite supply of human attention.

And at the time in 2007, it was actually the year the iPhone came out. We started our company before the iPhone came out. But obviously what mobile phones did is they opened up the attention economy. It used to be people only spent a few hours a day on computers and then they would Get offline and go outside, go to a movie, do something else. And increasingly every moment of our lives became Heart.

of this attention economy sold for a commodity like The time you sit in the toilet and then you go to the bathroom. And that's a boom. Now there's 10 extra minutes in the attention economy because the smartphone opened up that new piece of real estate. So I was just seeing the fact that this is where this is all going. There's there's only so much, and it's gonna get more competitive. People are gonna find more creative ways. of creating stickier More persuasive.

more socially validating, more outrage driven, more addicted, more distracted, more polarizing. Narcissistic, you know, th these kinds of things. Yeah. And it was pretty daunting to see that in twenty thirteen when I was at Google and made This presentation. Because you you're starting to see like if this keeps going I can tell what kind of society this is gonna create.

And that's not a society that that I think we can afford To to be in we need it we need to turn the tide. this presentation that you're referencing, it was called It was a call to minimize distraction and respect users' attention. You were an employee at Google and you decided to put together a hundred and forty four page um Google Slide presentation About in what was going on and I just want to read a line in there. Um

The line is um never before in history have the decisions of a handful of designers working at three companies, Google, Apple, and Facebook, had so much impact on how millions of people around the world spend their attention. We should feel an enormous responsibility to get this right. That was written in twenty thirteen. You wrote it internally in Google and it kinda went in internally viral. Um how did the leadership of Google respond? I mean did they you know, sort of pay your lip service and say, Yeah, this is all you're just saying all the right things or or w were people annoyed or what they say? I remember when I sent the presentation to just ten friends at Google just to say, Hey, can I get your feedback on this? And I came to work the next day. And there was something like forty simultaneous viewers. And I knew that was impossible because I'd only sent it to ten people. They were sending it around. And then later I looked that day and there was a hundred and fifty simultaneous viewers and then thousands by the you know.

The end of the day. And so I really realized I gotta clean this up and finish it basically in less than a couple hours. And uh And it was this real moment in time. I I remember hearing that like I think in the first twenty four hours that Larry Page, the CEO of Google uh had had several meetings that day in which people brought up this presentation to him.

Um and I got emails from around the company, mostly from other employees who just said, I completely agree. This is happening to my children. This is this is affecting my relationships. This is this is this thing that you're you're naming a thing that I felt, but I didn't know how to put into words. And you know, there was even an executive at Google who decided to host me basically offer me the chance to to work on this topic and He sent me a quote by Neil Postman. That we were all worried about.

This dystopian future of nineteen eighty four, the George Orwell. vision of dystopia where technology limits our access to information that we are there's surveillance, there's control, we ban books. But he said alongside that vision. There's this other dystopian vision for technology.

Control is not established by banning books, but by creating a world of so much amusing ourselves to death that no one wants to read a book. No one even knows. There's just this. Tsunami of information. It's impossible to discern what is real from from what is not. That's right. Because it doesn't have a single source, it's not big brother.

It's the big incentives of the attention economy. that have made this problem worse and then combine that with technology and AI. And we're heading into, you know, a bigger version of that. So I'm not trying to paint a dark picture here. It's just important that we get a clear eyed view. of what world we're pulling towards so that we can say if that's not the future that we want. How do we have to change the incentives to arrive in that future that we all want for our children?

We're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, more from Tristan on how social media and now AI development are happening too fast for humans to fulfill. Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to how I built this lab. Mm. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and my guest is Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. Now back in 2013, social media was really starting to explode.

And Tristan was at Google and he was sounding the alarm about the dangers of the attention economy. And he wasn't the only one concerned about the power of this new technology. And I remember reading at the time, and I don't know if this was apocryphal or not, but reading that Steve Jobs, who had died two years earlier,

Wouldn't allow iPads in his own home. He did not allow his children to have these products that he himself Help to create. Um and it really struck me as Not so much hypocritical, but but that

There was something that people Understood. fundamentally understood about the dangers. of what they were unleashing. Yeah. And did you feel at least at Google, did you feel like, okay, you know, they're taking this seriously. They made a position for you there called design ethicist. Did you feel like, you know, maybe I can really Make a dent here at Google. Maybe I can have an impact.

Well, I certainly told myself that story when I first got started. And I and I really want to make sure that I'm honoring that I I thought it was generous for Google to support the fact that I was doing that work. Right. Um and I want people to hear that so you don't hear me as some kind of reactionary, you know, the the evils of big tech and all the people at the top are evil. At a human level, when you talk to the human beings who worked in these products, I had a lot of people who were very sympathetic with these concerns. But when it came down to trying to change Android, like I met with the Android team, say, what if we could change how the operating system works and better protect people's attention? Met with the Chrome design team. What if we could change Chrome to make it better at protecting people's attention?

At the end of the day, Android and Chrome, you know, and Google benefit the more overall screen time there is versus not. And so I knew that my success within the company was gonna be limited. And I had to eventually take the concerns outside of the public world. To try to say how do we create public pressure? That will start to change those incentives. And I had no idea in twenty

fifteen or so when I left Google how I was gonna do that. But You know, here we are today and there's some amazing things that have shifted in the public consciousness around this. Uh and a lot more needs to happen.

The first nonprofit that she founded was called Time Well Spent. And that was around two thousand fourteen. In at that time and I mean up until r you know recently Understandably, your focus I think increasingly was on social media.

As it began to capture more and more of our time and attention. Yeah. And you start to see this happen at lightning speed. Yeah. A around this time. Yeah, I mean, so time well spent came from this turn phrase time spent. Most tech products and advertising is maximizing time spent. And we said but is it

Maximizing time well spent, meaning at an existentialist level as a human being, what are the choices that you endorse as time well spent? And imagine a world where technology is competing, not to maximize how much time it takes from you. But to maximize its contributions, its net positive contributions to a life. that you would endorse on your deathbed, meaning enabling you and helping you make the choices that are the lasting meaningful fulfilling choices, not the full but empty choices. But certainly inside of the time well spent world and the attention economy, the biggest

forces that we were dealing with at that time were the growing revenues of social media companies and the growing portion uh of social media in that problem. You know, it's and I know you've made this analogy or versions of it, but you think about something like the Gutenberg Press, right? You know, that happens in the f in the fifteenth century in Europe, and all of a sudden ordinary people

can get access to the Bible and they can start to learn how to read it. And it doesn't have to be filtered through the priests. And so That creates it launches the reformation. You know, of course, a a huge innovation, it changed the world, but it was very disruptive. At the same time this happened. over a long period of time, right? And so You can basically trace that moment all the way to the end of World War Two, which was kind of the end of of the European era of wars, but five hundred years.

What happened with social media was like Five years and it was like the Gutenberg press on Steroids and amphetamines and, you know, everything and in in between. It's almost inconceivable how our brains were We're going to adapt. to this massive rapid

Proliferation of information. Yeah. In our work, we often reference the EO Wilson quote, um, who's the father of the field of sociobiology, that the fundamental problem that humanity faces. Is that We have paleolithic brains.

Medieval institutions. And godlike technology, which is to say both in the power and the speed, our brains and our emotions are not built to see exponential curves, right? There's nothing on the Savannah when you see a giraffe or a tiger and you gotta run from you know, something that your brain needed to understand an exponential curve. It took, you know, Isaac Newton and calculus and sort of teaching ourselves education about math to start to understand what exponential curves are.

We get more practice with that with finance, um, and savings accounts and things like that. But our brains are not built for that. So suddenly you have something like you know, social media come along where you totally have an exponential curve of how many users, how much content Et cetera is flowing in the system. Then you get AI and you get a double exponential. You get an exponential that accelerates its own exponential, meaning AI accelerates AI development. And so We now have something that is moving so fast.

Yeah. You know, it's like our brains are are completely not comprehending the moment that we're in. As you said, social media took, you know, five, six years to get And the absorption of elections and journalism kind of get sucked into the black hole of of that superorganism.

In the case of AI, you know, the step that we use is it took Instagram, I think two years to get to a hundred million users and it took chat GPT two months. So we're we're living With a technology that's changing and undermining the assumptions about how our world worked. We can humanity can absorb

New technologies. But it takes time. And the challenge is when the time pressure that you have to absorb that new change. is

faster than than ever before. This is the fastest that we've ever had to face it. Just to provide one quick thought experiment, a friend of mine uh who's a AI policy researcher at one of the major labs, he said, Imagine that we just named that humanity has a finite capacity to absorb new technologies. that undermine our assumptions about how everything works. And imagine instead of just releasing all the new technology as fast as possible and just Blowing past.

Those Finite absorption boundaries. That we instead what if you had to apply for a license to release a new technology. into the commons. And so we're basically

consciously choosing as a society which new technologies we want to absorb, we want to prioritize, and which ones we want to like give ourselves a little bit more time. It's not yes or no to technology, it's how do we absorb technologies at the pace that we can get it right. And I I think it's an interesting thought experiment for people to think about. We're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back... The story of how Tristan was alerted to the dangers of another nascent technology, one that he says could pose an existential threat to the entire world.

Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and my guest is Tristan Harris, co founder of the Center for Humane Technology. In 2018, Tristan co-founded that nonprofit, and at the time it was focused on the dangers of social media. But then, in late 2022, early 2023, Tristan started getting messages from people working on a different technology. You and Asa Raskin, one of your co-founders, were contacted by people working in AI, and they were

They were sounding the alarm. And the analogy that you've made about this encounter really alarmed me. You compared it to like to the Manhattan Project. Can you describe her Explain that a little bit. Yeah, well a lot of people analogize that the invention of AI is a significant

as the invention of the atomic bomb. Now that might sound like alarmist or panic creating or something like that. And it's it's not actually and it's because of How the atomic bomb restructured The world. Order. It was a new kind of power.

that whoever had it was clearly sort of the dog on top of the food chain. And with AI, what people don't understand is if you genuinely build Something that can do full artificial intelligence across All kinds of

Cognitive labor, meaning scientific labor, research labor, market analyst labor, financial labor. If you can out compete all stock traders on the stock market, if you can out compete all military strategy games, if you can out compete Anyone in writing. uh text to influence people on the internet. If you have that AI system that can do that, that is a new kind of power.

In which your position in the world will be greatest relative to everybody else. And so there is a new atomic bomb project in the form of those who are racing to build Towards this.

you know, fullest expression of AI which Some people call artificial general intelligence. Remember that the stated mission statement of OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind from the very beginning, those three companies. Have been to create artificial general intelligence. So

When we got calls from some people in those labs, it felt like getting a call from a scientist. working on the Manhattan Project before you knew what the Manhattan Project was. Mm. Okay, so in twenty twenty two you are contacted by

AI researchers who are kind of r ringing the alarm. Right. AI arms race underway. And so

Presumably they they wanted you to help. Spread the word about what was happening, right? Yeah, this is late twenty twenty two, early twenty twenty three. And frankly, as you said, when we started the Center for Humane Technology, we had all the other issues of how social media is you know undermining democracies. We we had our plate full and I I actually They were asking for our help. They basically said, Okay, you all raise the alarm about

Social media, the social dilemma, you have a huge public platform. Listen. this race to build AI has gotten out of hand and OpenAI and Anthropic and DeepMind are now in this race to release things as fast as possible. And This race is gonna go to a dangerous place if we don't have some outside pressure that can help bend the curve.

Maybe slow it down a little bit, create some international norms, create some safety guardrails. Would you use your public platform to Help raise the alarm. And you did and and you and your co founder is a Raskin. would go on to build a presentation called the AI dilemma that you I I think you first delivered it

in March of twenty uh twenty three here in the Bay Area. You present it several times. since then I've seen it live, uh it's available online. Anybody can watch it. What was a message that you were trying to send with This presentation.

You know, the main point we made in the presentation Is that Social media was really humanity's first contact experience. with a mass deployed AI because it's an AI Point it at your

thirteen year old's brain. trying to calculate what's the perfect next TikTok video to show you. Or what's the perfect next politically outrageous tweet that will keep you scrolling. And we saw how that experiment went. You know, there's a lot of really good things that social media has done.

But the overall picture of what social media has done, if you really take into account the full scope of Impacts and externalities. Is it's also created. you know, lower trust society.

And that that is like undermining the quality of the soil underneath your feet. while you have a few nice shiny shiny toys above the soil. We knew That No matter what positive stories we were telling about social media, unless you pay attention to the incentives, which is to maximize attention and engagement, which produces that race to the bottom of the brainstem, that that was gonna be the driving force of what would tell you which future we're gonna land into.

And if we care about which AI future we get. We're gonna hear a lot of positive stories about AI. Developing antibiotics and solutions to climate change and new drugs for cancer. And of course, I have a beloved with cancer right now. I want as many of those solutions as we possibly can get as fast as possible.

But We have to also look at the incentives, which is if it's a race to roll out AI. capabilities as fast as possible, like handing out new magic wand for new kinds of things that people can do that they couldn't even do four months ago. The fact that, you know, there's a new magic wand that was released last year that with three seconds of your voice, guy, I can talk to your bank representative or your grandmother and pretend to be you and get sensitive information out of them. And society wasn't prepared for that magic wand to be

Rolled out. I want you to explain I I there was a h a big breakthrough in twenty seventeen. W essentially Google announced this development, it's called the transformer model. And this helped kind of spark this this breakthrough in when what we now know as large language models, and that's kind of helped to trigger what's now called generative AI. But help me understand how works.'Cause I mean I think a lot of people, you know, are thinking about or you know, hearing about breakthroughs in scientific developments and and cancer research and climate change technology, things that are going to benefit us, things that will make our lives easier. But at the same time

From what I understand, based on on what you've talked about, A lot of the s the scientists and researchers working with large language models are kind of developing a Prometheus, something that Already they know that is growing faster and becoming smarter. Faster than they ever anticipated.

Yeah. So Just to say that I was pretty skeptical of a lot of the bigger AI risks. Um when

There was a community in San Francisco called the Effect of Ultraists that have been worried about bigger AI risk for a long time. Yeah. I was incredibly skeptical of a lot of this stuff. In fact, I actually told them, I actually think you all are misguided. You're not seeing the AI that's been released right underneath your feet that has already wrecked the world and it's called social media. So just want to say that I'm not walking into this conversation wanting to hype AI capabilities. What changed though is in twenty seventeen, there was a paper at Google published called Attention Is All You Need, in which they invented this new kind of AI paradigm of transformers.

I won't go into too much in the technical details, but we swapped the engine underneath the hood of AI in twenty seventeen. And everything that we used to be skeptical of about AI up until twenty seventeen, I would have agreed with everybody on. And you know, there's AI when Siri mispronounces your mom's name, and there's AI when Google Maps gets the directions wrong or mispronounces a street address. But that AI that falls over and makes mistakes is different than the AI of Transformers in which basically

It's like a big brain neural network and you're throwing more data. More training. More compute at it. So for example, GPT four. They spent a hundred million dollars.

To get a bunch of NVIDIA chips to churn away. For something like six months. And then come out with this Weird digital spaghetti brain. This is a massive neural network. And the thing about it is that as you scale these digital brains.

They end up with more emergent capabilities that no one Who built them? Anticipate it. So suddenly. When they scaled, you know, GPT four.

They tested it and it could explain jokes. You could give it an image of The picture of an iPhone with where the bottom of the port, there's like an old VGA cable, like those old monitor cables from the 1990s. Yeah. And you could say, what's funny about this image? And it explained, well it's funny because an iPhone can't have a 1990s VGA cable at the bottom with the iPhone. It's not that it had ever seen that image before. It's not that it was trained on that.

And this is not to sort of conjure this sort of mythical blank check of AI is going to have all sorts of magic capabilities. It's just that it we know that it gains capabilities that people may not notice for a long time. It took two years, for example. for researchers to figure out that GPT three point five, the predecessor to GPT four.

had research grade chemistry knowledge, meaning you could ask it questions about You know, how to synthesize dangerous chemicals and it would tell you how to do that. And so By the way, nobody knew that. Nobody knew that it had developed those capabilities on its own. That's right. And it's confusing, by the way, because I want to also, for those who are listening to this and skeptical, because they're like, Well, that's that's true, but look at how many times it hallucinates and it gets things wrong. That's a hundred percent correct. It's hallucinating and getting a bunch of things wrong. So it's similar, it's We've never been around this

This new kind of brain that is simultaneously in certain ways better than humans at a bunch of things. But also makes really Dumb mistakes like surprising and kind of a uh almost embarrassing mistakes. It's like a weird combo that we're not used to, but it's because it's an artificially intelligent mind. It's not a kind of mind that we're have any previous sort of

knowledge about. That's part one of my conversation with Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. You can catch the rest of my conversation with Tristan, where we discuss how AI could undermine the foundations of our society and what we can do to prevent that. That's coming up in part two next week. And thanks for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss an episode of the show. As always, it's free. This episode was researched and produced by Alex Chung with editing by John Isabella. Our music was composed by Ramteen Arablui, our audio engineer was Neil Rouch. Our production team at High Beltus also includes Carla Esteves, Chris Massini, Casey Herman, JC Howard, Catherine Cypher, Carrie Thompson, Malia Agadello, Neva Grant, and Sam Paulson. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to how I built this lab.

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