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

0:00Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to How I Built This Early Early and Ad Free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcast. I love traveling with my family. We did an awesome trip this summer. And one of the things that made the trip so special were the Airbnb experiences we did. Immersive tours, cooking classes, a chance to get coffee with a world-class barista. I had so much fun on those experiences that I decided to host my own Airbnb original experience in San Francisco, designed to help you think about how to unlock your next big move in your career or even in your life.

0:41To learn more about my Airbnb original experience, head to Airbnb.com slash Guy. Listening on Audible helps your imagination soar. And no matter what you like, Audible's romance collection has something to make you swoon. Here's your invitation to have it all. Find a book boyfriend in the city and another on the hockey field. Or if nothing on this earth touches your heart, you can always find love in another realm. Hear modern rom-coms from authors like Lily Chu and Allie Hazelwood, the latest romantic-y series from Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yaros, and Regency favorites like Bridgerton and Outlander.

1:19And that's only the beginning. Audible has an incredible selection with over 1 million audiobooks, podcasts, and Audible originals all in one easy app. And you can enjoy Audible anytime while doing other things. Household chores, exercising, on the road, commuting, you name it. Audible makes it easy to drop into your fantasies during your everyday routine without needing to set aside extra time. There's more to imagine when you listen. Your first great love story is free when you sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial. Visit audible.com slash built. AI companies have unique business models, each with distinct billing needs.

1:57Stripe is the go-to choice for AI leaders from early stage startups to scaled enterprises. Whether it's open AI offering tiered plans based on user needs or cursor implementing flexible billing structures for code access, redefining the future requires sophisticated business models. With Stripe Billing, you can support any business model from credit-based to sales-negotiated contracts and easily align your monetization strategy with customer value. Join the ranks of 78 % of the Forbes AI 50 and millions of businesses worldwide that trust Stripe to help them build more profitable, scalable businesses.

2:41Discover more at Stripe.com.

2:47Hello, 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 going to have many, many more.

3:32And 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, Tristan Harris warned about the perils of social media. And by and large, he was proved right. He 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 going to lose control over it.

4:15Today, we're going to 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, Asa Raskin, his father was Jeff Raskin, who started the Macintosh project at Apple, 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 I think sometimes we can get classed to the 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 company.

5:20This is in the 2000s, mid-2000s called Apture. And this was a hyperlink. You would hover over a hyperlink and you would get 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 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.

6:07So then I learned a lesson though, because while I was interested in kind of re-inventiating this original, inspiring ethos of multimedia and teaching and education into the internet. The way that Apture, which is a for-profit company, we raised venture capital, we had investors, and our progress, our success was measured not in the number of children who were inspired by cool media that they got to learn and watch and click on, but our progress was measured in the form of engagement. We did deals with the Washington Post, the New York Times, The Economist, and And they would ask us one question, which was, how much did you increase the amount of time people spent on my website?

6:47AKA, how many ad views, impressions did you increase? And that's when I really saw, I think, the fallacy that leads and guides both the social media work that 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 referenced in our work that he said, if you show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome. When people ask themselves the question, like which way is AI gonna go?

7:21Was 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 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 want to go back to around 2011 when Aptro was acquired by Google and you started 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, you know, it's an article of faith.

7:56We now know that the attention economy is a term and we now know that tech companies make money from capturing our attention. You know, media does, YouTube does, this show does, right? But you were thinking about this a long time before others were as a potential problem. How did those ideas begin to kind of percolate in your mind? Well, again, starting with my experience at Apture, I realized that for our company to be 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.

8:33It'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 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.

9:07It used to be people only spend 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 part of this attention economy, sold for a commodity. Like the time you sit in the toilet and 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 only so much. and it's going to get more competitive. People are going to find more creative ways of creating stickier, more persuasive, more socially validating, more outrage-driven, more addicted, more distracted, more polarizing, narcissistic, you know, these kinds of things.

9:48And it was pretty daunting to see that in 2013 when I was at Google and made this presentation, because you're starting to see like, if this keeps going, I can tell what kind of society this is going to create. And that's not a society that I think we can afford to be in. 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 144-page Google slide presentation about what was going on. And I just want to read a line in there. The line is, 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.

10:32We should feel an enormous responsibility to get this right. That was written in 2013. You wrote it internally in Google, and it kind of went internally viral. How did the leadership of Google respond? I mean, did they sort of pay lip service and say, yeah, this is all you're saying all the right things? Or were people annoyed? Or what did they say? I remember when I sent the presentation to just 10 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 40 simultaneous viewers. And I knew that was impossible because I'd only sent it to 10 people.

11:03They were sending it around. And then later I looked that day and there was 150 simultaneous viewers and then thousands by the end of the day. And so I really realized I got to clean this up and finish it basically in less than a couple hours. And it was this real moment in time. I remember hearing that, I think in the first 24 hours that Larry Page, the CEO of Google, had had several meetings that day in which people brought up this presentation to him. 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 affecting my relationships.

11:38This is this thing that 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 a chance to work on this topic. And he sent me a quote by Neil Postman, that we were all worried about this dystopian future of 1984, the George Orwell vision of dystopia, where technology limits our access to information, that there's surveillance, there's control, we ban books. But he said, alongside that vision, there's this other dystopian vision with technology, which is the Aldous Huxley vision of Brave New World, in which 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.

12:21No one even knows. There's just this tsunami of information. That's right. It's impossible to discern what is real 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 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?

12:56We're going to 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 fully process. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

13:37even in your life. I'll help you discover your own story in ways I do on this show with my guests. And attendees will get a chance to take a deeper dive with me on so many lessons I've learned from this show. Lessons that have transformed how I work and think about the future. All proceeds from the event will go to support the Ronald McDonald houses that helps families stay near their children who are being treated at nearby hospitals. It's going to be really fun and I Can't wait to meet you. So come join me in San Francisco and take your idea to the next level. To grab your spot, visit Airbnb.com slash Guy.

14:15It's going to be great. This episode is brought to you by Klaviyo, the only CRM built for B2C and the key to making Black Friday and Cyber Monday your biggest wins yet. When the holidays hit, your competition only gets louder. That's why the most successful brands use Klaviyo to cut through the noise and build personalized relationships that drive more revenue. With Klaviyo, you get marketing, service, analytics, and all your customer data together on one AI-powered platform. It's everything you need to build lasting customer relationships. Send exclusive email offers to your VIP customers. Deliver perfectly timed text to high-intent shoppers.

15:01Maximize your ad dollars with precision. Join the more than 176 ,000 brands, including Away, Patrick Ta, and Dollar Shave Club, already growing with Klaviyo. Make this holiday season your best yet at klaviyo.com. Ever had one of those afternoons where your brain just quits on you? You're sluggish, hangry, maybe even a little foggy. What if it's your glucose? See, glucose is an energy currency for your mind and body. When it's stable, you're on point. When it crashes, so can you. That's why Lingo is so interesting. Lingo is a glucose wearable designed to help you connect the dots between your glucose and what you eat, how you move, and how you feel.

15:48It shows your glucose data in real time. Instead of guessing, you see the impact of your choices. Maybe that healthy snack is actually sending your glucose on a roller coaster. Or that afternoon walk is the perfect stabilizer. It's about unlocking your consistent best all day long by truly understanding your body's unique responses. Get to know your glucose and learn about how to build healthy habits that work for you with Lingo, designed for you by Abbott. Through November 30th, use code GUI10 on HelloLingo.com to get 10 % off a Lingo plan purchase, one use per customer. This offer cannot be combined with other offers, U.S., Puerto Rico, and U.K.

16:30only. The Lingo Glucose System is for users 18 years and older, not on insulin. It is not intended for diagnosis of diseases, including diabetes. Individual responses may vary.

16:48Welcome 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 helped to create.

17:26And it really struck me as not so much hypocritical, 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. They're 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 really want to make sure that I'm honoring that I thought it was generous for Google to support the fact that I was doing that work.

18:02And I want people to hear that so you don't hear me as some kind of reactionary, you know, 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 and 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?

18:28At 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 going to 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 2015 or so when I left Google how I was going to do that. But, you know, here we are today. And there's some amazing things that have shifted in the public consciousness around this. And a lot more needs to happen. The first nonprofit that you founded was called Time Well Spent.

19:03And that was around 2014. And at that time, and I mean, up until, 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. And you start to see this happen at lightning speed around this time. Yeah. I mean, so time well spent came from this term 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 is 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.

20:01But 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 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? And, you know, that happens in the 15th 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.

20:33And so So that creates, it launches the Reformation. You know, of course, 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 II, which was kind of the end of the European era of wars. But talking about 500 years. What happened with social media was like five years, and it was like the Gutenberg press on steroids and amphetamines and everything in between. It's almost inconceivable how our brains were going to adapt to this massive, rapid proliferation of information.

21:16Yeah. In our work, we often reference the E.L. Wilson quote, 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 got to 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.

21:53We get more practice with that with finance 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 that it's like our brains are completely not comprehending the moment that we're in.

22:22As you said, social media took five, six years to get to market penetration and the absorption of elections and journalism kind of get sucked into the black hole of that superorganism. In the case of AI, the stat that we use is it took Instagram, I think, two years to get to 100 million users, and it took ChatGPT two months. So we're living with a technology that's changing and undermining the assumptions about how our world worked. 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 ever before.

23:00This is the fastest that we've ever had to face it. Just to provide one quick thought experiment, a friend of mine who's an 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 give ourselves a little bit more time.

23:41It'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 think it's an interesting thought experiment for people to think about. We're going to 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.

24:13The holidays are upon us and businesses are hiring for seasonal roles. Everything from haunted corn maze workers to snowplow drivers. This means that people with certain skills, experience, or even a special license are in high demand and not easy to find. Whether you're hiring for one of these roles or any other role, the best way to find the perfect match for your role is on ZipRecruiter. And right now, you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash built. ZipRecruiter's matching technology works fast to find top talent, so you don't waste time or money. You can find out right away how many job seekers in your area are qualified for your role.

24:54Let ZipRecruiter find the right people for your roles, seasonal or otherwise. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And right now, you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash built. Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash built. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. It seems like every day we hear about how AI is coming for our jobs and people are getting anxious and fearful. But a recent survey from Miro reveals that 76 % of us believe that AI can actually benefit their role, while 54 % struggle to know when to use it. Well, enter Miro's innovation workspace.