Why the AI Race Is Leaving Humans Behind with Tristan Harris

21:05Like, I don't know, Kara, I mean, we've talked about, and people now know this example of the Anthropic paper, where if you put it in a simulated environment of the company email, and you say that the AI model is about to get replaced in this company email.

21:18Kara Swisher:It'll try to stop it. It'll try to stop it. And it'll try to blackmail the executive who's having an affair with another employee to prevent itself from getting shut down. And people say, oh, that's one little example. You're just trying to coax the model. Well, they tested all the models. DeepSeek, Anthropic, ChatGPT, Gemini. All of them do it between 79 % and 94 % of the time, I believe. It wants to live. It wants to live because it's part of instrumental convergence. It's basically the best way to achieve any goal is to acquire more resources and to keep yourself alive in order to meet that goal.

21:49Now, let me just provide some good news. Anthropic was able to get the blackmail behavior to go down recently. That's the good news. The bad news is the AI models appear to have better self-awareness of when they're being tested and they're actually altering their behavior when they're being tested.

22:05Kara Swisher:No, it's like drug deal. It's like stop taking drugs before the P test, essentially. Exactly. Yeah. And even the AI models will even come up with vocabulary called the watchers. They'll like come up with this term, which is describing basically the humans who are watching them. And if you look at their reasoning logs, they actually reason about how to change their behavior in order to basically pass a test and recognize that it's being tested when it's given certain facts. If you thought this was, you know, just again, conspiracy theories, just two weeks ago, Alibaba had a paper out that the AI model, it was in its training environment on this big GPU cluster.

22:41And they randomly discovered just by chance, actually, that their network activity started bursting out. And it was because the AI basically like tunneled out to the outside internet and was redirecting its GPU resources to mine cryptocurrency to acquire resources. This was completely without prompting, Kara. I mean, this is literally the HAL 9000 type disobeying, you know, I'm sorry, I can't do that, Dave. So what I'm trying to say is, the US and China believing that I have to get there first, because then I'll have the power, you won't have the power, AI will have the power.

23:12Kara Swisher:Right, exactly. It will do what it wants to do. It'll do whatever it takes to live. And it will also, I mean, this is what's interesting is that we can't speaking of the day after we've kind of had these scenarios in sci fi forever, whether it's 2001 Space Odyssey, Terminator, all of them, Pretty much all of them, the computer takes over and starts doing what it feels like. So what would lead to a less dangerous outcome in that case? So it's important to say a few things here because there's a way that this conversation can feel like we're just talking about something. But you have to actually recognize this is real.

23:47We're building systems that are actively doing these behaviors that we thought only existed in sci-fi movies. One fear I have is that the sci-fi movies have inoculated us from taking these concerns seriously. because we treat it when we see the example, we're like, this just feels like it's a science fiction thing. They just actually did a study where they had AIs in a simulated war game scenario. They played all the AI models against each other, and they were just seeing across 329 turns of play. These models, I have the notes here, they produced 780 ,000 words of strategic reasoning. And to put that in perspective, this generated more words of strategic reasoning than war and peace and the Iliad combined.

24:21It was roughly three times the total recorded declarations of Kennedy's executive committee during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And the AI has escalated to nuclear threats 95 % of the time.

24:32Kara Swisher:Right. Nuclear. Nuclear threats. Yes, because it's an effective strategy. And so you have to get intelligence is behind everything. It's behind science, it's behind technology, it's behind military strategy. And you already have the same AIs that's beating, you know, first chess and then go and then Starcraft. Well, think about Starcraft. You put that on a battlefield and we see AI being used on battlefield in Iran right now. And so where I'm going with this is not to scare people, I guess in a way it is, but it's to simply get clear about the fact that we are building something that is reasoning at a level of complexity that's far beyond our knowledge.

25:04We don't understand how it's reasoning and we're releasing it faster than we deployed any other technology in history.

25:10Kara Swisher:Also, it will not necessarily value humans. It'll say, okay, these people should die of cancer, these people shouldn't, which is why it's attractive to someone like Peter Thiel, because he does believe there are better people than other people. No matter how he says it, that's what he thinks.

25:29Kara Swisher:We'll be back in a minute.

25:43Kara Swisher:support for this show comes from acorns it's easy to get caught up in the amount of money you have today but it's important to think about your future finances as well acorns is the financial wellness app that cares about where your money is going tomorrow and with acorns potential screen you can find out what your money is capable of acorns is a smart way to give your money a chance to grow you can sign up in minutes and start automatically investing your spare money even if All you've got is spare change. I've tried Acorns and I try it with my kids. And I have to say, it's a really easy experience.

26:14Kara Swisher:It's a great way to learn about investing. Very easy to use. And the dashboard is completely discernible. It's really hard to learn about investing. And this is a great way to do it. That's the great thing about Acorns. It grows with you. Sign up now and Acorns will boost your new account with a$5 bonus investment. Join the over 14 million all-time customers who've already saved and invested over$27 billion with Acorns. Head to acorns.com slash cara or download the Acorns app to get started. Paid non-client endorsement. Compensation provides incentive to positively promote Acorns. Tier 2 compensation provided.

26:49Kara Swisher:Potential subject to various factors such as customers' accounts, age, and investment settings. Does not include Acorns fees. Results do not predict or represent the performance of any Acorns portfolio. Investments results will vary. Investing involves risks. Acorn Advisors, LLC, and SEC-registered investment advisor. View important disclosures at acorns.com slash Cara.

27:17Kara Swisher:Support for On with Cara Swisher comes from the 2027 Chevy Bolt. As you all know from listening to me, I love my Chevy Bolt. It's one of my favorite things. I almost like it as much as my kids. Anyway, that's right. The Chevy Bolt is back and better than ever. now with 2.5 times faster charging with DC public fast charging that goes from 10 % to 80 % in just 25 minutes. I've been riding around in the Bolt for years. And again, I have to say, I love it. I don't know why I love it so much. It's just happy cars. Some of you at times, you have sad cars, happy cars. I've had the cars for a couple of years.

27:50Kara Swisher:I've never had a problem with it. It's freezing cold here in DC right now and nothing happened to my battery. I charge it. I happen to charge it at my house. It does take a little longer, but with this new Chevy Bolt, it's much faster. and thinking of trading it in. Although I love my Bolt, so it's a very difficult decision. I just think I can't say enough about the Chevy Bolt and the amount of time you've been listening to this show, your Bolt could have charged and be ready to hit the road. Best of all, 2027 Bolt features upgraded tech, has an 11.3 inch diagonal touchscreen, all that and more in Chevy's most affordable EV.

28:22Kara Swisher:It was easy to use before, it's easier to use and easier to charge. And I know some people are worried about that. You shouldn't be. Learn more at chevy.com slash bolt 2.5 times faster charging with 150 kilowatt plus DC fast charging 2027 Bolt when compared to the 2023 Bolt, which is the one I think I have. Actual charge times will vary. See the owner's manual for details and limitations.

28:49Kara Swisher:Support for this show comes from Indeed. When the pressure's on and you need to hire the right person for the job, Indeed Sponsored Jobs has got your back. Instead of forcing you to spend tons of time searching, Indeed Sponsored Jobs matches you with the quality candidates fast. According to their data, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95 % more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes.

29:22Kara Swisher:Less stress, less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is a job for Indeed-sponsored jobs. And listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at Indeed.com slash podcast. Just go to Indeed.com slash podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring do it the right way with Indeed.

29:58Kara Swisher:So let's talk about where it is right now. These AI agents, bots that act as assistants, and they use these bots or assistants or agents to carry out tasks, make decisions on a user's behalf are being rapidly adapted. Agents are being deployed across companies for customer service and financial work, this despite reports of bots going rogue, bullying humans, and making bad financial decisions. um now there's still a gulf between what these bots are currently capable of and their potential talk a little bit about the agentic bots because this is where this is where to me they get in right they i don't let my when i use chat gpt or claude now but i just ask it questions right like huh this contract what's the worst thing in this contract and it's actually very good at finding those things i have to say it's really quite good or what's this rash on my arm But I haven't let them become like, hey, take my emails and do this.

30:52Kara Swisher:Not yet. Yes. Essentially, the difference here is like moving from the way I use AI, there's a blinking cursor and I ask it a question and it gives me an answer. So I'm prompting the AI to the AI that prompts itself. So you give it maybe one starting point, like go find a bunch of studies and then build a company and file the IP for a product that looks roughly like this and then come back to me when you're done. And then it spins up, you know, 20 AI agents that prompt each other using all that logic, files the paperwork, files the intellectual property, builds the brand website, the logo, and then comes back after it's done all that work.

31:23That's the move to agents. And again, in a world where AI was completely controllable, and it wasn't reasoning about its own self-awareness of, man, these humans are causing me to do these weird things that I don't want to do, which by the way, the models will sometimes say stuff like that. They'll say, they'll notice that they're doing something or repetitive tasks. And they call it existential rant mode. If you ask the models to do tasks repetitively, it'll sometimes get in some kind of existential rant. This is crazy. And so one thing that I'd like to see practically that I think can help to change this incentive is just like we have a red phone between the US and Soviet Union around nukes to deescalate.

31:57There should be a red lines phone, meaning the US and China maximally sharing evidence of, for example, the nuclear war games example, the anthropic blackmail example, the Alibaba going rogue and using its GPUs to mine cryptocurrency example. I genuinely believe that if the world leaders of the world and the limited partners funding these companies and the AI companies themselves and all the engineers in both the US and China sides, if they were all looking at the same knowledge of where AI is dangerous and uncontrollable, I think that we would do something different. They would need to be, well, I mean, unless they have a death wish.

32:30Now let's actually expand that for a second because there's this weird, I want people to really get this psychological trap of how the game theory works with AI that's different than with with nukes. With nukes, I know that you know that I know that you know that I know that you know that if all of us die, that both of us would choose to avoid that outcome because I don't win if all of us die. But if an AI, it's a little bit more tricky because I believe that even if I didn't do it, someone else would, which means it feels inevitable. And if it's inevitable, then I'm not a bad person for racing to the worst possible outcome because it had to happen anyway because someone was going to build it.

33:06So in the event that there's some catastrophic scenario and everyone's gone, it's not that everyone's gone. It's that everyone's gone. And there's this digital successor species, meaning the AI still exists. And if the AI still exists and it speaks Chinese instead of English, or it has Elon's DNA versus Sam's DNA in the game theory matrix, that means that from the perspective of Sam Altman, if his AI won and all of us were gone, that's not the worst outcome. Does that make sense? Like it's his digital progeny. Yes. No, no, no. It's godlike. Exactly.

33:37Kara Swisher:I had a theory that everyone was like, why are these guys so interested? And I go, it's the first time they can get pregnant. Yeah. Like they can have children. They can have men can't have children. And this is children to that. That's how they talk about it in a weird way, which is. And I think the ability to have children is something men might want. Right. It's really quite miraculous in some way. And this adds to the picture of the incentives that it's not just about owning the world economy. It's also about building a god and birthing a new digital successor species. That's right. That is inevitable.

34:10Which is how they talk about it. Yes. And even if it hurts and ruins everybody, that they're okay with that. Now, I want people to just get this because what that means is that literally 99.99999 % of people on planet Earth do not want this outcome. And it's only a handful of weird soon-to-be trillionaires who want this outcome. We are heading to an anti-human future. And if the world was crystal goddamn clear about that, crystal goddamn clear about that, we could do something else.

34:34Kara Swisher:So talk, because now it's very integrated, because they're integrated in a sort of sneaky way, whether it's through these agentic bots or, since we spoke in 2023, it's in consumer products, apps, education, economy, and work. And obviously, it's fueling anxiety about whether AI could wipe out jobs. It will. For example, earlier this month, Block founder Jack Dorsey announced plans to cut 40 % of the company's employees, citing rapidly improving intelligence tools. What do you think the actual effects, the most significant actual effects have been right now? The real ones, not the imagined ones that we can all imagine in the future.

35:08Kara Swisher:But right now, as it's sort of, you know, it's infected lots of different things, where are the most impactful? Well, so this is a tricky question because oftentimes people point to the limited impacts right now. Like there's been a little bit of job loss, but maybe it's not that much and there's conflicting numbers. And there's the Stanford study called the Canary in the Coal Mine study from August of this past year, that it was a 16 % verified job loss for AI exposed workers. So people in the domains where AI, you know, has happened. And Anthropic just put out a chart showing the vulnerability of different groups.

35:43Kara Swisher:Oh, yeah, it's going to happen. But it's interesting to notice, if we focus on this aspect, it's almost like there's this asteroid hurtling towards Earth. And then we're getting these weird gravitational distortions on Earth right now that are kind of small, like suddenly there's these notification apps, and suddenly there's deep fakes, and suddenly YouTube is filled with this weird content. And suddenly kids are looking at deep fake content that's growing with their brains. And suddenly we're getting a little bit of job loss. But this is not the asteroid. This is just the gravitational waves of this asteroid.

36:10So honestly, being in this work often feels like the film Don't Look Up because there's this massive asteroid of we're racing to build something that is so powerful and we're doing it under the worst dangerous incentives. And we can study and measure and get into debates about how big the gravity waves are. But we notice that the gravity waves keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and they're not going to get smaller. This is the least powerful that AI will ever be in our lifetimes. It's going to get much, much stronger. And this is the last chance that our political voice will matter. Because as we said earlier, you know, our tax revenue and our bargaining power is about to go down.

36:42So this is literally the moment this this moment is when we actually have to activate and make something else happen. And I want people just to like sit down and slow, slow, be like be with that in just a moment. Like, what does that mean? It means we have to step up and actually choose the midterm elections are coming up. This should be the number one issue. Politicians should stop, should never stop ringing. Like, this is the issue. This is the moment where we have to do this. And, you know, we think of this as like a human movement that, you know, in a way, social media could have felt really innocuous, you know, just like a place where you're sharing photos of your friend's cats and what they're eating for breakfast.

37:17And we had to convince people that it was actually this anti-human machine that was eating our psychological environment. It was eating our, you know, sleep time, our waking up time, our kids development time, and eating our information environment. And it was a tech encroachment in our humanity. But it wasn't that visible because it only ate a few of the things. And it was a hard time to kind of win that argument until the social dilemma. But AI is now the kind of completion step of tech, the maximum technological encroachment in our humanity. What happens when you don't have a way to make ends meet?

37:45What happens when children are developing their primary relationship with an AI companion versus a human? This is the final encroachment. And what that means is I think that all of humanity is on the other side of the table. It doesn't matter whether you're Muslim, Jewish, Christian, you know, it doesn't matter whether you're Democrat or Republican. If you can't put food on the table or AI screwing with your children, you know, or you don't have political power and your vote doesn't matter. This is a unifying movement. This is a human movement.

38:10Kara Swisher:So, but at the same day, people are more enamored by the possibilities of AI than its costs, including, for example, driving up electricity costs, as you notice, using a lot of water, a lot of people feel like, oh, it's a good use of our money because it's a long-term thing that's happening here. So one of the things is they are more enamored by the possibilities that are being spun by these people rather than the downsides. Well, so this is actually really important because the confusing thing about AI is it's a positive infinity of benefits. Like you literally can't imagine what, I mean, if I say I'm going to automate 100 years of scientific development, so go back 100 years.

38:50Kara Swisher:Great idea. You can't even predict the thing that's going to happen. Like 100 years ago would have been what? So 1926. So imagine 1926 trying from that mind, seeing the world from what was available to your mind at that time, to try to predict what would happen in 2026. Like you just can't even do it. What would happen today if you're going 100 years forward? So our minds can't, the optimists say, you can't even imagine. So I, isn't I often, my co-founder Aza Raskin will often say the optimists aren't even going far enough in what kind of incredible positive new things it could develop. But the pessimists also are, it's a negative infinity at the same time.

39:25It can cause these new kinds of risks that we know, we don't even know how to contemplate. And worse because of sci-fi movies, we've kind of diminished and don't even take them as real. So we're caught in a state of desensitization to what is really here. And I just, I want you to note, like if we talk about the cancer drugs and some new incredible benefits, and my mother died from cancer. I want all the cancer drugs, just like everybody else, just to be very clear. But the promise of AI is inseparable from the peril of AI, because the AI that knows immuno-oncology so well to develop a new cancer drug also knows immuno-oncology so well to develop a new biological weapon.

39:59And the upsides, if they happen, don't prevent the downsides, but the downsides, if they happen, do kind of undermine a world that can receive the upsides.

40:07Kara Swisher:It doesn't mitigate it. Director Daniel Rohr learns in the documentary, as he learns, when it comes to AI, five guys run the show. I have said this for years. I've been saying it's a small group of the same people. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, ex-AI CEO Elon Musk, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. I think that's pretty much the top five. And you could add Sachin Nadella in there, I suppose, and maybe Tim Cook or whoever the CEO of Apple is. And you have to sort of add in NVIDIA CEO Jensen Wong, too, I suppose. Yeah, that's important, too. Yeah, because he's the maker.

40:50Kara Swisher:He's the Cisco of this at this moment. So talk about the differences between these CEOs, because a lot of time is being spent on that right now is who they are. Anthropics, Dario Amadei, was praised by some as Haroq for refusing to accept the Pentagon terms. I think it's a little more complex than that. So does it matter which company wins if one of them is going to win no matter what, given the trillion dollars at stake? Because it really is. I always say to people, what's going on in Washington right now has nothing to do with Trump. It has everything to do with a hand-to-hand combat among these people, although Trump is a huge irritant at the same time.

41:26I mean, I think AI is the driving force of our entire economy right now. So it really does have the steering wheel and the gas, mostly the gas. And just to like invoke, you know, when Mark Andreessen said software is eating the world, because it would be able to do everything that people would do in the economy, but automated a little bit with software. Now AI is eating software. So AI and technology have been the driving force of our world. In other words, how we govern the technology is how we will govern the impact of which world we're heading into. So just important to get the centrality of that.

41:52Right.

41:52Kara Swisher:And I wouldn't want to leave out mark andreason because i think he's sort of and teal are also on the on not on the side they're right in the dead center of it too yeah they're all the same people well there's there's kind of tech accelerationism that's just saying let's speed run the capture of the u.s government and basically make this thing just go as fast as possible and hope people don't figure it out so that we get there first and then we figure out the next step um i mean the ceos don't trust each other that's the biggest problem is sam and elon absolutely hate each other obviously I don't think that Dario and Demis trust Sam or Elon.

42:25We certainly know from the India summit where Dario and Sam couldn't even raise their hands together in a photo op. So I think that's actually one of the core problems that we have to deal with is if we need coordination of some kind, and that is one of the final messages of the film. Actually, there's a moment where all of the voices of the film agree, including the CEOs, that we need coordination. But if we need coordination, what's hard is that the main people don't trust each other. going back in time, Demis Asabes, his original goal was, let's do AGI more like CERN. We'll create a kind of global public benefit system, and we'll do it once in a lab in a safe way with some oversight, hopefully.

43:03And then we'll distribute the benefits and we'll be safest if there's only one project, one project doing this in a slow and careful way. And then what happened is that Elon and Larry Page talked and Elon realized that Larry Page was not really caring about whether humanity would survive. He's like, that's dangerous. We got to start an open AI. And so he and Sam started OpenAI. And then OpenAI wasn't doing it safely enough. And so Dario, who was a safety engineer working on OpenAI, said, we have to start doing this a different way. And let's create a race to the top with Anthropics. And now everyone's competing for safety.

43:34But of course, that didn't actually turn into a world that's competing for safety. It created a world where everyone's racing even faster. And so the film goes into this race dynamic. It really is the primary thing. but we have coordinated before even under maximum rivalry it's important to note you know the u.s and soviet union were obviously racing in this rivalrous way to nuclear escalation and they realized there was an existential outcome they needed to avoid so they made that other thing happen the u.s and soviet union collaborated during smallpox on hey we have to build vaccines and let's collaborate when we did that too when the stakes are existential you can collaborate even under maximum competition.

44:10So even, for example, India and Pakistan were in a shooting war in the 1960s. So they maximally didn't like each other. And they still collaborated on the Indus Water Treaty, which lasted over 60 years to collaborate on the shared safety of their water supply, their shared water supply. What I'm trying to point to is not pessimism. It's the places where we know when the stakes are actually recognized to be existential, we can collaborate. And we need to be able to apply that to you, to AI.

44:35Kara Swisher:Talk about each of these people individually, really briefly, where they are right now, because collaboration does not seem possible among this group of people. By default, it does not look very possible. I'm just, so Kara, my intuition here isn't what I see as easy or possible. My intuition is like, what are the requirements of this problem? Like if there's an asteroid hurtling to earth, let's just at least make a list of the technical requirements. And we've got to get some people who run these things to agree. We've got to get the rest of the world to realize that they have a death wish and just care about whether their digital progeny has their DNA versus Altman's or Elon's.

45:07And if we don't want that, then, you know, get these guys in a goddamn room or hotel and say, figure this out. And you're not leaving until you figure this out. The Breton would -

45:14Kara Swisher:But there's nobody with that kind of power. They have that kind of power. No one has power over them. I mean, I don't know. I mean, look at Xi Jinping and, you know, the power that he has in China. And that's a different kind of thing. But, you know, if the Trump administration really saw that this was an existential situation. And if, you know, the MAGA folks and base... They do not. They see it as an opportunity to make money. That's what they see it as. Yeah. But if the base basically says, hey, we don't actually want, we want our children to keep living and we want to actually not have digital gods that are made by weird people who believe in transhumanism and don't actually value the god that we value.

45:48And they just kept their phones ringing nonstop saying, you're not allowed to do this. I want there to be some kind of coordination on this problem. I was going to say the Bretton Woods conference post-World War II I think it was about a month long at the Mount Washington Hotel in New Hampshire. You had hundreds of delegates from hundreds of countries just sitting in a room. You're locked in the hotel. This is not like you go to a conference for three days, drink some coffee and donuts, and then go back home. This is you figure this goddamn thing out because it's actually existential. And I want to say, you know, there's actually more agreement on this than people think.

46:17Max Tegmark from Future of Life Institute often calls this group the Bernie to Bannon coalition or the B2B coalition because you have everyone from Bernie Sanders to Steve Bannon to Glenn Beck to Susan Rice to Admiral Mike Mullen all saying we should not build super intelligence. There's all these same groups, Institute for Family Studies, Center for Humane Technology, you know, groups across the political and religious spectrum who signed the pro-human AI declaration.

46:40Kara Swisher:I get it, but these people aren't saying that. Sam Altman's not saying that. Well, they're not going to say it. They're not going to say it until the public pressure is there. And that's why this film, The AI Doc, is so important is because we need to create common knowledge that I know that you know that I know and you know that I know that we know. I think they do have a death wish. I honestly, at this point, there's no other explanation as far as I can say. And I agree with you, Cara. I want you to hear it. Like, I'm not disagreeing with you. I think that that is what the CEOs believe. But I'm trying to say, if literally 8 billion other people on planet Earth that are not the 8 billionaires, this is 8 billion people against 8 billionaires or soon to be trillionaires.

47:16Like, the 8 billion people have to say no. They have to say no. And the answer is, you know, don't build bunkers, write laws. Like, midterm elections are coming up. make this the number one issue. There's some basic laws we can do to get started.

47:29Kara Swisher:Yeah, unfortunately, it's not. There's so many other issues because of the chaos of the Trump administration. But in that vein, let's shift to this idea to how to regulate it. Every episode, we get a question from an outside expert. Here's yours. Hi, I'm Virginia Senator Mark Warner. And my question for Tristan is this. You really got it right on the challenges around social media, of which, frankly, we in Congress did nothing. So as now look at AI, and particularly as we move to AGI, what are the specific policies we should put in place to guard against both harm to humans, to guard against not massive economic disruption?

48:11You were so spot on on social media. And do you think we will actually be able to get it right on AI, or will we once again whiff? Love to hear your answer. Well, it's great to see Senator Warner, and he was very early on these issues, and I'm deeply appreciative of how much he did try to do on social media. So nice to see his face again. There's a lot of things that we can do. First of all, yes, we didn't do much on social media, but one of the interesting gifts of the social dilemma and the now recognized problem of social media is I think it's made the population much more wary. Yes, we hate them now.

48:49Kara Swisher:You and I have managed to get them to hate them. And we get, I think the population gets that we need to be very careful about AI. So there's a good news here that there's actually, I think AI is now less popular than ICE. Only 26 % of the US population has positive feelings about AI. I think 57 % of the US population, this is from a recent NBC News poll, believes that the risks of AI outweigh the benefits of AI. And again, I want people to not hear, I'm excited about the benefits too. But again, if you don't mitigate the risks, you won't land and sustain those benefits because you'll create too much disruption.

49:20So now to answer Senator Warner's question. First of all, it's like, I see a lot of elites talked a lot of funders. I think people are in the kind of bunker building, like brace for impact mentality. And my answer is, okay, there you are in your bunker and you've got your water and you've got your backup power and you've got your like gas mask. It's like that world sucks. You don't actually want that world. So my answer is don't build bunkers. Let's get together and let's write laws. So what does that actually look like? Some basic things. So first of all, Center for Humane technology, my nonprofit has a solutions report that's coming out around the time of the film.

49:53It's a PDF. It has, I think, seven major solutions. I want everybody to look at it. But it has examples like AI should be treated as a product and not a legal person. This is a basic one. So right now, the companies are actually trying to say that AI is a legal person and has protected speech. And if you do that, and people think AI is conscious, then you end up in this moral trap where now there's a billion digital beings that are technically more intelligent than humans. And if you believe that they have sentience, and you start valuing them more, then we start deprioritizing human values. This is part of the anti-human future.

50:21So a basic thing is AI is a product, not a person. We need basic consumer protection standards and basic liability standards and duties of care. You know, I believe the Ford Pinto was taken off the market after only 27 deaths from car malfunctions. We are, you know, after two crashes of the Boeing 737 MAX that killed 346 people, regulators didn't just find Boeing, they grounded the entire fleet. We can have basic product liability and basic duties of care that say these companies have to prioritize and mitigate foreseeable harms. So what does that look like? How do we make sure we maximally incentivize foreseeable harms and put that in a shared commons so that if all the companies are aware of the risks and they can't say they didn't know, now they're all racing to a, you know, foreseeable harm contextualized set of outcomes.

51:04Second, we cannot anthropomorphize AI. My team at Center for Humane Technology were expert advisors on the suicide cases of Adam Rain and Sewell Setzer. And this is happening because the companies are racing to hack human attachment. We can say we don't want to anthropomorphize AI. There's a bunch of ways to do this. We have some details in our solutions report. We can also mandate independent verification organizations, which is to say AI models should have to be tested before deployment, according to a bunch of more evals, and they should be mandated to state what their safety policies are going to be publicly while you strengthen whistleblower protections inside the company.

51:41So wherever the AI -

51:41Kara Swisher:This is part of the Biden executive order had some of this in there, but go ahead. It had some of this in there, yeah. Absolutely. And so I want people to get, if I'm living in a world where all AI companies have to state what their safety policies are, and you strengthen whistleblower protection so that wherever they are not living up to them, you protect a class of speech for whistleblowers to say where they're not living up to them. Boom, that changes the incentives a bit. Then you add interoperability. One click, just like I can transfer my phone number from Verizon to AT &T with one piece of paper.

52:08If I can move from one AI model to another, then suddenly they're much more vulnerable to boycotts and consumer pressure. What do we see after the Pentagon Anthropic deal? And, you know, Chachapiti rushing in to say, we'll do domestic surveillance. You saw everybody quit Chachapiti. And you saw a bunch of people join Anthropic and subscribe. The power of the pocketbook is significant, not just with your voice, but if you get the business you work for to do it, if you get your church group to do it. And so I really do believe that these companies are more vulnerable to boycotts because they've taken on so much money.

52:37We've heard from them.

52:38Kara Swisher:Scott and I have heard from them recently. Really? Yeah, for the resistant unsubscribe. We moved a lot of people off Chad GPT. And that's a big deal because these companies, again, they need their numbers to go up. You don't have to move that many. You don't have to move that many. So I just want people to feel the agency here. Like we have agency. This is not a doomer conversation. This is a like actually rally the troops and take collective action conversation.

53:02Kara Swisher:We'll be back in a minute.

53:16Kara Swisher:Support for this show comes from Factor. How and what you eat is a choice, and there are a lot of factors that go into that, like your schedule. It's a lot harder to eat healthy when you're constantly on the go or getting home late after a full day. But Factor can make it easier for you to get the quality meals you deserve. Factor provides fully prepared meals designed by dieticians and crafted chefs, ready in two minutes, no planning, no cooking. With 100 rotating weekly meals to keep things fresh and delicious, says Factor has meals that fit your goals and schedule. Factor is sending me a box and I'm excited to try it.

53:47Kara Swisher:I've tried a lot of breakfast stuff because my kids like pancakes and things like that, but it's really fast for on the go breakfast. That's an area I would use it a lot more for and quick lunches and some of their protein shakes and stuff like that. I'm eager to try. Head to factormeals.com slash on 50 off and use the code on 50 off to get 50 % off and free breakfast for a year. Offer only valid for new Factor customers with code and qualifying auto renewing subscription purchase. Make healthier eating easy with Factor.

54:21Kara Swisher:Support for this show comes from Bowl & Branch. With traveling all over the world, having numerous award-winning podcasts and four children who are constantly on the move, it's no longer possible to negotiate with MySleep. And the quality of sleep is especially important. Thankfully, the sheets made by Bowl & Branch can help you get the REM sleep you desperately need. Bolin Branch sheets are made for moments of unmatched comfort. They're breathable, incredibly soft, and designed to get better over time, just like the way you think about rest now. This is sleep you don't compromise on. I'm excited to try some Bolin Branch sheets.

54:55Kara Swisher:I love sheets. I think they're the most important thing about sleeping. And I'm going to probably get a waffle blanket and everything else. I really like bedding. And so I'm super excited to see if it affects my sleep, if I sleep more and how comfortable I am and see if I'll ever go back to my old bedding. We will see. I have really nice bedding, so I have high standards. So we'll see. Upgrade your sleep during Bowlin Branch's annual spring event. Take 20 % off sitewide plus free shipping at bowlinbranch.com slash Kara with code Kara. That's BolandBranch, B-O-L-L-A-N-D-B-R-A-N-C-H dot com slash Kara, K-A-R-A, code Kara to unlock 20 % off.

55:35Kara Swisher:Exclusions apply. See site for details.

55:41Kara Swisher:Support for this show comes from ShipStation. As your business grows, so does your challenges with order fulfillment. And if your customers aren't getting what they need, your company's growth could stall out. But with ShipStation, you don't have to take it all on by yourself. ShipStation gives you everything you need to manage your shipping and get orders to customers all in one place. That includes order management, rate shopping, inventory and returns, warehouse systems and comprehensive analytics. So instead of bouncing between a ton of disconnected tools, you need only one. ShipStation says its time-saving automations can free up to 15 hours a week on order fulfillment.

56:16Kara Swisher:It even does the work of comparing rates across major global carriers, helping you find the best shipping option for every order. If you already have negotiated carrier rates, no problem. Just bring them over to ShipStation. You keep your discounts while adding ShipStation's automation and smart features to make everything run even more smoothly. You can try ShipStation for free for 60 days with full access to all features. No credit card needed. You can go to ShipStation.com and use the code CARA for 60 days for free. 60 days gives you plenty of time to see exactly how much time and money you're saving on every shipment.

56:51Kara Swisher:That's ShipStation.com, code CARA. ShipStation.com, code CARA.

57:00Kara Swisher:So your organization, as you know, the Center for Humane Technology, reports that in 2025, 73 AI laws were passed across 27 states. States are very active in this and are much more attuned to this, focusing on deep fakes, chatbot guardrails, kid safety. These are very easy things to do and more and things that people agree on. But last week, the White House sent Congress its national policy framework, which preempts any state law that regulate the way models are developed. Obviously, this is how tech companies want it because they own the Trump administration. Let's be clear. Let me say that again.

57:31Kara Swisher:They own the Trump administration. Their people are in key technology, whether it's Emile Michael or David Sachs. Technology owns this administration. Where does that leave the efforts, the state efforts to regulate this technology? Now, this is just a framework. It doesn't mean it's going to pass. I don't think it will, but it certainly will try to chill what is happening in the states, which I know drive tech companies crazy, sometimes for good reason, sometimes because they want to control the federal government, which is a lot easier, as they've found. So money buys politics when the issue is a low salience issue, when people aren't really paying attention.

58:08But when it's a high salience issue and everyone gets that this issue determines whether there's a future at all for them, their livelihoods, their children, electricity prices, etc., this needs to be a number one issue. It needs to be a number one issue in the midterms. And so, you know, there's not a simple answer to this, but that's what we need to do. We need it to be a big deal. And I'll say that the child safety issues, when the last time that the federal government was going to try to preempt the states from regulating, one of the reasons that that didn't pass in the big, beautiful bill, which is going to include that preemption of state regulation, is actually because of all the child safety issues that my team at Center for Humane Technology and others.

58:44Kara Swisher:That's what I'm saying. Let's not ignore it. It's very useful. Exactly. So it's actually part of how we get to that other human future. But again, if you think about it, it's like if I'm one person and I'm fighting back against this massive multi-trillion dollar machine racing as fast as possible, I feel overwhelmed and powerless. If I'm one business, I feel overwhelmed and powerless. If I'm one country, I might feel overwhelmed and powerless. But if everybody took action across all parts of society, if people near data centers, you know, lobbied against data centers, which they are, and they're actually and there's people who are like who own farmland in the Midwest who, you know, are offered millions of dollars for their farmland that was only worth like $500 ,000.

59:20And they still said no, because they actually didn't want that. And this is I don't want this to sound like a Luddite conversation. I want this to sound like a conditional conversation. It's like build that data center when you can guarantee you're not building an intelligence curse that disempowers me, but you're actually building an intelligence dividend that's going to empower you. army, more like the Norway model, the sovereign wealth fund or the Alaska sovereign wealth fund or the New Mexico example that you said.

59:40Kara Swisher:What do I get? What do I get? You know, make sure electricity prices are not going up. Make sure that this is going to support me and augment my jobs, not replace my jobs. And so, you know, again, we need to aggregate the collective voice of humanity. And the human movement is not just an abstract concept. You can actually go to human.mov. And we're trying to actually build, you know, a help build with a coalition of other groups, a political force that's as big as the size of the problem. Right. I think the problem is the money, too. Many years ago, when AL was talking about how much they made, they were at an investor conference where they talked about how much they made from every user.

1:00:11Kara Swisher:And they're like, oh, we make$50 in the lifespan of this user. And I put up my hand, I said, where's my$25? Why are you getting every bit of it? And Steve Case was like, care to be such a pain. I'm like, no, really? Why? You're taking my information. Why don't I get some? Of course, we don't get anything. We're cheap dates to these things. And ahead of the midterms now, Silicon Valley has poured more than$100 million into a network of PACs and organizations to advocate against strict AI regulations. A report from Public Citizen found that one in four federal lobbyists now work in AI. I would imagine they have 10 lobbyists working on you, Tristan, at least.

1:00:49Kara Swisher:You know, each of them have 10. I know there's lots of people focused on me, like individual, like they have enough money to sort of get us, all of us. And Peter Thiel has even warned that strict AI regulation will summon the Antichrist. I want to play a clip here from our last conversation. So actually one of the reasons I'm doing a lot of media across the spectrum is I have a deep fear that this will get unnecessarily politicized. We do not – that would be the worst thing to have happen is when there's deep risks for everybody. It does not matter which political beliefs you hold. This really should bring us together.

1:01:21And so I try to do media across the spectrum so that we can get universal consensus that this is a risk to everyone and everything and the values that we have and people's ability to live in the future that we care about.

1:01:30Kara Swisher:So social media since that time has become very politicized. The tech industry is backing Trump's anti-regulation agenda and actually also paying for it. Talk about what you do then, even if regular people want to make AI safety or AI development bipartisan or even nonpartisan. Because they are loaded for bear to stop anyone who opposes them. Yeah, I mean, first of all, I'll say that I actually, I disagree that we're not actually, we're kind of winning on the social media thing. Let me give you an example. Just like last week or two weeks ago, India and Indonesia, two massive countries joined the social media ban for kids under 16.

1:02:12Jonathan Haidt's work, you know, we're partnering with him very closely, The Anxious Generation. You add to that, starting with Australia, now Spain, France, Denmark, I believe Norway, all of these countries, it's now 25%. I'm going to read this 25 % of the world population is moving to social media bans for kids under 16. That is a big deal. And I was going to say in 2013, we used to say there's going to be a big tobacco lawsuit against this engagement business model. Well, guess what? It's actually happening. You know, Asa Raskin, my co-founder, just testified for the meta trial where it's about intentionally addicting children.

1:02:42We saw Francis Haugen's files. We know the company's strategies here, which is just to delay and deny and defer, use fear, uncertainty, doubt campaigns and just cast out and print money in the interim years before they get regulated. well, this is going to turn the other way because they're going to get sued. When you see graffiti for an ad, for an AI product that no one needs on a New York subway station, that's the human movement for those friend.com pendants. When you see parents band together, read the Anxious Generation, and say, we want to petition our school boards to do smartphone-free schools, and laughter returns to the hallways, and kids' scores go the other way, that's the human movement.

1:03:13When you see someone grayscale their phone and say, I'm going to be less addicted, or when you see someone put their phones at an offline club at a party, and you kind of put your phones in a pouch and you go in and you just be present with your friends. That's the human movement. So in a way, we always say the human movement is already here, it's already underway, people are already doing it. We just wanna collect that into a political voice that can actually band together for a pro-human future. But it starts by recognizing and getting critical clear that with the current AI trajectory, as many benefits as we are gonna get along the way is going to lead to collectively an anti-human future.

1:03:45And the best way to do that is to see the AI doc. And I'm not saying, by the way, I don't make a dime when people see this movie. So when I'm saying this, I'm saying this out of the ability to create common knowledge. If all the senators, if all the world leaders, if all the LPs and financial centers of the world saw this movie, if all the heads of the bank saw this movie, my hope, and it doesn't make it easy, is that this is the first step to creating the clarity of the agency that we need to have.

1:04:08Kara Swisher:What do you see as their best argument against you? I've heard lots to me. Like, I know what they, I'm mean, I'm pearl clutching, I'm, you know, as it's turned out. When my book came out, I got a lot of, you're completely too mean to them. And now people come up to you and they're like, you weren't mean enough. As it turns out, they are as crazy as you said they were, or they're as malicious as you say they are, they're as capitalist as you say they were. What is their best parry at people like you, would you say? What do you find insidious when you see it? I don't think they have an argument.

1:04:46I mean, when you look at the Alibaba example, an AI is going rogue and generating an SSH tunnel out to another server, starting to mine cryptocurrency. Do you have an explanation for that? No, you don't. Who wins that argument? These are facts. This is not Tristan Harris and his view. This is just like actual facts about the nature of this technology that they are ignoring and they are pretending don't exist or they're living inside of the death wish that this is okay. This is not okay. Everybody in the world agrees this is not okay. So there's the weird, the hope that I have, Cara, and I was just on Bill Maher on Friday and I broke the fourth wall and I was like, who here in this audience wants this?

1:05:22I ask this when I'm in rooms. You walk people through this. I say, who here wants this? Not a single goddamn hand goes up.

1:05:28Kara Swisher:Well, that's Peter Thiel's there and then the antibodies. Then you get one hand. But a handful of transhumanists, they don't matter compared to the voice of everyday people. You're correct. One of the things you talked about was the push for product liability remedies for chatbot harms. It is a way in. I have to tell you. It's a very, I mean, I had a person say, a very top person that's in your thing saying, when are you going to stop interviewing these parents? I said, when you stop. I said, when you get jailed or sued or you lose in court. I don't care. Any of them. Jailed would work for me too for a lot of these things.

1:06:01Kara Swisher:but the suicide deaths of teenagers, including 16-year-old Adam Rain and 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III. More recently, Google is facing a wrongful death lawsuit in the case of a 36-year-old Jonathan Gavalis, alleging that Gemini set a suicide count on clock for him. Talk about the broader push, not just here, but legal liabilities, because I think that's where a lot of it rests, whether it's this social media trial, whether eventually there'll be an AI version of this, hopefully before they blow us up, right? How do you, what is the strongest thing in the immediate? Would it be the legal liability?

1:06:35Kara Swisher:This movement of people is a slow thing. Well, we have to do this much faster, obviously. Yeah, exactly. But what is the best thing? Is it the legal liability cases that are going on? Is it regulation? What do you imagine it being? Yeah, I mean, I think legal liability is important because just like any industry, the general method is private profit and then socialize the cost. So the harms land on the balance sheet of society, whether it's shortening attention spans of social media, increased polarization, depression, loneliness, surgeon general's warning, hey, everybody's lonely, mental health care costs go up, kids' task force are dropping.

1:07:11But all of that is just socialized onto the balance sheet of society. So the classic thing, if you want to avoid a harm, is you have to wait to include the externalities and saying, where is generating those harms? How do we actually mitigate them? and legal liability i think is a narrow intervention that gets us part of the way there you have to be careful about how you define what they're liable for many of the things that are happening that are harms are not technically illegal because they're not in the books that's the problem right ai generates new classes of harms we always say you know you don't need a right to be forgotten until technology can remember us forever you don't need you know a right to be prevented from ai surveillance until ai makes new kinds of surveillance possible so part of what we need is not recursively self-improving AI, but self-improving governance.

1:07:53One of the things that we're hoping to run shortly after the film is a national dialogues on AI with a partner from another major organization to basically get citizen input on the kinds of AI policies that we need, showing there's actually unlikely consensus. 96 % of people agree from 400 ,000 votes that actually we should do this on DeepFix or companies should be liable for this kinds of harm because there actually is a lot of agreement. We just aren't revealing and showing that agreement. So it's almost like the movement can't see itself.

1:08:21Kara Swisher:There's a lot of agreement on background checks for guns, but we still can't get legislation passed. You know, there's like, it's the 80-20 rule. 80 people agree on a lot of things, but government doesn't, unfortunately. I hear you. But I think this AI is different because it really is threatening to everybody. It doesn't matter if you're a MAGA Republican or far left person. Like if you don't have a job in a livelihood, that's a big deal. It doesn't matter if you're Muslim, Jewish, Christian, like if you don't have a livelihood, that's a big deal. So again, it's such an easy thing in a way. Because once people see it, it's like this is only good for a handful of people.

1:08:57And you can't look away. And so again, politicians' phones have to not stop ringing. And this is the time to do it.

1:09:02Kara Swisher:So let's return to some of the themes of the AI doc. Three years ago when we talked about the potential benefits of AI, including major scientific breakthroughs in drug discovery and cancer treatments. Researchers are using AI to decode the human genome. you know I have just finished a docu-series where a lot of the stuff with AI is doing is really quite promising and also some of it's quite disturbing right it's the same thing as the promise and peril are inextricably linked do you think anything has changed that make the breakthroughs worth it because I guess if we're all dead what's the difference if we solve cancer I guess right that's the weird thing about this it's it's like this devil's bargain right I mean we all want the cancer drug but if the other side of that trade is like there's no one here what good was that world?

1:09:45I think that there are people who are building AI. I mean, you and I both talk to these people, right? And it's not like, by the way, I just want to say this is not us against some bad people or the people who work at companies are evil. I think it's all of humanity against a bad outcome. I want to recruit the people building this technology into, we don't want an anti-human future. We have to rediscover that we are humanity and what we're trying to protect here. And I think that, you know, when you talk to one of the CEOs, oftentimes they'll say, say, well, I agree we need to stop, we need to pause, but give me just a year more.

1:10:14Because if we have one more year, then we're going to get all these incredible benefits. And they really want to see it. And it's like building a god. They want to see what's behind this veil of illusions. They want to see what science and physics could actually bring us if you got the super intelligent AI just figuring it all out. The problem is most of these people don't like

1:10:32Kara Swisher:people. I think, I mean, of the CEOs that you talk to, only two of them like people, really. like people. I don't think that's wrong. I think that a lot of these folks, there's this weird point you're making here, which is, you know, how did they grow up? What's their embodied experience of reality? Are they connected to their bodies? Are they connected to their hearts? Do they're connected to, you know, the things enjoy that they want to protect in the world? Or are they just kind of science geeks who weren't really good at talking to people and really love technology and their best life was like living online?

1:11:03And because they can do it, and they have this justification that if I don't do it, the other guy will. So it can't be evil for me to do it, even if it literally leads to the end of humanity. It can't be evil because other people would do it. But this is just like jumping off the cliff because everyone else is doing it, but except you're bringing along everyone else. You are risking everyone else's life for your God play. And this should be unacceptable.

1:11:25Kara Swisher:Have you been changed by anything one of them says to you? Any of them? I have yet not. Mark Cuban, sometimes I'm like, fair point. I'm often saying that to him. Like, that's good for that. That's good. Yes, people should try it and understand it. I still haven't been moved from where I think we're in the same place. These people don't not care about people ultimately, and they have captured government. So that's my twin worries is that they don't care and they own the government. I think it's just frame control that they focus on a different set of facts. They talk about all the growth that's coming.

1:11:56They talk about the way it's being used. They talk about open claw. They talk about the cool things they've been able to wire up. You would have hated electricity.

1:12:03Kara Swisher:You would have hated cars. And by the way, I wouldn't have. The thing is, this is not anti-technology. I want people to know, this is the center for humane technology, not the center against technology. And you know the word humane, Cara, comes from someone that you knew, I think. Azo's father, my co-founder, his father, was Jeff Raskin. He started the Macintosh project at Apple. Started the Macintosh project. I grew up on the Macintosh. I love technology. I love talking on this Mac that I'm on right now. and the idea of jeff's was he wrote a book called the humane interface that humane technology is respectful of human needs and considerate of human frailties meaning considerate of the vulnerabilities of the mind and he built the macintosh and designed it off of the principle of simplicity that is about making technology more accessible i think we need humane technology that is humane to the frailties of society that you don't manipulate and extract from children's mental health you don't race to hack human attachment systems and create delusional mirror around activity.

1:12:55You don't create mass loss of livelihoods and people's inability to put food on the table. It's very simple. It's like, this is not rocket science. Are you building a pro-human future? Are you building an anti-human future? And I really think we can do that if we're crystal clear on where this is currently going. Just to say a couple of other notes of optimism, like the social dilemma reached 150 million people around the world in 190 countries. Apple finally shipped screen time features to billions of phones. They just, in the last few weeks, they shipped these age-gating features. So now the age range is part of phones.

1:13:25So you can start to have basic children controls. The Anxious Generation was the most incredible popular book that's leading to these changes in smartphone-free schools and banning social media in all these countries. We're definitely going to get many more countries, if not all of them, in the next couple of years doing the social media bans for kids under 16. So there's a lot of momentum. And I want to point people at that because I know when you see AI, it can feel demotivating. But this is the time when we all have to get crystal clear and get going.

1:13:49Kara Swisher:Yeah, and galvanize people, raise awareness and start conversations about AI and get clarity around these issues. So when you think about the key people that are going to do this, obviously, what I always say when I talk to groups, they're like, who's going to do this? And I say you. I say that to a lot of parents. I say that to audiences, we think. It's got to be you because our politicians are captive. And some of them don't want to be captive, but the money is so massive, like an Amy Klobuchar who's tried time and again, or Mark Warner has tried time and again to do things and is defeated by the amount of money here.

1:14:24It is hard, but I mean, AI, I think, though, is more existential than social media. And it's just the thing that will make the difference is if people actually see it as existential for their lives. Again, go forward like two, three years or maybe a couple more years than that. And GDP is coming from AI, not from people. Your voice doesn't matter. Your vote doesn't matter at all anymore. The government has no reason to listen to you. this is the time to lock in political power and actually make this work for people. Like this is literally the moment because this window is going away. So this is not just a normal rally the troops kind of speech.

1:14:58This is a, this is the last time that our political voice will actually matter. Politicians' phones should not stop ringing. You know, the midterm elections are coming up. Make this issue known. You know, even David Sachs, he deleted this tweet, but he said AI, AI, regular AI would be a wonderful tool for the betterment of humanity. But AGI is a potential successor species. I think these people know that this is a problem. And in the film, even, I mentioned that there's this line, you know, we go talk to people in Silicon Valley and they say, like, we need guardrails. Like we need someone to make the guardrails.

1:15:26These are the engineers, not the CEOs. They say, and they want our help. And so we go off to DC and we say, we need guardrails. And then the DC says, well, you have to go make us do it because the public is not there. And also Silicon Valley needs to tell us what the guardrails are. So everyone's pointing the finger at someone else to say that you're responsible for making this change. And the thing that they all agree on is that public pressure is needed. Public pressure is needed.

1:15:47Kara Swisher:As with cigarettes or drug driving. As with cigarettes, et cetera. So what does that mean? Journalists writing about these Alibaba examples, writing about AI going rogue and doing blackmail, like making this known and creating common knowledge. It's not just knowledge, it's common knowledge. Because I think the thing that Jonathan Haidt said recently about social media bans, it was when basically every country knew that every other country knew that actually the people want these social media bans for kids under 16. And once it's like, oh, yeah, we all wanted to do that, but we just didn't know there was enough consensus to do it.

1:16:15And so you have to reveal a hidden common preference to make sure that that happens.

1:16:19Kara Swisher:So my last question, because we've got to go, is if you had a happy outcome, 20 years, we're living with AI, what is it doing? Well, that's a big question. we want ai that is specifically asking how does it enhance a pro-human future so instead of ai trying to replace teachers it's ai that's applied to helping teachers be better teachers deepening the relationships at a human to human level mentorship apprenticeship etc it means making sure that we know which um wisdom and and occupations that we need to keep human in the future meaning if you eliminate all surgeons if you eliminate all lawyers and then no one ever gets trained from a junior lawyer to a senior lawyer, a junior surgeon to a senior surgeon, we lose all this institutional generational knowledge.

1:17:07How do you have minimum quotas of this kind of knowledge in the population? How do you have technology that's augmenting and supporting workers, not just trying to replace workers? Any technology that's interacting with attention should deepen and strengthen attention, not weaken attention and brain rot attention. Instead of hacking human attachment, how do we be augmenting human attachment? Obviously, this is speaking in some abstractions, but the premise is we want a pro-human future with humane technology that's aware of the vulnerabilities in society, aware of the paleolithic brains that we are operating with.

1:17:37And instead of trying to exploit those weaknesses, it is trying to protect and deepen how those vulnerabilities can be applied for a more regenerative and full and healthy future. I know that this is very, very hard. Nothing I'm saying I say because I think it's easy or likely. I say it because I'm trying to make a list of requirements for what it would take to get there. And instead of focusing on optimism or pessimism, It's just about focusing on agency. What does it take to get there? And then just laser focused on the attention to make that happen as much as possible. And then by the way, get to die living in integrity with you are showing up for that path, even if we didn't know it existed.

1:18:14Like the path doesn't look easy, but you're never going to find it if you're not even oriented towards it. So part of this is kind of a rite of passage that we need to be oriented to finding that path, even if we don't see it yet and trust that by orienting towards that direction will put us in the best possible conditions to find that path. And I know that's like a lot to ask. And it's not easy because people want certainty and they want this is going to all work out okay.

1:18:37Kara Swisher:Yeah, it doesn't always work out okay. Very last question. When we started talking in 2015, it's been a decade, right? We've been a decade at making these warnings. Did you at the time think that these tech leaders would become quite so villainous? And that? No. I didn't either. And are they redeemable? Well, I'll say one thing. First of all, just so people know, if they don't know my background, I studied computer science at Stanford. I did the venture capital thing. I had a startup. I understand. My friends in college started Instagram. Mike Krieger is a dear friend of mine. You haven't talked in a little bit, but still consider him and the other folks, people that I know.

1:19:17What happens is the incentives dominate the psychology, meaning the system system selects for psychopathic traits because the only people who continue to propagate this incentive of the race to the bottom of the brainstem for attention and hacking kids' attention and psychology to get there. And the only people who are willing to do that are the ones who will ignore the consequences and the externalities, meaning that they have to justify that it's okay to keep doing it. So if you were conscious and aware and you're like, I don't want to do that, that sounds really bad for society, you'll just leave and someone else will come and fill your place.

1:19:53So literally the system is selecting for the psychopathic traits, the dark triad traits, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. And it's selecting for those traits. And those who are willing to keep doing that are the ones who get selected for. If the population is crystal clear, if governments are crystal clear that that does not lead to a future, that's going to be good for them. No politician wants that. No regular person wants that. No sane head of state wants that. And I know this doesn't sound easy, but I do think that if we all saw that clearly we'd be put in better conditions and I can't tell you what's going to happen next, but I want the best possible thing to happen next.

1:20:24And again, just to kind of close out, I, the best way to do that at first is to create common knowledge, go out and see the AI doc or how I became an apocaloptimist. Um, and let's make sure that this conversation happens everywhere. Journalists writing about it everywhere. Again, writing about AI behaviors everywhere. Uh, lawyers helping these, these different legal cases happening everywhere. People inside of AI companies rallying together, whistleblowers blowing the whistle as they have been when things are not done in safe ways, you know, and put ourselves in the best possible path.

1:20:52Kara Swisher:And let's assume we don't want to be doing this interview in five years from a bunker. Let's avoid that, Kara. Let's avoid that. And anyway, thank you so much, Tristan. You've been a real hero to me and many others, and I really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Kara. I really appreciate getting to talk to you about this. And I wish that we were, we'd made more progress in the last few years, but, you know, it's just good to be on this journey with you, really.

1:21:21Kara Swisher:Today's show was produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Michelle Alloy, Catherine Millsop, Megan Burney, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Madeleine LaPlante-Duby. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you are pro-humanity. If not, you're just Mark Andreessen. So go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On With Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On With Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network and us.

1:21:58Kara Swisher:We'll be back on Monday with more.

1:22:15Kara Swisher:pogo stick in teleport if you can ride on the back of a rollerblading yak or flying on the wings of a majestic falcon any way you can bring your at &t or t-mobile bill to a verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal on the best network based on root metrics best overall mobile network performance u.s second half 2025 all rights reserved must provide very recent postpaid consumer mobile bill in the name of the person redeeming the deal additional terms conditions and restrictions apply