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Tristan Harris

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175
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2025-11-27
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2025-11-27
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  1. “Absolutely. I think that's what most people don't understand. There's a different conversation happening publicly than the one that's happening privately. I think you're aware of this as well.”

    2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “And then I will be forever a slave to their future. And I know this might sound crazy to a lot of people, but this is how people in at the very top of the AGI world believe is currently happening. You've had, I mean, Jeff Hinton and Roman Yomplansky on and other people, Mogad, and they're saying the same thing. I think people need to take seriously that whether you believe it or not, the people who are currently deploying the trillions of dollars, this is what they believe. And they believe that it's winner-take-all, and it's not just first solve intelligence and use that to solve everything else, it's first dominate intelligence and use that to dominate everything else.”

    2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Thinking about the stock market, if I have an AI that can trade in the stock market better than all the other AIs, because currently there's mostly AIs that are actually trading on the stock market, but if I have a jump in that, then I can consolidate all the wealth. If I have an AI that can do cyber hacking that's way better at cyber hacking in a step function above what everyone else can do, then I have an asymmetric advantage over everybody else. So AI is like a power pump. It pumps economic advantage. It pumps scientific advantage, and it pumps military advantage, which is why the countries and the companies are caught in what they believe is a race to get there first. And anything that is a negative consequence of that, job loss, rising energy prices, more emissions, stealing intellectual property, security risks, all of that stuff feels small relative to if I don't get there first, then some other person who has less good values is me, they'll get a”

    2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “So, first, is if you believe that this is like, metaphorically, it's like the ring from Lord of the Rings. It's the ring that creates infinite power. Because if I have AGI, I can apply that to military advantage. I can have the best military planner that can beat all battle plans for anyone. And we already have AIs that can obviously beat Gary Kasparov at chess, beat Go, the Go Asian board game, or now beat StarCraft. So you have AIs that are beating humans at strategy games. Well, think about StarCraft compared to actual military campaign in Taiwan or something like that. If I have an AI that can out-compete in strategy games, that lets me out compete everything, or take business strategy. If I have an AI that can do business strategy and figure out supply chains and figure out how to optimize them and figure out how to undermine my competitors, and I have a step function level increase in that compared to everybody else, then that gives me infinite power to undermine and outcompete all businesses. If I have a super”

    2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Infinite promise, and how can it be infinite peril? And what I wanted to do today is to really clarify for people what the incentives point us towards, which is a future that I think people, when they see it clearly, would not want”

    2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “I do think that we're going to get there. It's not clear how long it will take, and I'm not saying that because I believe necessarily the current paradigm that we're building on will take us there. But I'm based in San Francisco. I talk to people at the AI labs. Half these people are friends of mine, people at the very top level, and most people in the industry believe that they'll get there between the next two and 10 years at the latest. And I think some people might say, oh, well, may not have them for a while. Phew, I can sit back and we don't have to worry about it. And it's like we're heading for so much transformative change faster than our society is currently prepared to deal with it. And the reason I was excited to talk to you today is because I think that people are currently confused about AI. People say it's going to solve everything, cure cancer, solve climate change. And there's people say it's going to kill everything. It's going to be doom. Everyone's going to go extinct if anyone builds it. Everyone dies. And those conversations don't converge. And so everyone's just kind of confused where how can it be, you know,”

    2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Exactly, which is why there's a belief that if I get there first and can automate generalized intelligence, I can own the world economy because suddenly everything that a human can do that they would be paid to do in a job? The AI can do that better. And so if I'm a company, do I want to pay the human who has healthcare, might whistleblow, complains, has to sleep, has sick days, has family issues? Or do I want to pay the AI that will work twenty-four-seven at superhuman speed, doesn't complain, doesn't whistleblow, doesn't have to be paid for healthcare. There's the incentive for everyone to move to paying for AIs rather than paying humans. And so AGI, artificial general intelligence is more transformative than any other kind of technology that we've ever had, and it's distinct.”

    2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “An advance in one field like rocketry. Let's say I uncover some secret in rocketry. That doesn't advance biomedicine knowledge or doesn't advance energy production or doesn't advance coding. But if I can advance generalized intelligence, think of all science and technology development over the course of all human history. Does that make”

    2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Yeah. So that's the thing that people really need to get is that these companies are not racing to provide a chatbot to users. That's not what their goal is. If you look at the mission statement on OpenAI's website or all the websites, their mission is to be able to replace all forms of human economic labor in the economy, meaning an AI that can do all the cognitive labor, meaning labor of the mind, so that that can be marketing, that can be text, that can be illustration, that can be video production, that can be code production. Everything that a person can do with their brain, these companies are racing to build that. That is artificial general intelligence, general meaning all kinds of cognitive tasks. Demisabis, the co-founder of Google DeepMine used to say first solve intelligence and then use that to solve everything else. It's important to say, why is AI distinct from all other kinds of technologies? It's because if I may”

    2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Exactly People now. And you generally speaking, you trust when you pick up the phone that it's a real person. I literally just, two days ago, I had the mother of a close friend of mine call me out of nowhere and she said, Tristan, my daughter, she just called me crying that some person is holding her hostage and wanted some money. And I was like, oh my God, this is an AI scam, but it's hitting my friend in San Francisco who's knowledgeable about this stuff and didn't know that it was a scam. And for a moment, I was very concerned and I had to track her down and figure out and find my friends where she was and find out she was okay. And when you have AIs that can speak the language of anybody, it now takes less than three seconds of your voice to synthesize and speak in anyone's voice. Again, that's a new vulnerability that society has now opened up because of AI.”

    2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “GitHub being like this website that hosts basically all the open source code of the world. So it's kind of like the Wikipedia for coders. It has all the code that's ever been written that's publicly and openly accessible and you can download it so you don't have to write your own face recognition system. You can just download the one that already exists. And so GitHub is sort of supplying the world with all of this free digital infrastructure. And the new AIs that exist today can be pointed at GitHub and found 15 vulnerabilities from scratch that had not been exploited before. So if you imagine that now applied to the code that runs our water infrastructure, our electricity infrastructure, we're releasing AI into the world that can speak and hack the operating system of our world. And that requires a new level of discernment and care about how we're doing that because we ought to be protecting the core parts of society that we want to protect before all that happens.”

    2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “was to treat everything as a language. And that's how we get ChatGPT write me a 10-page essay on anything and it spits out this thing. Or ChatGPT finds something in this religion that'll persuade this group of the thing I want them to be persuaded by. That's hacking language because religion is also language. And so this new AI that we're dealing with can hack the operating system of humanity. It can hack code and find vulnerabilities in software. The recent AIs today, just over the summer, have been able to find 15 vulnerabilities in open source software on GitHub so it can just point itself at GitHub.”

    2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “We should establish that first. Why is language so central? Code is language. So all the code that runs all of the digital infrastructure we live by, that's language. Law is language. All the laws that have ever been written, that's language. Biology, DNA, that's all a kind of language. Music is a kind of language. Videos are a higher dimensional kind of language. And the new generation of AI that was born with this technology called transformers that Google made in 2017.”

    2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “And that was enough to wreck and break democracy and to create the most anxious and depressed generation of our lifetime just by this very simple baby AI. And people didn't even notice it because it was called social media instead of AI. But it was the first, we used to call it in this AI dilemma talk that my co-founder and I gave, we called it Humanity's First Contact with AI because it was just a narrow AI. And what ChatGPT represents is this whole new wave of generative AI that is a totally different beast because it speaks language which is the operating system of humanity. Like if you think about it, it's trained on code, it's trained on text, it's trained on all of Wikipedia, it's trained on Reddit, it's trained on everything, all law, all religion. And all of that gets sucked into this digital brain that has unique properties. And that is what we're living with ChatGPT.”

    2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “It's a different kind of AI. We used to call that the AI behind social media was kind of humanity's first contact between a narrow, misaligned AI that went rogue. Because if you think about it, it's like, there you are, you open TikTok, and you see a video, and you think you're just watching a video. But when you swipe your finger and it shows you the next video, at that time you activated one of the largest supercomputers in the world pointed at your brainstem, calculating what 3 billion other human social primates have seen today, and knowing before you do which of those videos is most likely to keep you scrolling. It makes a prediction. So it's an AI that's just making a prediction about which video to recommend to you. But Twitter's doing that with which tweet should be shown to you. Instagram's doing that with which photo or videos to be shown to you. And so all of these things are these narrow misaligned AIs just optimizing for one thing, which is what's going to keep you scrolling.”

    2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “And so it was like watching this slow motion train wreck in 2013, you could kind of see that there's this kind of myth that we could never predict the future. Technology could go any direction. And that's the possible of a new technology. But I wanted people to see the probable that if you know the incentives, you can actually know something about the future that you're heading towards. And that presentation kind of kicked that off.”

    2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “And it had 130 something simultaneous viewers. And then later that day, it was like 500 simultaneous viewers. And so obviously it had been spreading virally throughout the whole company. And people from all around the company emailed me saying, this is a massive problem. I totally agree. We have to do something. And so instead of getting fired, I was invited and basically stayed to become a design ethicist studying how do you design in an ethical way and how do you design for the collective attention spans and information flows of humanity in a way that does not cause all these problems. Because what was sort of obvious to me then, and that was in 2013, is that if the incentive is to maximize eyeballs and attention and engagement, then your incentivizing a more addicted, distracted, lonely, polarized, sexualized breakdown of shared reality.”

    2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “I was very nervous actually because I felt like I wasn't coming from some place where I wanted to stick it to them or be controversial. I just felt like there was this conversation that wasn't happening. And I sent it to about 50 people that were friends of mine just for feedback. And when I came to work the next day, there was 150, you know, on the top right on Google Slides, it shows you the number of simultaneous viewers”

    2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “About basically how Google and Apple and social media companies were hosting this psychological environment that was going to corrupt and frack the global human attention of humanity. And I basically said I needed to make a slide deck. It's 130-something pages slide deck that basically was a message to the whole company at Google saying we have to be very careful and we have a moral responsibility in how we shape the global attentions of humanity.”

    2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “These perverse incentives. And so Google acquired my company called Apture. I landed there, and I joined the Gmail team, and I'm with these engineers who are designing the email interface that people spend hours a day in. And then one day one of the engineers comes over and he says, well, why don't we make it buzz your phone every time you get an email? And he just asked the question nonchalantly like it wasn't a big deal. And in my experience, I was like, oh my God, you're about to change billions of people's psychological experiences with their families, with their friends at dinner, with their date night on romantic relationships, where suddenly people's phones are going to be busy showing notifications of their email, and you're just asking this question as if it's like a throwaway question. And I became concerned, I see you have a slide deck there.”

    2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “That's why I started my company. And then I kind of realized through that experience that at the end of the day these news publishers who used our product, they only cared about one thing, which is, is this increasing the amount of time and eyeballs and attention on our website? Because eyeballs meant more revenue. And I was in sort of this conflict of, I think I'm doing this to help the world, but really I'm measured by this metric of what keeps people's attention. That's the only thing that I'm measured by. And I saw that conflict play out among my friends who started Instagram because they got into it because they wanted people to share little bite-sized moments of your life. Here's a photo of my bike ride down to the bakery in San Francisco. That's what Kevin Sister used to post when we were when he was just starting it. I was probably one of the first hundred users of the app. Later you see how these sort of simple products that had a simple good positive intention got sort of sucked into”

    2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “So I did a program at Stanford called the Mayfield Fellows program that took engineering students and then taught them entrepreneurship. You know, I, as a computer scientist, didn't know anything about entrepreneurship, but they pair you up with venture capitalists, they give you mentorship. And there's a lot of powerful alumni who are part of that program, the co-founder of Asana, the co-founders of Instagram. We're both part of that program. And that put us in kind of a cohort of people who were basically ending up at the center of what was going to colonize the whole world's psychological environment, which was the social media situation. And as part of that, I started my own tech company called Apture. And we basically made this tiny widget that would help people find more contextual information without leaving the website they were on. It was a really cool product that was about deepening people's understanding. And I got into the tech industry because I thought that technology could be a force for good in the world.”

    2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “I'm not naive. This is super fucking hard. But we have done hard things before, and it's possible to choose a different future. So,”

    2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

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

    2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “If you're worried about immigration taking jobs, you should be way more worried about AI because it's like a flood of millions of new digital immigrants that are Nobel Prize-level capability, work at superhuman speed, and will work for less than minimum wage. I mean, we're heading for so much transformative change faster than our society is currently prepared to deal with it. And there's a different conversation happening publicly than the one that the AI companies are having privately about which world we're heading to, which is a future that people don't want. But we didn't consent to have six people make that decision on behalf of 8 billion people. One of the world's Technology”

    2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT