← On with Kara Swisher
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A
Let's assume we don't want to be doing this interview in five years from a bunker.
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B
Let's avoid that, Karen.
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A
Let's avoid that.
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B
It's on. It is on.
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A
Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is on with Kara Swisher. And I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is Tristan Harris, a technology ethicist and co founder of the center for Humane Technology. He's a former entrepreneur and Google employee who now studies how the tech industry's platforms have become extractive and controlling. He was featured in the 2020 Netflix documentary the Social Dilemma, which showed how social media has manipulated our psychology and behavior through addictive algorithms. Now he's in a new film from director Daniel Rohr called the AI Doc, or How I Became an Apocalyptomist, I Think I Got that Right, which explores the promises and existential threats of AI. Topics Tristan has written and spoken about extensive when he was last on In May of 2023, we talked about why he felt the AI arms race needed to slow down. Three years later, that hasn't happened and AI has become integrated into nearly every aspect of society. I have been talking to Tristan for many, many years. We did an original interview back in 2017. I think I was one of the first people to focus on what he was saying because he had come out of the tech industry and he had such insights into the sort of casino mentality that was inside these companies in terms of keeping people's and not letting it go. And he was spot on, even though people were not paying attention to him or they dismissed him as someone who wasn't successful at tech and various insults that they did. But he was spot on, right? And I find him to be very smart. And in fact, he was one of the first people to do a session for people in Congress about AI long ago. Again, where a lot of people were decrying what he was saying and he was 100% right. So when something's right so much, you tend to try to pay attention to them. Let's get into my thoughts. Third conversation over 10 years with Tristan Harris. Our expert question comes from Virginia Senator Mark Warner, whom I recently interviewed, too. He's the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and he recently introduced a bipartisan bill aimed at AI and the workforce. So stick around. Support for on with Kara Swisher comes from the 2027 Chevy Bolt. Oh, I love the Chevy Bolt. I have mine. How long is 25 minutes? A quick workout or a stop to the Grocery store. It's all the amount of time it takes you to charge your Chevy Bolt. As I said, I drive the Chevy Bolt myself. An older version. And now the Bolt is back and better than ever. I may have to trade it in. You can charge from 10% to 80% in just 25 minutes with public DC fast charging. That's about half the length of this fair Cherry podcast. Explore Chevy's most affordable EV@chevy.com Bold actual charge times will vary. See Owner's manual for details and limitations. Let me say again, I love my car. Never had a problem with it. Best car I've ever owned. Buy the Chevy Bolt. Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business takes everything you've got. And a lot of the tools out there that are supposed to make your life easier just aren't great at talking to each other. And that means you end up having to toggle between a dozen different apps and just to keep the lights on. Enough of that. Now there's Odoo, the all in one fully integrated platform that actually might help you get it all done. Thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you try Odoo for free@odoo.com that's o d o o.com.
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A
Tristan Harris. Welcome to on.
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B
Good to be with you, Kathy.
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A
Again, when did we.
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B
I think our first one was in 2017 about the attention economy and then social media.
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A
And then we talked in 2023 when you came on the podcast three years ago, we talked about the 1983 TV movie the Day after, which is about a nuclear war. Now you featured in a new documentary called the AI Doc or How I became an Apocalyp. Say this to me. Apocalmoptimist.
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B
Apocaloptomist. The combination of the words apocalypse and optimist.
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A
Right, Exactly. No, I get that. Apocalyptimist. Okay, I got it. The title is Apocalypse Play of doctor Strange. Obviously. The famous Stanley Kubrick film that ends with a nuclear holocaust. You know, I don't consider you a doomer neither. I can. I do not Consider my. Myself that either. But I'm definitely a wary customer and wary is doing a lot of work there. So talk a little bit about the documentary and how you. I think I saw the beginnings of this in a thing that you showed with sort of a golem many, many years ago in Washington.
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B
Yeah, you were there in our first AI Dilemma presentation. Yeah. So this film, the AI doc, or How I Became an apocalyptimist, was a collaboration between the directors of Everything Everywhere all at Once and the director of Navalny. And actually the directors of Everything Everywhere all at Once were listeners of our podcast called you'd Undivided Attention. And we met them around the same time that we switched into AI in 2023. And together we were just talking about the impact of this film the day after that you mentioned. And just to take people back in history because I think, I don't know if people really get how profound this moment was because it's never really happened ever like that again. Yeah, it was a made for TV movie about what would happen if the Soviet Union and the US went to a full scale nuclear war. It wasn't about who started the war, it was just about the consequences, the implications of the escalation. And it visualized, you know, families in Kansas and these different places where missile silos were. And then of course, the film was about what would happen, quote, the day after this happened. And it's not like it's important to know. It's not like people didn't know what the idea of a nuclear war would be. It's not like you couldn't visualize that. But there is something about visceralizing and, and allowing us to look at something that we were keeping in our collective shadow of our mind, our, you know, denial. We don't want to look at that. And the film supposedly was. Was watched by Reagan and it made him depressed for several weeks because he just. It depressed a lot of people. And 100 million Americans watched it. There's a great documentary about it called A Television Event. And, and you know, supposedly it gave him a renewed interest in making sure that we did not have nuclear Armageddon because it visualized that these were consequences. This was an omni lose lose outcome. Everyone would lose. And the film was later aired in the Soviet Union, so everyone in the Soviet Union saw it. And in the documentary there are these interviews with people in the Soviet Union who say, like, wow, we didn't know the Americans actually cared about not getting this wrong. And it created trust because now we Both I know that you know that I know and you know that I know that you know that we both don't want this to happen. And so I think inspired by this theory of change, my deepest hope is that this film, the AI doc, or How I Became an Apocalyptimist, which comes out Friday, March 27th in theaters across the U.S. i believe Canada as well, will create common knowledge about the anti human future that we are heading towards. And important to note, it's not a doomer movie. It's not just an optimist movie. I'm really proud of the team because they interviewed people across the optimist spectrum, the risk pessimist spectrum, and even the CEOs. They have three out of the five major CEOs in the film. So you're really getting a complete picture. And I think the reason this is so important is, as we've talked about in the past, Kara, like AI is such a complex hyperobject of a problem. It's so multifaceted, multifaced. The conversations don't converge. I was at Davos a couple months ago and you always have the same conversation. People talk about a few different things and they jump around to jobs and they talk about AI suicide and they talk about all these different things. And then dessert comes and everybody just kind of mumbles and everyone says, I hope someone else figures this out. And that doesn't do anything. Like when nothing happens, the companies win and the default outcome wins. And if people concede that this is leading to an anti human future, we have a chance of changing it. And so the point is clarity creates that agency.
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A
So let's get into anti human a minute. For those I did see the day after I was in college and they showed it for everybody. We watched it. I think it was Copley hall there. I was at Georgetown and it was something I'll tell you. People were silent afterwards. High schools did classes on it because high school students watched it. So it was a big sort of national debate about it. And I think what was gripping was what happened. Like nobody came out well and everybody died of radiation poisoning or just in the initial blast or the afterword. And there was no hopefulness to it whatsoever. It just was. But silence is all I remember afterwards, nobody knew what to say.
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B
Well, parents didn't know what to tell their children. You know, it's not like anybody had an answer.
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A
Right. And it wasn't particularly violent. Right. It wasn't. It just was horrible. Like horrible. And they did. They said it in the Midwest, which I think was very effective because that's where the silos were and there was no escaping it. I guess that's what the whole point was. Nobody got out. Nobody got out of this thing. So when you first did that presentation, I remember completely agreeing with you and the room, not, it was sort of a weird hotel room in Washington and you came trying to warn people about this, a little like John the Baptist kind of thing. Like previously with social media, talk about the uphillness of it, because first people couldn't conceive it and then the money has become so big they want to help it. Correct, from what I can understand, from what I remember of that time. But people ignored it. I didn't. I was like, oh, Jesus, he's right.
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B
Well, first of all, thank you, Kara, for not ignoring it. I mean, you like me, have had the right intuition about this. Starting with early with social media and trusting that there was a problem when everyone else is in denial and saying, it's a moral panic, I want to take people back. Actually, 2017, you and I had that conversation and people wanted to say, well, no, this is reflexive fear of a new technology. This is a moral panic. We're always afraid of new technology. I understand all those concerns. What I want people to refocus on is how the incentives let you predict the outcome. And I repeat this quote all the time. But Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner, says if you show me the incentives, I will show you the outcome. And in 2013-2017, if you looked at that incentive, my very first slide deck at Google, where I kind of laid out the arms race for attention that would obviously lead to a more addicted, distracted, polarized, narcissistic sexualization of young children. That whole set of consequences society also a breakdown of shared reality, because personalized information is better at engaging your eyeballs than non personalized information, which means you shred shared reality. It hurts social trust and you outrage ify people's psychological environment. All of it happened, literally all of it.
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A
I think enragement equals engagement.
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B
Enragement equals engagement. And so we saw that. Okay, so now AI is a more complicated picture because it's a general purpose technology. But what we can look at is what are the incentives? And the incentives are it's important to get this. So given the amount of money that companies have taken on, people think, well, you know, what's the business model? What's the incentive of these AI companies? And if you're a regular person using the blinking cursor of chatgpt and it helps you with your baby burping in the background. You're like, I guess their incentive, their business model is just to get my subscription. It's the 20 bucks a month. And if everybody paid 20 bucks a month, then boom. That's the incentive for these companies. That's not the incentive. That would not add up to the amount of money that they've taken on. Okay, so let's try advertising. So now you get everybody's using these things and you add advertising. Google's a very profitable company. Search is a very profitable business model. But that's also not enough, I don't think, to make up the amount of money that's been taken on. The only thing that justifies the amount of money in capital that has been raised into these companies is to build artificial general intelligence, which is to replace all human labor in the economy to do anything.
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A
Which they have said.
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B
Which they have said. So this is not a conspiracy theory. This is not Tristan being a doomer. This is literally reality checking. So what does that mean? It means a race to replace. Not a race to augment human work, a race to replace all human work.
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A
They're using augment lately. You know, one of the quotes you have from the documentary, it's not that you say that. It's not that ChatGPT is an existential threat. It's the race to deploy the most powerful, inscrutable and uncontrollable technology under the worst incentives possible. That's the existential threat. And I think you're right. This idea that it's gonna have upsides and debt. They're trying to. First they tried to say it's gonna solve cancer. It might, you know, it might help for sure. It definitely is helping in drug discovery in certain areas, which is sort of the. They always have one of those pulling out, you know, someday will find cancer before it even decides to live, essentially, which it might. It could. There's a lot, a lot of really promising stuff happening in gene editing and drug discovery. But. But one of the things they did say was replacing humans as jobs. And you feel like this is the only incentive big enough. Advertising isn't being the second Google. You know, that's another way to look at it.
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B
I mean, those are also big incentives, but it's really, you know, owning the entire labor market means that five companies would concentrate the wealth of the entire economy. Right? It means that an unprecedented levels of wealth and power. Now, I want to invoke something that people should get to understand why this means it's an anti human future. Luke Drago and Rudolph Lane wrote an essay called the Intelligence Curse. This is really important. So this is modeled off of economics, something called the resource curse. So if you're Congo or Libya or Venezuela or Sudan and you discover that you can just basically make your gdp, your economy, off of a natural resource, well, first it looks like a blessing. You've got this incredible resource, you can sell it, you're going to make a ton of money. But then it becomes a curse because from a government perspective, when all the GDP comes from that resource, your incentive is to invest in mining that resource and, and, and selling it. Not to invest in the people because you don't need the people. So you don't invest in healthcare, you don't invest in childcare, you don't develop your people. And this is what happened in, in these places like Congo, etc.
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A
Now if you look at, although in the Gulf States they give money to the people, right? They sort of.
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B
Yeah. So now they're doing a little bit more of that. Right. So this is the key thing. So Luke and Rudolph wrote this beautiful essay that really articulates this, that what happens when the GDP of countries like the United States comes entirely from AI and you don't really need the people anymore. So first two things happen. One is all the labor is produced by AI, most of it by AI, not by people. So companies don't need you anymore. So your bargaining power kind of goes away. From that perspective, unlike labor unions, you could say we're going to withhold our labor. Well, what are you going to do? Second is all the wealth gets concentrated and what does that lead to is that countries have no incentive to invest in their people. And then you ask, you sort of link this with. Sam Altman was asked, doesn't it take so much money and energy and resources for data centers? Yeah. And he said, well, it takes a lot of energy and resources to grow a human. So there's this weird thing where humans start to look like parasites because you don't care about humans because you don't need to care. And basically this world that we're heading to is good for a handful of soon to be trillionaires and basically disempowering everyone else. And this is the last time.
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A
Right. I mean their vision is that you won't have to work and therefore you have abundance. You know, it's sort of wrapped into. It's all. I heard this idea first from Vinod Khosla and then others is that there won't Be a needle for work, because the work will be done for you and then the wealth will be shared. And I'm always like, it never is shared. Yeah.
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B
When's the last time that that happened?
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A
Yeah, well, I mean, I'm thinking, right, recently New Mexico gave everyone childcare, right, because they can afford it, because of, I think it's shale oil or something. But yeah, no, it has to be done by governments. But then governments are captive of these companies and then governments don't have any upside either to help anybody because they're not. They don't have taxpayers, they don't have constituents.
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B
Well, exactly. They're not getting you for your tax revenue, so they don't need you either. And again, this is a perverse trap because it leads people to devalue humans. Because then we ask, well, what are humans good for? Because we're only measuring the value of humans in terms of economic output.
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A
Batteries.
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B
Batteries. I mean, this is the matrix. And you look at Peter Thiel being asked by Ross Douthat in the New York Times, should the human species endure? And he stutters for 17 seconds, unable to give a clear answer. It's like this is linked to this perspective and I want people to get that. What that means is we're trying to predict the future we're heading towards. Are we heading towards a pro human future or are we heading towards an anti human future? If you're racing to replace all human labor in the economy, if you're racing to not have to invest in people anymore, but invest in data centers and solar panels and have electricity going to those data centers because that's where your GDP comes from and not going to regular people. Prices go up while they can't afford anything. And AI is controlling everything, increasingly disempowering humans across the economy because humans make, quote, more. I mean, AI makes more efficient decisions across every aspect. This is an anti human future that disempowers regular people. And if everybody got that, we would say, hey, that's crazy, we should do something else.
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A
Right? Exactly. So AI companies are locked in a race to deploy these models and achieve what you just said, AGI, as fast as possible. Expensive safety, which is essentially perfect. AI that can do agentic. There's just a story today that Mark Zuckerberg has created an agent to help him be a CEO. It would seem a bizarre thing a couple years ago. Now it isn't. A study published late last year found that safety practices, of course, of the firms, including Anthropic, OpenAI, XAI and Meta, are Far short of emerging global standards. In the doc, journalist Karen Howe says profit maximization incentives are driving the development that it's in order to get to profits, which they aren't at, by the way. Talk about what maybe then an alternative incentive structure would look like if this is the direction they are clearly going in and have made these massive trillion dollar investments in.
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B
Well, so yeah, it's important to slow this down because there's so many subtle aspects to this incentive. What's important to understand why AI is different than other kinds of technologies so you understand what the incentive is. If I get AGI first, then I'm automating intelligence, which means I'm automating all science and technological development across the economy. So it's like hard to get. It's like getting 24th century technology crashing down on 21st century society. Because if I make an advance in biology, that doesn't advance rocketry, but if I make an advance in rocketry, that doesn't advance biology. But if I make an advance in artificial general intelligence, intelligence is what gave us all science, all technology and development. And so as Daria would say, you get, you know, maybe 100 years of scientific development in 10 years. And people saw this with AlphaFold. And this means I also get new cyber weapons. It means I pump my gdp. It means basically I'm like time traveling into the future and it's a race for who will get that power and get a step function above every other country or every other company. And that is the incentive of I've got to get there first. But right now, essentially we're racing for who can get the power faster instead of who's better at applying and controlling that power. So the key distinction of the new incentive we have to get to is as an example, the US beat China to the technology of social media. So we built a psychological bazooka, then we spun it around and blew up our own brain because we did not actually govern that technology appropriately. So again we have to redirect the race from racing to the power to racing to applying and stewarding that power. If you look, give a couple of examples of this is not just boosting up China, but it's interesting to note they are regulating this technology in different ways. Some people don't track all these examples. In China, they actually shut down AI during final exams week. They have a synchronized final exams week. So they can do that. But what that means is that students have an incentive to actually learn and can't outsource all their homework to ChatGPT. Throughout the semester, so or deep seq. Whereas I was just talking to a TA in Columbia University and he was saying on the final exam for economics at Columbia, the students couldn't even label which curve was the supply and demand curve because they've been outsourcing all their thinking to chatgpt. Which country is going to have a future if you're doing that? You know, in social media China was regulating. So 10pm to 6 in the morning, it's lights out for young people. It just doesn't work. And then it's like opening hours and closing hours like CVS and that creates a slightly better environment. Now I'm not saying you have to regulate in some totalitarian top down way, but democratically you should be regulating in some way. So that's one aspect is the race has to get redirected to governing the technology. The second aspect to I think changing the incentive is recognizing that AI is dangerous and uncontrollable unlike other kinds of technologies like, 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 at the company email and you say that the AI model is about to get replaced in this company
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A
era, it'll try to stop it.
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B
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, um, now 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. Now 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.
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A
Oh, it's like drug deal. It's like stop taking, stop taking drugs before the P test essentially.
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B
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 was in its training environment on this big GPU cluster. And 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.
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A
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, speaking of the day after, we've kind of had these scenarios in sci fi forever, whether it's 2001, A Space Odyssey, Terminator, all of them, pretty much all of them. The computer takes over and starts doing what it feels like. So talk. What. What would. What would lead to a less dangerous outcome in that case?
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B
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. We'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 produce 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. It was roughly three times the total recorded deliberations of Kennedy's executive committee during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And the AIs escalated to nuclear threats 95% of the time.
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A
Right? Nuclear.
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B
Nuclear threats, yes. Because it's a 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 it will in a way it is, but it's, 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. Knowledge. We don't understand how it's reasoning and we're releasing it faster than we deployed any other technology in history.
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A
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. We'll be back in a minute. 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, 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. It's a great way to learn about investing. Very easy to use. The dashboard is completely discernible. It's really hard to learn about investing and this is a great way to 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 cara or download the Acorns app to get started. Paid non client endorsement compensation provides incentive to positively promote Acorns tier 2 compensation provided 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, an SEC registered investment advisor. View important disclosures@acorns.com Cara. Support for on with Karis Fisher 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 new times you have sad cars. Happy cars. I've had the cars for a couple of years. I've never had a problem with it. It's freezing cold here in D.C. right now and nothing happened to my battery. I charge it. I happen to charge at my house. It does take a little longer, but with this new Chevy Bolt, it's much faster. I'm thinking of trading it in. Although I love my Bolt, so it's a very difficult decision. 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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. 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 to me they get in, right? I don't let my when I use ChatGPT or I use 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. Not yet.
- [30:53]
B
Yes, eventually. The difference here is like moving from the the way I use AI is 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. That'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 like want to do. Which by the way, models will sometimes say stuff like that. 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. So one thing that I 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 de escalate. There 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, you know, 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. Now 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 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 in 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. So 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?
- [33:35]
A
Yes.
- [33:35]
B
And I want people to get that Exactly.
- [33:38]
A
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. Like they can have children. Men can't have children. And this is children to them. 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.
- [34:01]
B
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.
- [34:09]
A
That's right.
- [34:09]
B
That is nebulable. 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 99.9999% 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.
- [34:35]
A
So talk. Because now it's very integrated, because they're integrated in a sort of sneaky way. Whether it's through these, 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. But right now, as it's sort of, you know, it's infected lots of different things. Where are the most impactful?
- [35:17]
B
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,
- [35:37]
A
you know, has happened and anthropic just put out a chart showing the vulnerability of different.
- [35:43]
B
Oh yeah, it's gonna happen. But I. But what's interesting to note is 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 faked content that's screwing 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. So 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 leave 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, our tax revenue and our bargaining power is about to go down. So this is literally the moment. This moment is when we actually have to activate and make something else happen. And I want people just to sit down and be with that in just a moment. 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 never stop ringing like, this is the issue. This is the moment where we have to do this. And we think of this as like a human movement that in a way social media could have felt really innocuous. Just like a place where you're sharing photos of your friends, cats and what they're eating for breakfast. And we had to convince people that it was actually this anti human machine that was eating our psychological environment. It was eating our 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 maximum technological encroachment in our humanity. What happens when you don't have a way to make ends meet? What 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.
- [38:11]
A
So. But at the same time, 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. You know, 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.
- [38:39]
B
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 a hundred years of scientific development, so go back 100 years, great idea. You can't even predict the things 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 my co founder Azaraskin 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, it can cause these new kinds of risks that 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 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. And 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.
- [40:07]
A
It doesn't mitigate it. Director Daniel Rohr learns in the documentary, as he learns when it comes to a five guys run the show. I have said this over. 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 Satya 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 Wang to it.
- [40:48]
B
Yeah, that's important too.
- [40:49]
A
Yeah, because he's the maker. 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 heroic 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 gonna win, no matter what, given the trillions 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.
- [41:26]
B
I 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 Marc 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.
- [41:52]
A
Right. And I wouldn't want to leave out Marc Andreessen because I think he's sort of. And Thiel are also not on the side. They're right in the dead center of it too. Yeah, they're all the Same people.
- [42:03]
B
Well, there's kind of tech accelerationism that's just saying let's speedrun the capture of the US 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. 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. We 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 in the film agree, including the CEOs, that we need coordination. If we need coordination, what's hard is that the main people don't trust each other. Going back in time, Demis Hasabis, 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, and then we'll distribute the benefits, and it'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 OpenAI. 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 anthropic. So now everyone's competing for safety. But of course, that didn't actually turn to 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 US 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 US 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. So 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 AI.
- [44:36]
A
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.
- [44:44]
B
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. And 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 Bretton Woods.
- [45:15]
A
But there's nobody with that kind of power. They have that kind of power. No one has power over them.
- [45:19]
B
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.
- [45:33]
A
They see it as a. Is a opportunity to make money. That's what they see it as.
- [45:37]
B
Yeah, but if. 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, and they just kept their phones ringing non stop 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 believe 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. Max Tegmark from Future Flight 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.
- [46:40]
A
I get it. But these people aren't saying that. Sam Altman's not saying that.
- [46:45]
B
Well, they're. 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.
- [46:57]
A
I think they do have a death wish. I honestly, at this point, there's no other explanation as far as I can.
- [47:03]
B
And I agree with you. Kara, I want you to hear it. 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 eight billionaires, this is eight billion people against eight billionaires, or soon to be trillionaires. The eight billion people have to say no. They have to say no. And the answer is now, 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.
- [47:29]
A
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.
- [47:42]
B
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. You 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.
- [48:48]
A
Yes, we hate them now.
- [48:49]
B
Yeah.
- [48:49]
A
You and I have managed to get them to hate them. Yes.
- [48:52]
B
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 a. There's actually. I think AI is now less popular than ICE. Only 26% of the US population has positive feelings about. 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. So now to answer Senator Warner's question. First of all, it's like, I see a lot of elites talk to 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. It'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. So 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 foreseeable harm contextualized set of outcomes. Second, 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 for deployment 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. So wherever the AI part of the
- [51:42]
A
Biden executive order had some of this in there, but go ahead.
- [51:45]
B
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, if 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, ChatGPT rushing in to say we'll do domestic surveillance. You saw everybody quit ChatGPT 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.
- [52:38]
A
We've heard from them. Scott and I have heard from them recently.
- [52:40]
B
Really?
- [52:41]
A
Yeah. For the resistant unsubscribe, we moved a lot of people off ChatGPT and that's
- [52:46]
B
a big deal because these companies, again, they need their numbers to go up that many.
- [52:50]
A
You don't have to move that.
- [52:51]
B
So. 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.
- [53:02]
A
We'll be back in a minute. 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 dietitians and crafted chefs. Ready in two minutes. No planning, no cooking. With a hundred rotating weekly meals meals to keep things fresh and delicious. Factor has meals that fit your goals and schedule. Factor is sending me a box. I'm excited to try it. 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. 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I think they're the most important thing about sleeping and I'm gonna probably get a waffle blanket and everything else. I really like bedding and I'm 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 Bowland Branch's annual spring event take 20 off site wide plus free shipping@bowlandbranch.com Cara with code Cara Kara that's Boland Branch B O L L A N--B-R-A-N-C-H.com Karakara code Kara to unlock 20% off exclusions apply. See site for details. 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 growth could stall out. But with Shipstation you don't have to take it all on by yourself. 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You can go to Shipstation 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 that's shipstation.com code kara shipstation.com code kara. 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 deepfakes, chatbot guardrails, kids 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 for you 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. They own the Trump administration. Their people are in key technology, whether it's Emile Michael or David Sacks, Technology owns this administration. Where does that leave the efforts that 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.
- [58:03]
B
So money buys politics when the issue is a low salience issue, when people aren't really paying attention, but 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, et cetera. This needs to be a number one issue. It needs to be a number one issue in the midterms. And so 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, 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 was going to include that preemption of state regulation is actually because of all the child safety issues that my team at center for Human Technology and others.
- [58:45]
A
That's what I'm saying. Let's not ignore it. It's very useful.
- [58:47]
B
Exactly. So it's actually part of how we get to that, 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 those 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. And they still said no because they actually didn't want that. And 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 me more. Like the Norway model, the sovereign wealth fund, or the Alaska sovereign wealth fund, or the New Mexico example that you
- [59:40]
A
said, what do I get?
- [59:41]
B
What do I get? 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, help build with a coalition of other groups, a political force that's as big as the size of the problem.
- [60:03]
A
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. And they're like, oh, we make $50 in the life lifespan of this user. And I put up my hand, I said, where is my $25? Why are you getting every bit of it? And Steve Case was like, care, don't 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, 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.
- [61:05]
B
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. And 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.
- [61:31]
A
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 non partisan because they are loaded for bear to stop anyone who opposes them.
- [61:56]
B
Yeah, I mean, first of all, I'll say that 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. Jonathan Haidt's work, you know, we're partnered 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 gonna 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 gonna say in 2013, we used to say there's gonna be a big tobacco lawsuit against this engagement business model. Well, guess what, it's actually happening. You know, Aza Raskin, my co founder, just testified for the Meta trial where it's about intentionally addicting children. We saw Frances 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 doubt 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.compendants. when you see parents band together reading the Anxious Generation and say, we want to petition our school boards to do Smartphone free schools and laughter returns. The hallways and kids scores go the other way. That's the human movement. When 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 want to collect that into a political voice that can actually band together for a pro human future. But it starts by recognizing and getting crystal clear that with the current AI trajectory, as many benefits as we are going to get along the way is going to lead to collectively an anti human future. And 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 of all the world leaders, if all the LPs and financial centers of the world saw this movie, of 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.
- [64:09]
A
What do you see as their best argument against you? I've heard lots to me like, I know what the 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 are 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 like insidious when you see it?
- [64:45]
B
I don't think they have an argument. I 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, Kara. 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? I 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.
- [65:28]
A
Well, unless Peter Thiel's there and then the anti.
- [65:30]
B
He's. Then you get one hand. But a handful of transhumanists, they don't matter compared to the voice of everyday people.
- [65:37]
A
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 gonna 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, 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 Gavalez, alleging that Gemini set a suicide countdown clock for him. Talk about the broader push, not just here, but legal liabilities. Cause 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? This movement of people is a slow thing.
- [66:38]
B
Well, we have to do this much faster, obviously.
- [66:40]
A
Yeah, you know, exactly. But what is the best, best thing? Is it the legal liability cases that are going on? Is it regulation? What do you imagine it being?
- [66:48]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think legal liability is important because just like any industry, you know, the, the general method is, you know, private profit, you know, and then socialize the costs so the lands and the harms land on the balance sheet of society. Whether it's a shortening attention spans of social media, increased polarization, you know, depression, loneliness. Surgeon general's warning, hey, everybody's lonely. Mental health, healthcare costs go up, kids, test scores are dropping. But 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 it's 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 on the books. That's the problem, right? AI generates new classes of harms. We always say you don't need a right to be forgotten until technology can remember us forever. You don't need 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. One 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 of people agree from 400,000 votes that actually we should do this on deepfakes or we should. 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.
- [68:22]
A
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 an 80. It's the 8020 rule. 80. People agree on a lot of things, but government doesn't, unfortunately.
- [68:35]
B
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 and a livelihood, that's a big deal. It doesn't matter if you're Muslim, Jewish, Christian. If you don't have a livelihood, that's a big deal. So again, it's such an easy thing in a way. Once people see it, it's like this is only good for a handful of people and you can't look away. And so again, politicians phones have to not stop ringing and this is the time to do it.
- [69:02]
A
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, what AI is doing is really quite promising and also some of it's quite disturbing. Right. It's the same thing is 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?
- [69:35]
B
That's the weird thing about this. 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? I 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, 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 when you talk to one of the CEOs oftentimes they'll say, well, I agree, we need to stop, we need to pause, but give me just a year more. Because 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 illusion. They want to see what, what science and physics could actually bring us. If you got the super intelligent AI just figuring it all out, like imagine if you have a thousand.
- [70:31]
A
Most of these people don't like people. You know, I think I, I mean of the CEOs that you talk to, only two of them. Like people. Yeah, really like people.
- [70:41]
B
I don't, 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 life was like living online and. 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, this should be unacceptable.
- [71:25]
A
Have you been changed by anything one of them says to you? Any of them? I have. Yet not. I. 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 do 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.
- [71:52]
B
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. They 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.
- [72:01]
A
You would have hated electricity, you would have hated cars.
- [72:05]
B
And by the way, I wouldn't have like the thing is, it's about this is not anti technology. Like I want people to know. This is the center for Humane Technology, not the Center Against Technology. And you know the word humane, Kara, comes from someone that you knew, I think Aza'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 neuron activity. You don't create mass, you know, 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. Like 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 other notes of optimism. The social dilemma reached 150 million people around the world in 190 countries. Apple finally shipped screen time features to billions of phones. In the last few weeks they shipped these age gating features. So now the age range is part of phones. So you can start to have basic children controls. The Anxious Generation was the most incredible popular book 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.
- [73:50]
A
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 gonna do this, obviously what I always say when I talk to groups, they're like, who's gonna do this? And I say you. I say that to a lot of parents, I say that to audiences. We think it's gotta be you because our politicians are captive and some of them don't wanna 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.
- [74:25]
B
It is hard, but I mean, AI, I think though is more existential than social media. And 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. This is the last time that our political voice will actually matter. Politicians phones should not stop ringing. The midterm elections are coming up. Make this issue known. Even David Sacks, he deleted this tweet. But he said 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. In the film, even I mention that there's this line, we go talk to people in Silicon Valley and they say, we need guardrails. We need someone to make the guardrails. These are the engineers, not the CEOs, and they want our help. And so we go off to D.C. and we say, we need guardrails. And then the D.C. 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.
- [75:48]
A
As with cigarettes.
- [75:49]
B
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. And so you have to reveal a hidden common preference to make sure that that happens.
- [76:20]
A
So my last question, because we gotta go, is, if you had a happy outcome, 20 years we're living with AI, what is it doing?
- [76:30]
B
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, et cetera. It means making sure that we know which wisdom 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 and generational knowledge. How 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. And 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, you know, 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. Like 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 gonna all work out okay.
- [78:38]
A
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. It's been a decade making these warnings. Did you at the time think that these tech leaders would become quite so villainous and that I didn't either. And are they redeemable?
- [78:59]
B
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. We haven't talked in a little bit, but still consider him and the other folks people that I know. What happens is the incentives dominate the psychology, meaning the 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. So 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. And again, just to kind of close out, 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 Apocalyptomist. And let's make sure that this conversation happens everywhere. Journalists writing about it everywhere again, writing about AI behaviors everywhere, Lawyers helping 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 and put ourselves on the best possible path.
- [80:52]
A
And let's assume we don't want to be doing this interview in five years from a bunker.
- [80:57]
B
Let's avoid that, Kara.
- [80:58]
A
Let's avoid that. Anyway, thank you so much, Tristan. You've been a real hero to me and many others, and I really appreciate it.
- [81:06]
B
Thank you so much, Kara. I really appreciate getting to talk to you about this, and I wish that we made more progress in the last few years, but, you know, it's just good to be on this journey with you, really.
- [81:21]
A
Today's show was produced by Christian Castro Roselle, Michelle Eloy, Katherine Milsop, Megan Burney and Kalyn Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Madeline laplante Dubie. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackadette. If you're already following the show, you are pro humanity. If not, you're just Marc 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. We'll be back on Monday with more. This podcast is brought to you by Carvana. Selling your car shouldn't feel like a second job. It should feel easy. With Carvana, it is. Just visit Carvana.com, enter your license plate or VIN, answer a few quick questions, and get an offer in minutes.
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