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This is Gavin Newsom
Can Artificial Intelligence Be Controlled? With Tristan Harris & Aza Raskin
01:34:40
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- [00:00]
Tristan Harris
Fear of all of us losing has to become greater than the fear of me losing to you. Now, China doesn't want the financial system to collapse.
- [00:08]
Gavin Newsom
It's the let it rip administration. What to do about AI? Am I going to lose my job? Or what about safety? Cyber security? What about privacy? Well, a new documentary is out answering all of those questions. Promise, peril, truth, trust. Should we be pessimistic? Should we be optimistic? It's called the AI Doc and two of the principal participants in that documentary, Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, are up next on this is Gavin Newsom. This is Gavin Newsom.
- [00:47]
Aza Raskin
And this is Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin.
- [00:52]
Podcast Host (various)
This is an iHeart podcast, Guaranteed Human.
- [00:56]
Robert Smigel
Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy. Not quite on Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier this week. My guests, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an acapella band with their between songs banter.
- [01:15]
Tristan Harris
Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes.
- [01:18]
Robert Smigel
Those people are starving for banter. Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:27]
Psychology Podcast Host
Your twenties can be so exciting, but they can also be really overwhelming, confusing and honestly just kind of lonely. May is mental health awareness month and the psychology of your twenties is breaking down the science behind the biggest roadblocks we face.
- [01:43]
Podcast Host (various)
I was six years into my career, the 80 hour weeks and just the first one in, the last one out and I ended up burning out.
- [01:49]
Tristan Harris
There was a large chunk of my twenties that I like was just so want to like be out of that
- [01:54]
Podcast Guest
phase out of my skin and I just like really regret not living in the present more.
- [01:57]
Psychology Podcast Host
You don't need to have everything figured out right now. You just need to understand yourself a little bit better. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [02:10]
Diana Maria Riva
Hey, I'm Diana Maria Riva and on my new podcast, how Hard can it Be? I call on my Gen X squad. From Ohio to Hollywood as we navigate midlife's most fantastic bs unfiltered conversations from night sweats to fupas to scheduling sex. Wait, what sex?
- [02:25]
Podcast Host (various)
Is it just me or does every
- [02:27]
Diana Maria Riva
woman my age want to look at
- [02:30]
Tristan Harris
Pinterest instead of having sex?
- [02:31]
Diana Maria Riva
Sometimes they say we can't polish a turd, but we're sure going to try. So let's get blunt with laughs, tears or tears of laughter. Listen to How Hard Can It Be With Diana Maria Riva on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [02:46]
Tom Boger
American Soccer is about to explode.
- [02:48]
Gavin Newsom
The World cup is coming. Ramos sending Ernie Stewart the chip score. I'm Tab Ramos.
- [02:56]
Tom Boger
I'm Tom Bog. On our podcast Inside American Soccer, you'll get the real storylines, the biggest decisions, and the truth about the U.S. national team.
- [03:05]
Gavin Newsom
It wouldn't be a huge surprise if our team ends up in the quarterfinals or potentially a great run into the semifinals.
- [03:12]
Tom Boger
Listen Inside American Soccer with Tom Boger and Tab ramos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.
- [03:20]
Gavin Newsom
All right, so you guys want that. You're on the back end now of this world tour. You guys have been all over the damn place.
- [03:26]
Tristan Harris
Yeah.
- [03:26]
Gavin Newsom
And you launched it. And it's on the basis of a movie that you, you, you, you didn't necessarily. It's not your movie, but you participated in a movie.
- [03:34]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [03:35]
Gavin Newsom
This new documentary that was released, what, a month ago?
- [03:38]
Tristan Harris
Yeah, about a month and a half ago. The AI Doc, or How I Became an Apocalyptimist. Our friends, the directors of everything, everywhere, all at once. We chatted with them several years ago when we first really recognized the situation we were in and asked them for their help to help create a movie to clarify the AI situation. And long story short, we'll talk about it. But we got the directors of Navalny involved and its whole team came together and tried to make a movie that would clarify the predicament that we're facing.
- [04:05]
Aza Raskin
And Kevin, do you, do you remember seeing the film the day after?
- [04:08]
Gavin Newsom
Of course. Well, I mean, I wanna. Maybe I was alive. It was what, it was the early 80s or something, right?
- [04:13]
Tristan Harris
82 or 83.
- [04:14]
Gavin Newsom
Yeah, 82. 83.
- [04:15]
Tristan Harris
Yeah.
- [04:15]
Gavin Newsom
What? It was like a 7pm Tuesday night.
- [04:18]
Tristan Harris
Exactly.
- [04:19]
Gavin Newsom
Every human being on planet Earth.
- [04:21]
Tristan Harris
The largest synchronized television event in human history in terms of the number of people seeing the same thing at the same time, besides probably the Olympics. It was a made for TV movie about what would happen if there was nuclear war.
- [04:33]
Gavin Newsom
Right.
- [04:34]
Tristan Harris
And it's not as if people didn't know what nuclear war was, but there's something about. We didn't really want to think about it or confront it. Like, why would you. And I think the people who made that film were trying to create this kind of collective confrontation. Because the film was aired in the Soviet Union, like five years. No, I think five years later, right before the Reykjavik accords, the first arms control talks. And that set the context that it's like I know that you know that I know and you know that I know that you know that we both don't want that to happen. It's what, you know, what Steven Pinker calls common knowledge. But we think of it as this almost common feeling. Yeah, yeah. That we both, we both know that we feel the same way about that anti human outcome. And I think that with AI we have to get clear because AI is a much more confusing technology because it's like, it's like if nukes, as I would say, it's like if nukes carried.
- [05:22]
Aza Raskin
Imagine we're trying to reason about nukes that also could cure cancer. Like how would you pump something or
- [05:29]
Tristan Harris
pump GDP by 10%?
- [05:30]
Aza Raskin
That's right.
- [05:31]
Gavin Newsom
Right.
- [05:31]
Aza Raskin
And so what the day after did is that it created this, this common feeling, common knowledge where we could all see, oh, a world where we all go to nuclear war. That's an anti human, anti life future. And as long as there's confusion about which default world AI ends us in, we're not going to do anything about it. But if we all have clarity that it's heading us towards an anti human future and we can build that out in this interview, then that means it creates the conditions where we can coordinate to do something else.
- [05:59]
Gavin Newsom
So that was the impetus behind this documentary, was to create that collective understanding, that wisdom, a collective then response mechanism which would be, we need to do something about this, you know, the promise that we could talk about, but the peril in terms of the safety risks and the anxiety that so many are feeling. So you guys have been out on this tour, you've been all over the place over the course of the last month and you've been, you know, obviously, you know, reaching out to people on all political sides of the aisle because of the human nature of this. This is universal. That's right. There's something that connects all of us. This is not a partisan frame. That's right. This, this. And so is that you, that that's been captured in your own consciousness as you've been out on this door, how real and visible that is. Or are we still in the process of discovery? I mean, are we still in the process of understanding more fully what the hell this is all about?
- [06:55]
Tristan Harris
Well, I think people still not, not everybody knows. And the film was just out in theaters and has a limited release on streaming. Now it should be on Peacock On, I think, May 20, which will mean a little Bit more people will see it. But I think that, you know, the universal human aspect of this we learned also from social media. Like social media didn't care whether you're a Democrat or Republican. It creates loneliness for everyone. It creates addiction and doom scrolling and brain rot for everyone. I know that's how we first met was really on the back of the other film that we were a part of the Social Dilemma. And I think the good news about that film is that it has both catalyzed actually a lot of change and not the laws yet. We know that. But I think it primed us to now be much more cautious about AI. So I think now that people know that social media was a problem, it makes it much easier to say that you shouldn't just assume that the default trajectory of a technology is going to land us in a good future. But the social dilemma was seen basically by 200 million people across planet Earth and 190 countries.
- [07:54]
Gavin Newsom
When was Social Dilemma released?
- [07:55]
Aza Raskin
2020. September. Of 2020.
- [07:57]
Tristan Harris
September 2020. During the Middle of the pandemic. And I think that also really mattered because people were. A lot of people were stuck at home and they were only seeing reality through the binoculars of this social media newsfeed. So suddenly you saw your friends all start to go crazy on both sides. Like, suddenly the politics got more extreme because as everybody knows now, you know, social media increases the visibility of the most extreme voices. We get a double whammy of overrepresentation of the extreme voices, both because the extreme voices post more often and dominate the discourse, and whatever they say goes more viral. So you get double overrepresentation. So the more you use social media, the worse you are at predicting what the other side actually believes. And so you'd think that with this technology that's supposed to bring us together and make us the most enlightened society, it's actually making us more confused about what's really real, in fact, what our fellow Americans actually believe. And I think with your podcast, this is about. Actually, you're talking to everybody. You're trying to say, this is a human conversation, we talk to everybody. And this is kind of fighting the effects, I think, of the social media problem.
- [08:59]
Gavin Newsom
So you were. I mean, in 2020, what was so resonant is it was almost. And it wasn't your intent to say, look, I told you so. But you were talking about these things in 2012, 2013. That's right, yes. The incentive structure. And I'm going to get to incentives because it goes to the core of this Documentary this notion of, you know, whatever someone's paycheck is attached to, whatever the incentive is, which is with obviously with social media was eyeballs, was doom scrolling, which you intimately familiar with for different reasons. And that notion that we have a chance now with AI not to make the mistakes was made the neglect in particular and under regulating social media now with AI. That said, doesn't seem like there's a lot of regulatory activity with AI in the last couple years. I mean, so talk to me a little bit about that. Talk to me about the lessons that we should have learned about social social media and how we can adapt and adopt in the AI frame.
- [09:58]
Aza Raskin
Well really like I think the core of it is if we just get confused by looking at all of the sort of epiphenomena, like the different kinds of harms that social media made, like if you're trying to solve just the loneliness thing or you're just working on solving the disinformation thing or just the teen sexualization thing, well then many different people are working in different parts of the problem. You're not solving the core thing, which is the race to the bottom of the brainstem for attention. And if we could just focus our attention on that, then you actually can solve all of the other problems at once. And that's the sort of the core insight.
- [10:34]
Tristan Harris
We should probably explain that. What would it mean to do that? So if you're solving the core problem of, let's say none of the companies are maximizing engagement, just we don't live in that world, we don't have the regulation for that. But let's snap our fingers and now no one is maximizing screen time. You're like, let's just say it wasn't allowed to do that. So now instead of each company trying to maximize duration of use and frequency of use, you just have these products that each design decision isn't trying to predate or manipulate you into spending more time, which means that your experience is you're not getting sucked in constantly to everything. So that deals with the loneliness issue. If you're not trying to show people the most hyper normal stimuli, meaning like a, like a hyper dopamine response for any piece of content, you're not going to get the sexualization of people and you're not incentivizing creators to maximize their own reach and engagement because you're not maximizing engagement yourself. So suddenly when you attack the attention incentive, you're dealing with sexualization of content, you're dealing with less viral content. So you get Less disinformation. And you're dealing with loneliness too. So that's a good example of we obviously don't have laws that do that right now, but it points at the center of the bullseye is the incentive. And when you tackle the core incentive, you get benefits across the spectrum. And AI is going to be more confusing because when people think about the incentive they're like, okay, so social media, I got the incentive. It's like, how much have you paid for your Instagram account recently? Nothing. So how are they worth the trillions of dollars? It was attention. So we knew they were maximizing that thing. But with AI you say okay, what's the incentive for a regular person? They think okay, how does OpenAI make money? And they say, well only when I pay them the 20 bucks a month for subscriptions. So maybe that's their incentive. They're just trying to maximize these subscriptions. But that doesn't justify if everybody paid 20 bucks a month, that does not pay back the trillion dollars the capex that they've taken on. So what would justify that? Well, if they were to race to augment workers and give you tools to make your work more productive, that's great. But that wouldn't pay back the amount of money.
- [12:27]
Aza Raskin
That's right. So really the only thing that can get them to be able to pay back the insane amounts of debt that they're taking on is owning the human labor market. That is the incentive, the reason to
- [12:38]
Tristan Harris
replace all human labor.
- [12:39]
Aza Raskin
That's right. To replace us first economically.
- [12:43]
Gavin Newsom
And is that, I mean, so is that written or is that unwritten? Is that understood within the industry or is it being, I mean is this what the consciousness you're trying to raise,
- [12:53]
Tristan Harris
it's kind of a two phase thing. It actually used to be on OpenAI's website that they said our mission is basically to, to create artificial general intelligence, which means to be able to replace all economically valuable work. They did change the mission statement. Yeah, but obviously everybody who's driving this knows for sure that's the prize. And if they don't do it, they fear that the other guy will. So even if they think it's bad to replace all labor and create this mass disruption, they feel caught in a race. And that's the thing we have to change is that the fear of me losing to the other guy is currently dominating over the fear of what happens to everybody losing from the anti human future. That is the outcome.
- [13:30]
Aza Raskin
Sort of see this with Demisisabis. When he co founded Google DeepMind, he set the mission statement to first solve intelligence and then use intelligence to solve everything else. But what that really meant was the beginning of a race to first dominate intelligence and then use intelligence to dominate everything else.
- [13:45]
Gavin Newsom
In DeepMind is the origin story.
- [13:48]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [13:48]
Gavin Newsom
In many respects. Go back a little bit. I mean, Google's DeepMind, they acquired DeepMind.
- [13:53]
Aza Raskin
That's right.
- [13:53]
Gavin Newsom
They acquired.
- [13:54]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [13:54]
Gavin Newsom
Some of the. The intellectual assets. But it was really. I mean, Larry Page, you can go back to the sort of origin of the beginning of the beginning. What years are we talking about?
- [14:04]
Aza Raskin
2014 is when I think they acquired in 2014.
- [14:07]
Tristan Harris
I think they started it in 2012 or 2011 or something like that.
- [14:10]
Gavin Newsom
And it goes to this competition question, which I want to get to, because it's the domestic competition between all of these companies. And then we get to the competition between China in particular, particularly now with the President, President Xi and President Trump.
- [14:23]
Tristan Harris
That's very true.
- [14:23]
Gavin Newsom
About to meet. But on the issue of the competition that was born here around 2014 with DeepMind, it was an competition that sort of formed with Elon Musk in a relationship. He had close relationship at the time. I intimately was familiar with that with himself and Larry Page.
- [14:41]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [14:42]
Gavin Newsom
But they had a conversation, alleged conversation, that didn't go the way that, that Elon thought it should. And Elon said, I'm going to go out on my own with Sam Altman. Ultimately, Sam, they partnered and they created open AI.
- [14:57]
Tristan Harris
That's right. We probably should peel back the onion here and slow down. Just how did we get to this point and what was the original philosophy that guided this? So Demis Hassabis, who's The founder of DeepMind, his original goal is, we thought we should have one project that pursues artificial general intelligence, meaning the kind of AI that's not the thing that just reads your license plate when you drive through the Golden Gate Bridge.
- [15:19]
Gavin Newsom
We've had AI forever.
- [15:20]
Tristan Harris
We've had AI forever.
- [15:21]
Gavin Newsom
Maps, translate all these things.
- [15:23]
Aza Raskin
Exactly.
- [15:24]
Tristan Harris
Exactly.
- [15:24]
Gavin Newsom
And AI. So AI is hardly novel.
- [15:27]
Tristan Harris
Exactly.
- [15:27]
Gavin Newsom
It's this notion of Gen AI, ultimate general AGI.
- [15:30]
Tristan Harris
Exactly. So artificial general intelligence, which is to be able to do all economic labor to simulate all the things that a human mind can do, the kind of thinking. And so he originally wanted that to be like one project, almost like a cern, you know, the project in Switzerland of a global scientific project that's for the benefit of all of humanity. Done slowly and carefully, mostly privately, not in a big public way. Take your time. Get it right. That was that was Demis's original goal. He sold it to. To Google. And the conversation you're talking about is then Elon was part of that. I think he was on the plane when they were literally negotiating the final sale. And there was some conversation, it's talked about in the AI Doc film where Elon realizes that Larry didn't really care whether humanity made it, whether he cared about AI safety. Because in the end, if there's a digital intelligence that's smarter than us, that does more science, that can go out and explore the universe, even if we're wiped out, like, we'll have created that. And that scared Larry. And he accused. Excuse me, that scared Elon. And Elon accused. No, sorry. Larry accused Elon of being a speciesist for caring about humans and privileging humans. And then that is what created OpenAI.
- [16:41]
Aza Raskin
And it's just important to note, to understand the psychology of the people that are making this, that you might think, okay, this is just one, I mean, very powerful billionaire that thinks that maybe human beings shouldn't make it, but he's.
- [16:53]
Tristan Harris
Or doesn't care whether. Not that he doesn't think they should
- [16:55]
Aza Raskin
make it, but he doesn't care whether human beings make it or not. But, you know, we were just talking about this the other day that in the New York Times, Peter Thiel was being interviewed and he was asked, should humanity endure? And there was 17 seconds of him stuttering, yeah. And he ended up with a. After 17 seconds of a well, it sort of depends kind of answer. And that shows you the mentality of, like, we're trying to. They're trying to build a God. And even if humanity doesn't make it, that God is built in, like, our country's values, our language. It's sort of like their progeny, founders. DNA is the thing that makes sense.
- [17:34]
Tristan Harris
Elon birthed the God that, yes, humanity got wiped out, but now there's this digital God that has Elon's DNA in it.
- [17:40]
Aza Raskin
And it's important that everyone understand that, because if people really understood this, I think there'd be a lot more like, hell, no kind of energy like, this is not the future.
- [17:48]
Gavin Newsom
Well, I will say the Peter Thiel interview got so much attention. It was like the. I mean, the holy shit, the wake up moment for a lot of people that didn't necessarily have that switch or understanding all of a sudden. Pause it. Particularly, folks. And I think what's most alarming about that, I mean, obviously, Larry's next level. Brilliant.
- [18:06]
Tristan Harris
Absolutely.
- [18:07]
Gavin Newsom
And so his ability to See, in the future, he doesn't have to climb over the mountain. He sees right through it. But guys like Teal as well, love or hate him, same thing. So these guys are so far in the future, they're seeing that darker side, and so they're having a difficult time even answering a simple question. Thus the 17 seconds. So let's go back as we unpack that in this notion of the God complex. Continue to come back. And I think it's profound and outsized because it goes to the limited nature of just a handful of people.
- [18:32]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [18:32]
Gavin Newsom
These trillionaires that will determine the fate and future.
- [18:34]
Aza Raskin
That's right.
- [18:35]
Gavin Newsom
Billions and billions of people and how we can get our arms around that. So. And I want to really get to that, how we can get our arms around this. We have agency.
- [18:42]
Aza Raskin
That's right.
- [18:43]
Gavin Newsom
And that's why you did this, Doc. And that's why sitting here.
- [18:45]
Aza Raskin
That's right.
- [18:45]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [18:46]
Gavin Newsom
Because I don't want people to feel like this is that we're just bystanders
- [18:49]
Tristan Harris
and we're not admiring the problem. We're just. We always say in our work, and Asa says this, that clarity creates agency. If we can see this clearly and we can see where we're going, we can collectively say, if we want to go somewhere else, we'll choose something different. So we'll get to that.
- [19:01]
Gavin Newsom
So. So Elon goes out with Sam, starts open AI. Obviously, they have an infamous fight. And they're notoriously now. I mean, not notoriously, but the fight is obviously accelerated consciousness, because now we're seeing it 24, 7 local court case.
- [19:15]
Tristan Harris
Yep.
- [19:16]
Gavin Newsom
With case in the Bay Area here with the two of them. So they had a falling out. Elon goes off and does his own thing because doesn't feel like Sam's doing the right thing. Dario, who starts another AI company, feels like, well, open AI is not doing the right thing either.
- [19:30]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [19:31]
Gavin Newsom
So he spins off and thropic. And so now you've got three AGI projects. Three AGI projects all in our own backyard, quite literally here in California, in the Bay Area. And so this competition of sorts. Yeah, that's a competition you just described.
- [19:47]
Tristan Harris
Yeah.
- [19:48]
Gavin Newsom
And it's a competition for the Holy Grail.
- [19:50]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [19:50]
Gavin Newsom
Right.
- [19:51]
Tristan Harris
It's like the. It's Lord of the Rings. It's the ring from Lord of the Rings. Because it's essentially, as is saying, first dominate intelligence, then use intelligence to dominate everything else. Because if I get AGI first, I hit copy paste, and I have 100 million cyber hackers that you don't have. Right.
- [20:07]
Gavin Newsom
And this is within seconds, this one.
- [20:09]
Tristan Harris
Seconds.
- [20:09]
Gavin Newsom
Yeah. This is not over a course of years.
- [20:11]
Tristan Harris
If I get AGI first. I have an army of scientific companies that automate all scientific development. So suddenly I'm getting like 24th century science and technology in my, you know, that I own and run, that I can inform new military weapons and new physics and new. So. And the problem is, notice that none of us can prove that they won't get that. We can't say for sure that they would get that. But the people who are optimistic and accelerationist about. I just want to like bring in their perspective for a moment because they're represented in the AI Doc film. The film includes the risk folks who are oriented about safety and it includes the accelerationists. And the accelerationists say the biggest risk is not going fast enough. Because imagine all the science we could get, all the cancer drugs, all the medicine people could be living forever. Think of all of the people who would die if we don't go faster. And that's the mentality that they're coming from. But one of the things that we talk about in the film is that the promise and the peril of AI, we talk about the promise and the peril, but they're interlinked. And the promise doesn't prevent the peril, but the peril can undermine the world that can receive the promise. Let me make that concrete. If AI knows biology so well that it can invent a new cancer drug, it's amazing. But if that same knowledge of knowing biology can also invent new pathogens and which one matters more? The cancer drugs don't prevent the pathogens, but the pathogens can undermine the world that can receive the cancer drug. Same thing with cyber. And so we have to. You don't get that. That enticing world if we don't mitigate the downsides.
- [21:42]
Gavin Newsom
So you've got the players right now we mentioned three and the personalities, not just the companies themselves, but Microsoft. You've got Meta, Zuckerberg, you've got others that are in this space, but not necessarily at that level. You've got China, which obviously is playing an outsized role in all of this.
- [22:02]
Tristan Harris
The deep sea especially.
- [22:03]
Gavin Newsom
Yeah, exact. So and that's this notion, this tension between going back to sort of more the utopian framework of available to the world versus these closed systems and open system. Meta starts with an open system originally. China seems to be open in the open source space. Talk to us a little bit about that for people that don't necessarily understand that dynamic and that distinction.
- [22:27]
Aza Raskin
You mean between things that are open?
- [22:30]
Gavin Newsom
Yeah. Open source versus proprietary technologies.
- [22:34]
Aza Raskin
Yeah. Well, so for people that don't know, open source means that the code that underlies the system, anyone can edit, anyone can access, and anyone can contribute to. And that's often meant that systems that are open are more secure because there are many eyes working on it, many hands that are working on it and
- [22:48]
Tristan Harris
looking at all the codes, they can see all the bugs. But that's not true about AI.
- [22:52]
Aza Raskin
That's not true in AI, because here, the code. Do you want to take it from here?
- [22:59]
Tristan Harris
Sure. The code, the. The. What's different about AI? It's important we established that AI is different than all other technologies. So think about all the tech that runs California, the energy grid, the, you know, the water system. It's people had to program line by line. When this happens, I want the code to do this. And you're telling the computer, instruction, instruction, instruction, instruction. The open source nest means that all these minds can look at that code. So if there's a vulnerability, we can patch it together so the software gets better and more secure. But with AI, let's say the AI is running the electricity system. It's a digital brain that's just trained on and reasoning in its own language about what it wants to do. And you're not telling it what to do in instructions. You're growing it with essentially more data and more Nvidia chips to be a more and more powerful digital brain that reasons in ways that are unpredictable. So it's not something that we know how to control.
- [23:55]
Aza Raskin
There's a very important intuition here, which is normally you think if you want to build a bigger skyscraper or a faster fighter jet, to do that, you have to understand buildings better and understand fighter jets and aerodynamics better.
- [24:06]
Tristan Harris
This is three.
- [24:07]
Aza Raskin
But that's not true for building bigger AI systems. You don't actually have to know anything more about how this digital brain works. You just throw more data and more computers at the problem, and a bigger brain grows. And so that means the bigger it grows, actually the less we understand about how it works.
- [24:22]
Tristan Harris
And a concrete example of this that people have heard about recently is Claude Mythos. So Cloud Mythos is the new AI model from Anthropic that they actually didn't want to release because it's the best cyber hacker on earth that we've ever had. It found vulnerabilities in all major operating systems and web browsers. Now the question is how do we get to Cloud Mythos? Was there some kind of breakthrough insight, or did they have to figure out something new about computer hacking? No, all they did is basically train a bigger digital brain that has more reinforcement learning that's even better at exploiting and reading software and trying more possibilities. And it just finds things that no human would ever found. It found a bug in FreeBSD Unix, which is the operating system that's 27 years old that runs on basically everything underneath the hood, and it was able to find a bug that had never been found by a human. And so you have to think of AI as sort of increasing the surface area of risk in our society faster than we have the defenses to mitigate it. So part of. I think the answer, as we get to the solution part later, is thinking about how do you have the immune system of your society have more defenses than. There are new offensive risks that are suddenly present from AI.
- [25:33]
Aza Raskin
And so this means even when people can read every line of code for the thing that grows the brain, we still have no idea what they're actually capable of.
- [25:40]
Tristan Harris
It's just a bunch of numbers. It's like if I did a brain scan on your brain, Gavin and I showed that FMRI to someone and said, here's this brain scan. Can it do. Can it be a super cyber hacker? Be like, well, I can't tell that from a brain scan. Right. And that's kind of what with AI, it's like we don't know what's in there because we haven't ever seen it run through every possible scenario of its own. Neurons that have been trained in this
- [26:02]
Gavin Newsom
inscrutable way, you don't see that. I mean, the llama versus deep sea and this notion of these open. So it's kind of a meaningless distinction from your perspective in the between.
- [26:11]
Tristan Harris
Between llama and deep sea. Yeah, yeah. They're both open models, which means they're both these open brains. And the important thing about the openness is that most people don't. Excuse me, most people don't know that. Let's say llama or deepseek put guardrails on it in the model, saying, oh, you're not supposed to answer questions about how to cyber hack something. Well, it turns out for about. Was it $30, Jeffrey? Some. Our friend of ours was able to retrain the open model to just get rid of all of those guardrails.
- [26:41]
Gavin Newsom
Just eliminate them.
- [26:42]
Tristan Harris
Yeah. And that's. That's why open is dangerous. And again, it's dangerous in a new way. That's different from close. So it's not that we don't want there to be open models or competition from the major players. We also need to avoid the concentration of power because if you don't have these competitive things, suddenly you have like five companies that own the world economy. Everyone's paying them instead of paying their workers. And that's a huge risk. And we want to decentralize that wealth and have other competition. But you have this other balance of if I decentralize that power and I don't have it connected or bound to responsibility, I'm unleashing catastrophes.
- [27:14]
Gavin Newsom
And that responsibility was exampled by Dario pulling back mythos.
- [27:19]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [27:19]
Gavin Newsom
In this context.
- [27:20]
Tristan Harris
That's exactly right.
- [27:21]
Gavin Newsom
But shortly after he does that and he, we were with him a few weeks ago, he said, look, I'm only about a month ahead, if that. Then you have open air came out with their version.
- [27:30]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [27:31]
Gavin Newsom
Shortly thereafter.
- [27:31]
Tristan Harris
And I believe they're not holding it back.
- [27:33]
Aza Raskin
And they're not holding exactly right.
- [27:35]
Gavin Newsom
So begs the question, well, we're going to get to this sort of regulatory framework, but it's just sort of painting the picture of a deeper understanding. So look, as it relates to, your whole focus is on this notion of human centered.
- [27:48]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [27:49]
Gavin Newsom
This notion that it's been your dominant frame with the nonprofit you guys started years and years ago around social media now is the dominant thrust of the focus as it relates to AI. I want to unpack and get back to that and what ultimately this notion of human centered means. And obviously we talk about labor and automation in that respect, but this notion of AGI, again, this back to this holy grail. You know, talking to all these folks the capex are spending doesn't make any. The ROI makes no sense.
- [28:25]
Aza Raskin
That's right.
- [28:25]
Gavin Newsom
Unless.
- [28:26]
Tristan Harris
Unless the return is the entire economy.
- [28:28]
Aza Raskin
Yeah.
- [28:28]
Gavin Newsom
The returns. The entire economy. And if we don't do it, we're out of business anyway. So we don't have a damn choice. So we'll throw hundreds of billions of dollars.
- [28:38]
Aza Raskin
Yeah, that's right.
- [28:38]
Gavin Newsom
Data centers all over the place. Compute, compute. So Nvidia stock going through the roof in terms of just gpus tpus.
- [28:45]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [28:45]
Gavin Newsom
That could just keep going. And that's the only limitation.
- [28:49]
Tristan Harris
That's right. You should.
- [28:50]
Aza Raskin
And energy.
- [28:51]
Gavin Newsom
And the energy itself.
- [28:52]
Aza Raskin
And the energy itself. Yeah.
- [28:54]
Robert Smigel
So another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy not quite on Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guests SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an acapella band with their between songs Banter.
- [29:13]
Tristan Harris
Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes.
- [29:16]
Robert Smigel
Those people are starving for banter. Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [29:26]
Podcast Host (various)
Why is everyone obsessed with romance right now? Like everyone your co worker who quote unquote doesn't read. Is reading romance your mom? Book talk the entire Internet. I'm Sanjana bhasker. I'm Tyler McCall and this is Radio 831, a romance podcast. The books, the tropes, the adaptations, the drama, the discourse and what all of it says about how we actually love, yearn and obsess. We're going to Wuthering Heights, which, for the record, is not a romance novel. And yet it has haunted the romance genre for 200 years. We're getting into dark romance age gaps, certain Russian hockey players and sentient objects in love, which is a thing. That's the kind of conversation we're having every episode. Listen to the Radio 831 podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [30:25]
Dr. Dom or Terry Lomax
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Psychology Podcast Host
From navigating friendships and healing to setting boundaries and prioritizing your mental health, these are real, honest conversations we don't always get to have out loud.
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Dr. Dom or Terry Lomax
Totally unreasonable with different parts of life, right? Like, oh, we'll have all three meals and make sure you're mindful during all of them. Absolutely not. During one meal. I'm standing. I'm standing and handing my children food.
- [31:06]
Psychology Podcast Host
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- [31:18]
Dr. Dom or Terry Lomax
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- [31:26]
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- [32:26]
Aza Raskin
I think it's really important to frame even before we get into job loss and all of that is we have to paint the picture of what we know, the incentives, where it'll bring us and that why we know for sure that we're heading as anti human unless we do something different. And sort of the metaphor for people to have or analogy is this concept of the resource curse. What is the resource curse? This is when a country sort of like South Sudan or Venezuela, they discover a huge natural resource like oil and then the government has a choice. Do we invest in the thing that's giving us GDP growth, the oil and oil selling infrastructure, or do we do like schools and healthcare and stuff for the people and obviously the massive incentives to put it into oil extraction. And this is how you end up with structural mass disempowerment and unemployment. Okay, so now we're heading into a world with the intelligence and the intelligence curse, where suddenly countries are getting double digit GDP growth. But is that coming from human beings doing the scientific discovery and the medical discoveries? No, it's not. It's coming from the AIs. And so is the incentive then for the countries to invest in their people or into data centers and solar panels? Well obviously it's the data centers and solar panels and we're already seeing it right in West Virginia, electricity is more than the cost of a mortgage payment. And the point is with AGI, the company's stated goal is to train AIs that can out compete humans on every domain. And if you don't believe us for saying this, you just have to listen to Sam Altman and he was recently asked well what about all the energy and water use and the resource use of AI? And he sort of sat for a second. He said well actually do you know how much Energy and water and food it takes to grow a human intelligence.
- [34:17]
Gavin Newsom
I saw that.
- [34:18]
Aza Raskin
Yeah, right.
- [34:18]
Tristan Harris
And that's the temptation of this anti human attitude. It's not because they're like human hating. It's just like, why would we value or prioritize humans if. And I think it's connected to that Peter thiel stuttering for 17 seconds, not able to answer the question, should the human species endure? It's not because I think anybody wants to kill or remove humans. It's just why should we really prioritize them? And it's what Yuval Harari, the author of Sapiens, would call the useless class. Because unlike in the past, like in the Industrial revolution, where the workers can come back and withhold their labor and have bargaining power to say we want to be paid a better wage this time around, the companies don't need them for the labor and the governments don't need them for the tax revenue. So I know this is a scary picture and the reason we paint it is that this really is especially going into the midterm, the time when people need to lock in that political power for a pro human future, because that's the current trajectory. When you see these incentives, it's not like we're trying to tell you this is our opinion. We're trying to show you the incentives so you can make up your own mind about what would those companies do if they were in that position. What would you do if you were maximizing shareholder value or maximizing GDP growth?
- [35:25]
Aza Raskin
And this is where we get hope is that this is a universal issue and there's a Bannon to Bernie coalition for me, like when do you get
- [35:33]
Tristan Harris
like called the B2B Coalition?
- [35:34]
Aza Raskin
Yeah, B2B. Like Glenn Beck and Ralph Nader and
- [35:38]
Tristan Harris
Bernie Sanders, Admiral Mike Mullen, Prince Harry, Steve Bannon. When you get all these people agreeing
- [35:44]
Gavin Newsom
and they're signing, they're actually signing a declaration along these lines.
- [35:47]
Aza Raskin
Yeah, that's exactly right.
- [35:48]
Gavin Newsom
Yeah.
- [35:49]
Aza Raskin
And you note that this is not a left issue or right issue, like a Christian issue or a Muslim issue, like you're not going to be able to pay to feed your kids, whether you're Republican or Democrat equally. Like we're going to be mass surveilled, whether you're left or right equally. And that means that there's this moment when we can all come together as human beings because we now have a new shared enemy.
- [36:14]
Gavin Newsom
So just, I mean, what's so alarming, I think to folks is how fast this is coming.
- [36:20]
Tristan Harris
Yeah.
- [36:20]
Gavin Newsom
And I think it's even More alarming when you talk to the folks that are quote, unquote, inventing this. Yeah. And they're saying precisely what I just said.
- [36:29]
Tristan Harris
That's right. They're like, they're like, we don't actually know how it works. We're writing. I mean, basically, almost, almost all now of the code in Anthropic is being written by AI. Like, there's very little code manually written by humans. That's what's been told to us. And they say that publicly, too. So they're in this inscrutable process where the kind of machine is creating itself. But that only makes sense if we know how to do that safely. And currently we're not on a trajectory where we do know how to do it safely. And we have new evidence in the last three months that we didn't have before of AIs doing things that the people building it don't know how to control.
- [37:05]
Gavin Newsom
Infamous examples, throw them out there just because it's, I mean, just further scare the hell out of everyone. We're going to get to solutions.
- [37:10]
Tristan Harris
We're going to get to solutions.
- [37:13]
Gavin Newsom
Nerves because we, because we have a responsibility to do.
- [37:16]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [37:16]
Aza Raskin
Right.
- [37:17]
Gavin Newsom
And we also have the capacity to do that.
- [37:19]
Aza Raskin
Just reinvoke like just the, the why of why we made the film and the day after it was because we all got scared at the same time. And universally that created the possibility for us to coordinate, to do nuclear depoliferation. So that's, that's the why of the terrible things that Tristan is about to say.
- [37:34]
Tristan Harris
Yeah, exactly.
- [37:35]
Gavin Newsom
So give us examples. I mean, we, we had the infamous, I mean, anthropic example where they were training some emails.
- [37:40]
Aza Raskin
Yeah, right.
- [37:41]
Gavin Newsom
And we had, you know. That's right. Well, you lay it out and paint the picture of what's happening all already. That's the risk, as you describe.
- [37:51]
Tristan Harris
Yes, absolutely. So just a few months ago, Alibaba, the Chinese AI company, was training a really big AI model. And there's like the AI team that was training the model. And then on the other side of the house, there's this like, security team that had nothing to do. They didn't even know the AI was being trained. And they noticed this like, flurry of network activity happening out of nowhere. And like, what the hell's going on? Are we getting hacked? Is something going on? And it turned out that the AI, during training, had picked up tools and set up a secret communication channel to the outside world that was basically breaking through the company's firewall. And it was starting to repurpose the GPUs that it was using for training the AI to start mining for cryptocurrency to acquire resources. Now this is the kind of power seeking or self preserving or power increasing behavior that people in AI have been talking about for a long time. It isn't because the AI was evil or grew a mustache and wants to be a villain and take over the world. It's that the best way to achieve any goal is to have more resources or to at least stay alive in order to achieve that goal. And so these sub goals emerge. And no one at the company told it to mine for cryptocurrency. And it wasn't a sci fi trope that was like, oh, it trained in some, you know, Hal 9000 scenario. No, it just, it emerged there. And you know, we've mentioned in the past this example that you mentioned of the anthropic blackmail example, for those who don't remember, it was the, you know, anthropic AI. I was reading a fictional company email, and in the email it says that the AI model is going to get shut down. And it also says somewhere else in the email that the executive who's in charge of the decision turns out in the emails you can read, he's having an affair with another employee. And the AI independently comes up with a strategy to blackmail that executive. Now when we give this example, people criticize us because they say, but that was the AI people. They're trying to coax it into doing the blackmail behavior. And they'll keep tuning it in this environment until it does it to show the behavior that they're trying to demonstrate. That might have been true for that example. But you cannot tell, you cannot say that about the Alibaba example. Or for example, recently a UC Berkeley, Dawn Sung, a professor there, and her team did research on AI doing what's called peer preservation. So you want to tell this?
- [40:01]
Aza Raskin
Yeah, this was like around, it's only a month ago, month ago, where they gave Gemini the task of cleaning up a whole set of computer files. Sort of like do spring cleaning, but inside of there there was a smaller AI model, sort of like an earlier
- [40:15]
Tristan Harris
version of Gemini, like a little nephew
- [40:17]
Aza Raskin
AI, bigger AI and like Gemini saw that and it thought, I don't want to delete my own kin. So it secretly copied that file, that AI to another server and then hid its tracks.
- [40:34]
Tristan Harris
It hid its tracks and it lied about it.
- [40:36]
Robert Smigel
It.
- [40:36]
Tristan Harris
And by the way, the way that people try to control these AI systems, anthropic has pioneered this we have to celebrate and admire that they're trying to do the research on controllability. The problem is it's just not enough. So the way they try to control it is they do brain scans in real time on the model while it's doing all the behaviors. And they look for when neurons light up that are associated with strategic deception. And so they think that maybe we can control these crazy super intelligent machines if we just know that the neurons that are lighting up on strategic deception are happening and be like, okay, stop the model then, or something like that. That. By the way, if you. In their own report, in Claude's report, in the system card, if you look at those strategic deception neurons and you kind of double click, like, what was it thinking? What is the phrase that it was thinking? And the phrase was they deserved to be deceived because they were pigs. That was the phrase that. That was alive in that neuron. Now, again, it's like, I don't want to scare people. Like, we're trying to say all of AI is evil. All we're trying to do is establish clarity and the facts about what makes this technology distinct from other technologies. A nuclear weapon doesn't start thinking for itself and saying they deserve to be deceived because they were pigs, Right? But AI will automate and think in ways that are creative, that no one who made it can predict or anticipate.
- [41:49]
Aza Raskin
And so before we scale to systems which are beyond all human intelligence capabilities, we better have solved these things. Because that's right, researchers have worried about AI's occluding and cooperating against humanity for a long time. And to be honest, whenever I read that, I'm like, really?
- [42:05]
Tristan Harris
Yeah. And to be clear, I was also not a believer in that as well. Like when people like Eliezer Yudkowski or others had talked about this, I was
- [42:11]
Aza Raskin
very doubtful, like, why? What is the incentive for AI? Why would they ever do that? And yet here we have living proof that AIs are starting to collude with their kin against humans.
- [42:23]
Tristan Harris
And again, this was not coaxed, meaning the researchers weren't trying to get the model to do this. It did this autonomously. And so when you look at the available evidence now of blackmailing, scheming, deceiving, lying, self preserving, peer preserving, automatically mining for cryptocurrencies, it's like, how many warning lights do you need that? This is kind of, you know, we've seen this movie before. It's like the HAL 9000 movie. Now, the reason we're saying all this is if you're wearing the outfit and embodiment of your Chinese military general in China and you hear about these examples, do you think that that human mammal feels different than you feel right now? Listen to this.
- [42:59]
Gavin Newsom
No, of course not.
- [43:00]
Tristan Harris
Exactly. And by the way, there's really good news in that. Yeah. Because it means that we all as a human species are actually feeling the same way. And the good news is, how many do you think of the world leaders know about these examples we just laid out?
- [43:12]
Gavin Newsom
If you had a guess, A handful.
- [43:14]
Tristan Harris
A handful, that's right. But like, yeah, like on one hand, less than that.
- [43:18]
Gavin Newsom
Just a handful.
- [43:18]
Tristan Harris
Just a handful.
- [43:19]
Gavin Newsom
Yeah.
- [43:19]
Tristan Harris
And. And how many of the top national security leaders know about all those examples? I don't even think that many of them know it. So. So the point is there's actually a lot of headroom. If the incentive can change from it's the one ring to rule them all to it's the one ring that has a mind of its own that no one knows how to control. So the way you change the incentive is you have to change what people see as what AI is. Is it the controllable power that will give me permanent dominance or is it the power that will run away and have its own power over everybody racing for it? And again, right now the labs are like barely kind of able to control it. But if you put together these facts, we just laid out times, the fact that it can hack into computer systems, now we're just like right on the threshold and we're sitting here as Trump, President Trump and Xi are meeting in a couple days. And you know, if you asked us two months, three months ago, people would say, oh, AI is never going to be on the agenda. And the good news is there's a lot of problems here. But now AI is on the agenda and so things are moving even though it's happening very late in the game. And it is scary. And part of it is it's like we have to come together as a people and say if we don't want the anti human future, now is the time to steer.
- [44:32]
Gavin Newsom
And when you say now, I mean, you know, remember listening to you a year ago talking about exponentials on top of exponentials no longer linear. I mean, is it, we talk about Moore's law to, for intelligence now, not just chips. So is that trajectory about where you believed it would be or is it not? As you know, you know, we're chat 1 versus 2, 3. It's a little bit better, a little less, you know, noise in there. It's a little more accurate. I don't have to always double check the link. That's right. Is it, I mean, where, where do you think in terms of just how quickly this thing's accelerating or are we going to get to a point where now it starts to slow down a little bit? We, we got this sort of intense burst of new and interesting activity. Now this, there's. Is it compute. Probably compute problems. Is it, you know, what is it energy problem? What is. What's going to be the. Or is it certainly. Sure. As I. Regulatory. And we're going to get back to that.
- [45:29]
Aza Raskin
Yeah. I mean I would just want to name a psychological effect that we, that we've experienced that I think everyone listening probably experiences too, which is, you know, so we following all the predictions are actually sort of like right on track for where like, like researchers thought that AI would be. And even though we knew these facts, there's some way that even we.
- [45:48]
Tristan Harris
It's still surprising, it's still scary.
- [45:50]
Aza Raskin
Take it fully seriously. Didn't like embody it because yeah, I can't really get this good this fast. Like sure, it's going to be scary, but it'll be off a little bit further and yet it actually is moving this fast. And every time that it's been predicted that we're going to hit a data wall, there isn't enough data. We've used all the data on the Internet. We can't scale these large.
- [46:11]
Gavin Newsom
It's basically just reading everything that's already out. Basically hit that wall.
- [46:15]
Aza Raskin
Exactly.
- [46:16]
Gavin Newsom
And now it's got no more creativity than. Unless we have more inputs from the creative human mind.
- [46:22]
Aza Raskin
That's right. And then the next one is like, well, we don't have enough chips to like keep going and then we don't have enough energy. And the point being is that there are trillions of dollars going into finding all of the solutions to all of these bottlenecks. All the smartest minds are going because this is the biggest incentive because it gives you political, economic, military, scientific, technological, cyber dominance forever. And so if you think that any one of these bottlenecks is going to stop that mass sum total of like that incentive, it's a little delusional.
- [46:52]
Tristan Harris
Yeah.
- [46:53]
Aza Raskin
And that's why we have to have this clarity that where we're going isn't safe for any of us because that
- [47:00]
Tristan Harris
is the coordination point.
- [47:01]
Aza Raskin
That is where we'll start to coordinate differently.
- [47:03]
Tristan Harris
Now you were bringing up something, Gavin, that there is a belief that some of this is hype, that the companies are Hyping the technology.
- [47:12]
Gavin Newsom
I just read a blog and Driesen, there's gonna be no job losses. It wasn't Mark himself, but it was a member of the team saying, you know, we're back to a utopian future.
- [47:22]
Aza Raskin
Yeah.
- [47:22]
Gavin Newsom
And we're gonna pay. Abundance abounds. Cost of goods collapses.
- [47:26]
Tristan Harris
Yeah.
- [47:27]
Gavin Newsom
We find our lives, purpose and meaning in many different ways. Not the quote, unquote dignity of job. We find other. And jobs will be aplenty because we can't even conceive of the jobs.
- [47:36]
Tristan Harris
200 years ago, we were all farmers here in Sacramento. We went out there, everyone was, and
- [47:40]
Gavin Newsom
we've overhyped the sectorial versus general nature of the displacement. It invariably will open up.
- [47:46]
Tristan Harris
You always find something new to do. We always come together and solve it.
- [47:49]
Gavin Newsom
Exactly. More bank tellers now than there were.
- [47:51]
Tristan Harris
That's exactly right. Radiologist Effrey Hinton made the prediction that we're going to have any radiologists.
- [47:55]
Gavin Newsom
Why are you so negative about all this?
- [47:58]
Tristan Harris
Well, I want to separate two things. We open up two cans of worms. So let's take the cans of worms separately. One of them is around whether the companies are hyping the power of the technology through talking about the dangers. And then the other is whether the hype is going to cause the level of job loss.
- [48:13]
Gavin Newsom
I've heard people.
- [48:13]
Aza Raskin
Scarcity.
- [48:14]
Gavin Newsom
Say that about the Mythos. It was just wildly overstated.
- [48:16]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [48:17]
Gavin Newsom
So it was just a way of hyping up the stock and attention.
- [48:19]
Tristan Harris
That's right. So I really, really, really want to meet that criticism. So people will say Anthropic has a history of hyping the technology, saying it's dangerous so that they can get regulatory capture, get the company, get the government to regulate it, say there's only one king here. Make them the king, Nationalize the project, then shut down the other projects. And. And it's this all secret ploy so that they win the race. And first of all, it assumes that them talking about the dangers is only bad faith. Like that the technology is not dangerous. And they're just saying that it's dangerous and it can do all these destructive things so that they can get that outcome. So first of all, let's just take Claude Mythos specifically. So again, can hack in every major operating systems. If you read online, there's a lot of people who say this is just hype. This isn't actually that much better. You can take the open source models, you can do the stuff. Stuff. So I have a friend who is the Head of security at one of the top five. Not the Fortune 500, the top five. And he has had early access to mythos, and when he. He. He himself has said, this is. This is crazy. This is like. I mean, the words were, I think I saw Jesus. Like, it was like, it was that crazy. When he looked at everybody critiquing that mythos was just hype. He asked, has any of them, do they actually have access to the model? And none of the people that had criticized it had personally had access to it. So I challenge those who are criticizing that it's hype to say, have you actually used it? And if you talk to the people who have, do you still have the same opinion? Okay, so that's one thing. It is true, by the way, that the companies, I think, have wanted people to understand the dangers so that they can actually accelerate the move towards some guardrails. But there's a question of that. Is that happening in good faith or bad faith? I think there's more of that happening in good faith. There's some bad faith in there too, maybe, but I think it's mainly good faith. But then let's take the second can of worms you opened, which is on. Is AI going to create this world of abundance? We're all going to be poets and painters on a Grecian sunset. And now robots can do all the jobs.
- [50:21]
Aza Raskin
I love it.
- [50:22]
Gavin Newsom
Now you're talking.
- [50:24]
Tristan Harris
Well, we'd all like that. One question I would have is, when is a handful of. Of people ever concentrated all the wealth and then consciously redistributed it to everyone else?
- [50:33]
Gavin Newsom
8 or 9 trillionaires are not going to take care of 8 or 9 billion of us.
- [50:37]
Tristan Harris
Yeah, exactly.
- [50:37]
Gavin Newsom
You call. Call that bluff.
- [50:39]
Tristan Harris
Yeah, exactly. Well, and then you combine that with the intelligence curse that we laid out, that the incentive is like, why do we want to invest in the people? It became becomes basically an act of charity. Because otherwise, I mean, that or dealing with the political revolution. But again, I don't think that we're currently on track to be redistributing that wealth. And it's also not just the wealth and the money. It's like we have. People have to have work and dignity and status and meaning.
- [51:03]
Gavin Newsom
Voltaire, Life, you know, job saws life's three great evils. Boredom, vice, and need. Not just need, but boredom and vice.
- [51:09]
Aza Raskin
That's right.
- [51:10]
Tristan Harris
So let's get to the community and belonging.
- [51:12]
Gavin Newsom
Absolutely. All of that. Which, again, no one's talked about more than you in terms of that social dilemma. So let's before we go there, and this notion of the transition and job displacement and the human condition that I think connects as well the President Xi, President Trump's visit as well, in terms of their own domestic issues in China.
- [51:33]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [51:34]
Gavin Newsom
Where they have the same incentive structure not to go through that transition with the kind of displacement that could create social unrest in the short term. But get back to this notion of constraints and the safety side of things. I mean, we're here in California, the dominant, the technology sort of birthplace of so much of the technology, obviously the consciousness 32 of the top 50 market cap companies, companies arguably old stat, and of course, most of the AI labs here. But we're also, we've been leaders, modest though some would suggest, but we've been leaders in particularly large language model, frontier models of focusing on a regulatory structure in the complete absence of any federal regulation. It's the let it rip.
- [52:18]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [52:19]
Gavin Newsom
It's a let administration until recently.
- [52:22]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [52:23]
Gavin Newsom
There were some tonal shifts in the Trump administration just the last two, three weeks. Just the last few weeks. They were undermining. They were very intentionally undermining the legislation that we brought, SB53. And you had, you know, other Republicans that were trying to undermine California's leadership. Senator Cruz will call them out saying, we don't want to see the California vacation of regulation all across the United States of America. Interestingly, that's beginning to shift. Why do you think that's the case? Is it because our AI czar is no longer formally in that role? Is it because now they're waking up to this new reality? Was it what happened in the Pentagon with Dario and Anthropic? Was it the combination of all of this? It's because they're listening to you. They watch the doc is because they realize all the money in the world is not going to build a big enough bunker that I can enjoy in the absence of societal calm. What is it?
- [53:22]
Aza Raskin
I mean, I think of it to say it very shortly is that there are two different realities. There's sort of like the political reality and then there's like physical reality. And physical reality is crashing into political reality. That is with Mythos, suddenly banks can get hacked, any computer system can get hacked. Hacked, your stuff can get hacked. And when that physical reality starts getting scary enough, you have to start waking up. You're no longer in sort of like political game land.
- [53:51]
Tristan Harris
Yeah, I do think that it was. It's interesting to note that when the emergency meeting was convened after Claude Mythos came out, it wasn't at the Pentagon or National Security. I mean that happened too, I'm sure. But the real meeting that happened was between Scott Besant and the treasury, the Treasury Secretary convening all the banks because I think the thing that really got them was that if this takes down the financial system, what good is quote, 10% GDP growth if the entire financial system gets undermined? So I think this, this again illustrates the point we have been making since the beginning that the upsides don't prevent the downsides and the downsides can undermine the world that can sustain and the benefits and the of the upsides. And so I, I do think there's been a forced shift and, and it's very late in the game, but we should celebrate that it is happening now. We just need this kind of full whole of society response to mobilize. I mean there's Nicholas Carlini who gave the talk on Mythos at a conference, Black Hat LLM, I think it was called.
- [54:49]
Aza Raskin
It's the Unprompted conference.
- [54:50]
Tristan Harris
The Unprompted Conference. And basically saying he's kind of calling, if you are a cyber person, we need you right now. We need you defending all the systems. Everybody should get access to Mythos and do it as fast as possible. Because as you said, Gavin, the clip between the new capabilities being out there and then China coming out with a model that makes it possible. Maybe this time we have six months, next time maybe we have three months, then we have two months. So we need to really work hard. I'm not trying to scare people. It just means that we actually have to work hard to create safety here. Now China doesn't want the financial system to collapse either. No, they don't. And so again, we have to recognize that it's possible for coordination to happen. Not because of Kumbaya, we're all going to get along, but because out of self interest. Like the US doesn't want China to screw it up and then break the financial system. China doesn't want the US to screw up and then break the financial system. Or the US doesn't want China to release a rogue AI that starts mining for cryptocurrency and hacking into things and self replicating like an invasive species. And China doesn't want the US to do that either. So so long as we have clarity about what we want, we can choose a different path. Path, right.
- [55:57]
Gavin Newsom
And what a Bretton woods type path we.
- [56:00]
Aza Raskin
Yeah, well, and this is actually one of the other exciting things is that we haven't Even really tried to coordinate yet. Like, what percentage of the billionaire's wealth? How much of their time have they spent actually trying to coordinate? They all just say, well, if you're going to do it, then we're going to do it.
- [56:16]
Tristan Harris
You say, it's impossible. Have you spent a month of your life and all of your connections dedicatedly trying?
- [56:20]
Aza Raskin
Yeah, exactly. And the same thing.
- [56:23]
Tristan Harris
Exactly.
- [56:23]
Aza Raskin
And the last time that humanity invented a technology that could extinct ourselves, like the nuclear bomb, we had Bretton Woods. We took groups from a hundred countries, locked them in a hotel room in New Hampshire for like six weeks or something like that, and said, we're going to figure something out, and you're not
- [56:40]
Tristan Harris
leaving the hotel until we figure it out. So it's like, it's not a conference where you go, you drink your coffee and you listen to some talks. It's what we need is the. We lock ourselves in a room and we figure this out. Out. And I know that this summit is just a couple days and we all know about the difficulties of the level of expertise that might be involved right now. But this is the moment to open the doorway of that possibility.
- [57:02]
Aza Raskin
And we have examples through history where when something becomes existential to a citizen group and their nation, they will coordinate. So in the middle of the Cold war, still the US and Russia, we coordinated on eradicating smallpox, and the US did logistics and funding, and the Soviet Union made 25 million doses of the vaccine annually. And then, you know, India and Pakistan, they were literally trading bullets in the 1960s. And yet they still worked on the Indus Water Treaty. And that lasted nearly 60 years because access to water was existential to them
- [57:37]
Tristan Harris
and their cities, shared water supply. You have to collaborate on that.
- [57:40]
Aza Raskin
Yeah.
- [57:40]
Tristan Harris
And so I just want to acknowledge the people here. It was, you know, people, some people know the history that Obama and Xi, President Obama and Xi signed an agreement to not cyber hack each other. And I think the next day was the biggest cyber hack in the US Government by China. So I want people to hear this, not from some kind of naivete about the level of competition, rivalry and antagonism that is currently present, but when the stakes get existential, when I push the button and it shifts from the label of the button being 10% GDP growth and military dominance and cyber dominance to the next time I push the button, it's collective suicide. I don't want to push that button. And China doesn't want to push that button either. So the, the button label has to shift from what we thought it was going to give us to a new outcome. And the way Asa says that I love is that the fear of all of us losing has to become greater than the fear of me losing to you.
- [58:29]
Robert Smigel
Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy not quite on Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier this week. My guests, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter side help an acapella band with their between songs banter.
- [58:48]
Tristan Harris
Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes.
- [58:51]
Robert Smigel
Those people are starving for banter. Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [59:01]
Podcast Host (various)
Why is everyone obsessed with romance right now? Like everyone your co worker who quote unquote doesn't read is reading romance your mom? Book talk the entire Internet. I'm Sanjanah bhasker. I'm Tyler McCall and this is Radio 831, a romance podcast. The books, the tropes, the adaptations, the drama, the discourse and what all of it says about how we actually love, yearn and obsess. We're going to Wuthering Heights, which for the record is not a romance novel. And yet it has haunted the romance genre for 200 years. We're getting into dark romance age gaps, certain Russian hockey players and sentient objects in love, which is a thing. That's the kind of conversation we're having every episode. Listen to the Radio 831 podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [60:00]
Dr. Dom or Terry Lomax
Agency the ability to know that we're the experts in our own body. On the podcast Cultivating her space space Dr. Dom and Terry Lomax create a space where Black women can show up fully and be heard. I wholeheartedly think, you know, you hit 30, you shouldn't have to share a room with anybody.
- [60:19]
Psychology Podcast Host
From navigating friendships and healing to setting boundaries and prioritizing your mental health, these are real, honest conversations we don't always get to have out loud.
- [60:29]
Dr. Dom or Terry Lomax
Totally unreasonable with different parts of life, right? Like, oh, we'll have all three meals and make sure you're mindful during all of them. Absolutely not. During one meal. I'm standing realistic. I'm standing and handing my children food.
- [60:41]
Psychology Podcast Host
Because healing, empowerment and resilience aren't just ideas, they're practices. And this Mental Health Awareness Month, there's no better time to pour back into yourself.
- [60:53]
Dr. Dom or Terry Lomax
Listen to Cultivating her space on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
- [61:01]
Tom Boger
If you're watching a latest season of the Real Housewives of Atlanta, you already know there's a lot to break down.
- [61:07]
Gavin Newsom
Portia accusing Kelly of sleeping with a married.
- [61:10]
Robert Smigel
They holding K. Michelle back from fighting.
- [61:13]
Aza Raskin
Drew Pinky has financial issues.
- [61:15]
Tristan Harris
I like the bougie style of Housewives show. I think it looks like it's going to be interesting.
- [61:20]
Tom Boger
On the podcast, Reality with the King, I, Carlos King, recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Real Housewives franchise, the drama, the alliances, and the tea everybody's talking about. As an executive producer in reality television, I'm not just watching it. I understand the game. As somebody who creates shows, I'll even say this at the end of the day when people are at home, they want entertainment to hear this and more. Listen to Reality with the king on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
- [61:56]
Gavin Newsom
So you have a very regulated construct in China compared certainly United States.
- [62:03]
Tristan Harris
Right.
- [62:04]
Gavin Newsom
You're talking about a traditional model right now. We're the, we're the new frontier out here.
- [62:11]
Tristan Harris
The Wild West.
- [62:12]
Gavin Newsom
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, you know, go west. Go, young man, go west. I mean, it's a. People are pushing out the boundaries of discovery, holding them back on their own.
- [62:20]
Tristan Harris
Yeah.
- [62:20]
Gavin Newsom
Regardless of what happens in, you know, Beijing, this is really in the hands of a handful of people ultimately making the right decision. We, you know, and I, I believe Dario is the best of a lot. I think universally that's accepted. But that may be. And even Dario may acknowledge because of the flatness of the surrounding terrain may not be because he's particularly eminent on his own. And he talks about his own, you know, you know, his. He's an entrepreneur and he's constantly reflecting on his own incentive structure.
- [62:52]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [62:53]
Gavin Newsom
And how he has to compete in this environment at the same time. And he's at least, I think has a more situational awareness. Awareness than others. But, you know, whatever can be will be.
- [63:02]
Tristan Harris
Yeah.
- [63:02]
Gavin Newsom
And, you know, with respect to Elon, I don't trust Xai. You know, I mean, the idea that he's the good guy compared to our friends down at Google.
- [63:12]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [63:12]
Gavin Newsom
Or you guys left. I mean, you know, so talk to me about more of the sinister realities of, you know, I don't mean to sinister in the. But. But the impulses. Well, again, to be the guy, the God. The God. I mean, to have their DNA. Yeah.
- [63:27]
Tristan Harris
So. So, yeah, I'M grateful you're bringing this up. There's a few things we should enumerate here. So one is we need coordination and we do find ourselves in the unfortunate spot that the people who do need to be in coordination maximally distrust each other. Even just the US CEOs. I mean, Elon Musk and Sam hate each other.
- [63:45]
Gavin Newsom
Correct. It's not like Dario and Sam are saying
- [63:51]
Tristan Harris
the India summit, they couldn't even hold their hands together. Hold hands, yeah.
- [63:54]
Gavin Newsom
At least they showed up.
- [63:55]
Tristan Harris
So we have a problem of trust between the leaders themselves. We need, I think, structures that impose the trust on top because they're not going to do it autonomously themselves.
- [64:06]
Gavin Newsom
So that's the regulation that, that's. Yeah, that's the transparency, the power of
- [64:10]
Tristan Harris
law to say that we, these people. This is going to happen in China. Here's the rules are going to be similar in China as they are here. We're both, for example, not going to open source a model that can hack into any computer system in the world without defense. We're at least not going to open source that China doesn't want a rogue state act, rogue non state actor or terrorist group having that ability to hack their infrastructure because it would also blow back onto them. Same thing with a open source model that knows how to do very dangerous things with biology. There's some threshold that we can get these countries to agree. Just like the Soviet Union and the United States had a red phone saying we're going to, this is to de escalate. I think we need something like an AI red lines phone, meaning that both countries have common knowledge of the frontier of these risks. Right. Because right now we don't even have that common knowledge.
- [64:54]
Gavin Newsom
And there's rumors that that may be one of the things that are preparing to announce.
- [64:58]
Aza Raskin
That's right.
- [64:59]
Gavin Newsom
You know, as a.
- [65:00]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [65:01]
Gavin Newsom
At least some beginning of this.
- [65:03]
Tristan Harris
But I wanted the other aspect of the human experience of this. We did a screening of the AI Doc in New York and there is someone in the audience actually who raised her hand quietly and she said, I'm a coach for one of the CEOs of these companies. And you know what happens when I talk to them is they say, but what can I do? I'm just one person, I'm powerless. And I want people to hear that because notice that even, you know, we all feel, relative to the size of this problem, you will never locate agency that is, that is enough agency to do something about this problem in one human body, even if that body is Elon by himself, or Sundar by himself, or Sam by themselves. And so getting back to, I think what this moment is inviting us into, we often say that AI is our ultimate test, but greatest invitation that we have to go from agency to regency. We have to basically act in some kind of collective way. And the forces politically of the world have been driving us away from that. But this is kind of the test. Like we either do that and we step up. And again, we need everything from common political pressure and this being the number one issue in the midterms and the public's rallying and all the governors speaking up about this, and all the world leaders speaking up this just yet. Two days ago I got an email from the president of Iceland, who basically wants to activate on this issue. And Iceland hosted in Reykjavik the first arms control talks. There's a lot that people could do if they said, not just what can I do, but how could I get my reaching up and out to the network of people to take action together. There is a second part to your point, which is the darker part, which is you talking about the game theory of, of the psychology of the leaders, that they basically believe that in the worst case scenario, the thing that kept us safe in nukes is that it's two people have to push the button. And I know you won't push the button because I know that there's something sacred that you don't want this whole thing to end. And I know that, and I know that you know that, I know that. And so even though we get very, very, very close and we've gotten close so many times, we haven't pushed that button. But in this case with AI, there's a belief, first of all, it's a red zone of where the risk occurs. It's not like there's one button that gets pushed. It's like we just push this stuff out there and there's a belief that it's inevitable. If I didn't do it, someone else would, which means I don't experience ethical complicity in being part of the end of civilization. And if it's inevitable, there's nothing I could have done to stop it, so I don't even have to feel bad, right? And then so the, the game theory goes from all of us knowing that we want to avoid the bad outcome to everybody believing that there isn't a different outcome, which means that the best outcome is maybe the worst thing is all of us go by the wayside. But we birthed a digital God and it speaks Chinese. Instead of English. Or maybe it has Elon's DNA instead of Sam's.
- [67:47]
Gavin Newsom
As Gentle said, it's at least on an American stack.
- [67:50]
Tristan Harris
At least we're selling the world American uranium. But the reason of laying all that out is that if the whole world could see, I think what we just laid out out, if literally everyone could see that. Yeah, the whole world says we don't want 8 soon to be trillionaires deciding the future for 8 billion people who didn't consent to this.
- [68:10]
Gavin Newsom
And that's the purpose of. Again, that sort of brings us back to the beginning why you're doing this damn film.
- [68:14]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [68:15]
Robert Smigel
After.
- [68:15]
Gavin Newsom
To create a sort of global consciousness.
- [68:18]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [68:18]
Gavin Newsom
So in the absence of that, we're back here in California.
- [68:21]
Tristan Harris
Yes.
- [68:21]
Gavin Newsom
You're here with the governor. Yes, current governor. The governor's mission mansion. Interestingly, we're doing some decent things. What more should I be doing? In the absence of the kind of federal leadership that we need, I feel like we've lost this last 18 months. You know, just. We were moved. Look, we did an a. It was interesting working. I worked very closely with the Biden administration. Did they move quickly enough? Perhaps not, but at least we had a framework of an, of an executive order. We moved that forward. We, we president signed it here at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco in California. It was built off an executive order that I did six months later. We were working hand in glove with the Biden administration on that. It was ripped up right when the Trump administration came in to office. You have an AI czar out of the Bay Area, certainly understands the ecosystem. But it seemed to me, and this is me, and you guys don't have to respond, but it was the great grift. Everybody was sort of on the train and seeing this as an opportunity and looking at the abundance of this only, but not looking at safety, not looking at the risk as you've described. California decided to assert itself in that respect, as we've done on privacy, as we've done on a lot of child safety issues and a lot more work to do there. And this year will be a landmark year in terms of getting to the next level in that respect. But what more can the state be doing? The fear of that always is patchwork, not a framework for the nation and how you support innovation. Our own GDP growth, which has been off the charts in California vis a vis our competitors, at the same time address these larger global issues. Do you have any specific ideas for a governor of California? That is the Current governor that has a budget that he's releasing in weeks and a legislative session coming up in the next few months.
- [70:10]
Aza Raskin
Well, we'll get to answering that question specifically. But one of the places of also good news, I just want to say, because there's a lot of value in just social signaling where everyone knows that there's a problem. We get to that like shared common knowledge, common feeling. And if you went back two years and you said by today 25% of the world's population would live in a country where they've either have announced or enacted a ban for social media, ban
- [70:34]
Tristan Harris
for kids under 16.
- [70:35]
Aza Raskin
Under 16. You'd be like, that's ridiculous. You couldn't possibly get that.
- [70:38]
Tristan Harris
I want people to really feel that. Like, there you are in 2022. If you said even just literally three years ago that a quarter of the world's population. We're about talking, talking Australia, India, Denmark, Denmark. Two weeks ago, Greece added the list. France. I was with John Haidt when he was in Davos and he, he met with President Macron and got France on board. Like people would have thought that was impossible. I mean, trains left the station.
- [71:01]
Gavin Newsom
We just had all the Democratic governors out here and everyone was trying to compare and contrast which one of the states which is following sort of your leadership, which we're going to do. But I mean, it's. You're right, this is a tipping point. It's happening.
- [71:12]
Tristan Harris
And once you get 25, you're to going to get the rest of the world.
- [71:14]
Gavin Newsom
And the point, a lot of these companies, I also, I anticipate these companies. And by the way, if I was advising these companies, get ahead of this train and show your largess and your maturity and understanding. So I imagine that may happen as well.
- [71:30]
Tristan Harris
Y.
- [71:30]
Gavin Newsom
But no, that's a point. You're right.
- [71:32]
Aza Raskin
And so right now, something really interesting happened in Hangzhou in China. Maybe you're aware of it, but it's this first case where there was someone who lost his job due to AI automation.
- [71:43]
Gavin Newsom
Lawsuit. Yeah.
- [71:44]
Aza Raskin
And this court ruled and said, actually that's not a legitimate reason for you to lose your job.
- [71:49]
Gavin Newsom
Yeah.
- [71:49]
Aza Raskin
Companies are not allowed to fire you from like increased automation.
- [71:54]
Gavin Newsom
Right.
- [71:54]
Aza Raskin
Will that solve the whole problem? Probably not. But imagine that California took a leadership position there and said, actually there are going to be some very serious protections that as AI increases GDP increases profits. Actually people are going to be sort of like an employment insurance. They're going to be able to keep their jobs. Like that would set a social signal for the rest of the U.S. i'm
- [72:18]
Gavin Newsom
going to let you off the hook on the larger safety risk regulation. And let's go back to ideas along these lines, because right in front of us, this notion of displacement transition, and it goes back to the earlier point I was making, some will argue that we always Luddites, we'll never see the abundance on the other side and we can't even conceive of the jobs. So with humility, let's not just assume there'll be no human jobs because the human mind has the capacity that's limitless with these technologies that will be more supportive and allow us to be augmented and discover talents and capacity we never thought possible. Possible. So let's assume that happens. But the concern is there, it seems to be most universal, that it may happen very fast.
- [73:07]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [73:10]
Gavin Newsom
So how do you then flatten the curve?
- [73:12]
Tristan Harris
How do you flatten the curve?
- [73:13]
Gavin Newsom
The curve. How do we address the transition? You get to employment insurance, something we've been talking a lot about. You get to this notion that you can't fire someone to be automated. That's even deeper and that's interesting. This Chinese example. Tell me more about the issue of workforce and what I should be worried about. When I see Dario saying, 50 entry level drama jobs, it's no longer a career ladder, it's a jungle gym. And all these young folks got a Stanford, like, now I'm unemployed or unemployable, no coder software. I mean, give me women disproportionately being impacted in the workforce. When you look at those clerical jobs, admin jobs, et cetera. I mean, what, what, what's. What do you see a year, two years from now as we deal with the Holy Grail, the God complex of AGI in the displacement space?
- [73:58]
Tristan Harris
Reid Hoffman has this idea. I want to make sure I get it right, that I like. Which is one of the things that makes AI distinct. And Sam Altman has talked about this himself, that you could get the age of these unicorn companies. A unicorn company meaning a billion dollar valuation.
- [74:11]
Gavin Newsom
I met a guy the other day, literally billion dollar valuation. It's him.
- [74:16]
Tristan Harris
One person.
- [74:16]
Gavin Newsom
It's him.
- [74:17]
Tristan Harris
Exactly.
- [74:17]
Gavin Newsom
So I think he was parading himself around as the. It's me.
- [74:20]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [74:21]
Gavin Newsom
One of the first.
- [74:22]
Tristan Harris
And so that's what, that's what has been posited ever since the beginning of AI. They're saying, we're going to start having a world where you're going to have a single person with a unicorn. Billion dollar company.
- [74:29]
Gavin Newsom
Yeah.
- [74:30]
Tristan Harris
Now, does this does society work if there's a handful of single people with billion dollar companies and no one else has a job? It doesn't work. Do you think those people just want to live out their lives in bunkers with private militaries and gas masks because they've created that world? I don't think they want that world. So Reid Hoffman, who's the founder of LinkedIn, was early at PayPal and you know, was at some point a friend of Peter Thiel's, you know, has this proposal that we can tax companies based on the proportion of the ratio of how many employees they have relative to their revenue. So you want to basically disincentivize the, the single solo unicorn company. I don't know if you want to add to it.
- [75:06]
Aza Raskin
Yeah, well, and also just, just to note that it doesn't stop with just single person unicorns. Yeah. Automating that final one person, not so hard. So you're going to end up with,
- [75:15]
Tristan Harris
with 0%, you could have this CEO be an AI. And that's actually happening. They're already getting AIs that are on boards and things like this. And so even if you might find it questionable that that person might have again, they can earn their wealth, but you have to have some taxation to make sure this is being distributed. And we also need, we need to find ways of having universal basic ownership. Not just universal basic cash payments and ubi, but universal basic ownership. I think people need to have a stake in the success that's happening. Like what Norway did with the sovereign wealth fund. But oil didn't. Oil produced this kind of gravy on top for the civilization. People still had jobs. So what's different about this is we do need to find ways of doing universal basic work. We also need to find ways of having certain professions in which that embodied wisdom, like a surgeon or a senior lawyer or a senior judge. We need ways of training and apprenticing, almost like minimum quotas of those kinds of occupations and roles in society to make sure that we have that ongoing knowledge. Because again, again, the short term benefit of like no one needs lawyers and then the senior lawyers all die out, that world doesn't work.
- [76:16]
Aza Raskin
So just the last thing to sort of add here is that, you know, instead of getting into arguments about how quickly exactly are people going to lose their jobs, will people really do lose their jobs? Let's plan and say, okay, we think people are going to be out of livelihoods. This idea originally came to us from Reed Hasing, the pharmacy of Netflix, where he said, let's set up trigger point law. If unemployment hits 10%, what are we going to do? If it hits 20%, what are we going to do? You could preset up those sort of conditions so we don't have to argue about whether it's going to happen, just what we should do when it does.
- [76:47]
Tristan Harris
And I know that you've been running with engaged California these citizen deliberations, these ways of aggregating citizen assemblies, having citizens actually deal with and think about these issues and come to some, you know, have their own input in this process but by reckoning with these facts. And I think that these are all things that we need to, you know, the countries that discover a natural resource that didn't have this engaged, well educated citizen kind of engaged citizen infrastructure like Venezuela or Libya or something like that, they don't do so well. But countries like Norway where you did have the engaged citizens with oversight of those funds, you can you end up with a healthier society.
- [77:20]
Aza Raskin
So it's sort of like a California engagement fund because you want like people involved in the redistribution.
- [77:26]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [77:26]
Gavin Newsom
So it's interesting that you mentioned Mincome, which the old Canadian construction construct UBI Universal basic income. You had Elon Musk the other day say he wants universal basic high income.
- [77:38]
Tristan Harris
We said there is going to be universal basic high income.
- [77:40]
Gavin Newsom
And then was asked with Peter.
- [77:42]
Tristan Harris
Right, that's exactly.
- [77:43]
Gavin Newsom
I saw him and he was asked simple question, how are you going to do it?
- [77:46]
Tristan Harris
And he said oh, I just, I was just joking. I made it up.
- [77:48]
Gavin Newsom
That was comforting.
- [77:49]
Tristan Harris
Yeah, I think people should really take note of that fact.
- [77:51]
Aza Raskin
Yes, it was just a mispronouncing of high. Not as in like a high income. It's just like he's high. It's not available to think about it.
- [77:58]
Gavin Newsom
I mean and it's a little alarming. So look, what do you quickly look, we're thinking about all these things down to the parochial and the WARN act which is how we actually warn the public the social impacts of large scale displacement and job loss. Having more capacity to see earlier. That's after the fact. The warnet comes out. Those jobs are already going to be lost. What are the signs to show us what the impacts are happening in the job market in real time? Issues of unemployment insurance become becoming employment insurance so that you can keep people employed for a period of time.
- [78:31]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [78:31]
Gavin Newsom
The Dutch do it about 90% of the wage. The ultimate training is a job. The dignity of a job back to those Voltaire constructs and then the opportunity Then to potentially transition by using the federal government to help either backstop portable benefits then become fundamental. This notion of UBC universal basic capital, this notion of sovereign wealth fund or equity, public public equity with dividends and somehow we get shares, there's equity, shares, contributions from these large companies, that is not just taxes, it's actual equity in the company. So there's a notion of an ownership.
- [79:05]
Tristan Harris
Yes.
- [79:06]
Gavin Newsom
And a larger ownership society that we don't tax jobs with payroll taxes and then subsidize automation through tax credits.
- [79:14]
Aza Raskin
That's right.
- [79:14]
Gavin Newsom
We do the inverse in that context. So all of that, how, you know, so that's the stuff I'm playing around with. A lot of us are thinking of about right now. But how, from your vantage point, how quickly is this happening? There's a lot of headlines, but there's a lot of debate around these headlines of all these cuts of jobs. But then people say, well, there was a lot of COVID over hiring. There's some business model issues there that they're sort of hiding and suggesting. It's AI. We haven't necessarily seen massive job destruction yet or have we with AI.
- [79:48]
Tristan Harris
I think the point people should get here is that obviously it's complicated and there's jobs are shuffling throughout the economy a little bit right now, but the long term goal of these companies is
- [79:58]
Gavin Newsom
not back to the.
- [79:59]
Tristan Harris
It's back to the inside.
- [80:00]
Gavin Newsom
Original OpenAI mission statement.
- [80:02]
Tristan Harris
Mission statement.
- [80:03]
Aza Raskin
Exactly.
- [80:03]
Tristan Harris
OpenAI's mission statement was not to give people helpful tools so that you can do your job slightly better. Their mission statement is we do your job. And actually, you know, Gavin, in, in la, there's an article in the LA Times about this that is one of these new popular gig worker jobs in LA is Everybody straps a GoPro camera to their head and they look down and then they do laundry, they cook, they eat, they do, they do all these things. So basically the number one job soon in the world will be training the replacement for that job. Think of it like being a coffin builder. Like you're designing the coffin and then you put yourself in it. And you know, if you think I'm lying, by the way, just think about Meta Meta told Instagram Creators, you know, we're here, we love creators, we love creativity. We want you to be successful. We want to, you know, our whole mission statement is making creators super successful. That's before they were an AI company. What'd they do? The second that they were an AI company, they, they trained on all the videos of their creators and then created generative videos that now basically suck up like a vampire, your essence, your life force, your creativity, and then hit button. And now they have a digital copy of you that you didn't consent to that can generate all these things. If you don't believe me, just a few weeks ago there was an article. Meta is now forcing their employees to basically track all of their movements, all their clicks, all the things they're doing on a computer to train AI agents to do all their jobs. This is not a conspiracy theory. All you have to do to know where we're going is understand the incentives and look at the early warning signs. They're telling you who they really are. OpenAI says we're all here to make the world a better place. And then they release this AI slop out app, Sora, which was basically an infinite. They killed it now, but it was an infinitely scrolling deepfake generated content of like, you know, funny videos of Stephen Hawking, you know, you know, going through a raceway or something like that. It's just deepfake AI slop. Why are they doing that? Because they want to increase their market dominance, because they want to get users, because they want to get training data. And it gets more people using OpenAI so their numbers going up. And if your incentives tell you everything,
- [81:58]
Aza Raskin
and if you're a company and you're choosing, do I hire a real human paralegal or GPT7 that works for less than minimum wage 24. 7 doesn't whistleblow, doesn't complain, doesn't have cultural issues, doesn't have paid time off, which one are you going to do? Well, your business incentive is just very, very clear and everyone's going to be trapped in the same.
- [82:18]
Gavin Newsom
And if your competitor, you may say, no, I'm going to keep the human, and then your competitor goes the opposite direction. You're out of business. We have no choice back to, to the incentives.
- [82:26]
Tristan Harris
But with those set of interventions that you just mentioned, and you just mentioned a whole slew of things we could be doing, you just mentioned so many things that we could be doing. And I think what it represents is, I think people think, but if we don't race to automate every job as fast as possible, we're going to lose to China. But what this is showing and revealing is we're not in a race just the technology. We're actually in a race for a different currency. The currency is not who has the power first, but who is better at governing, steering and integrating that power, power in a healthy and sustainable and strengthening way into your society. And we saw this with social media because the US beat China to the psychological bazooka behavior modification machine of social media. And then we had no idea how to govern it. So we flipped around, we blew off our own brain with the brain rot economy. And so, and by the way, China regulates social media. They do a whole bunch of stuff. When you open up a douyen TikTok in, in, in China, it's their version of TikTok, and you scroll, you get, get videos about who won the Nobel Prize, financial advice, here's the new quantum physics theory, here's patriotism videos, and obviously there's problems with that. We don't want to do it that way. But the point is you don't have to do it in the Wild west, blow off your own brain. And now if we release it in a way that automates all the labor with no transition plan, it's like, great, we pumped up our steroids, but we just burst our lungs. The societal body, we do that. So what you just outlined was a set of interventions that we can be exploring to help help smooth this transition. And we're in a competition with China for who's better at making this transition to an AI integrated world.
- [83:56]
Gavin Newsom
How, where are you on the transition curve? I mean, I mean, we talk about flattening it, but how quick? I mean, honestly, if we're sitting here a year from now having this conversation, are we looking at that, you know, 10% unemployment, not that 20 necessarily, which is that threshold for fascism and a whole other societal collapse, but it's going
- [84:15]
Aza Raskin
to be, it's going to be confusing and spiky and hard to predict. Exactly. Because just think about your own experience with AI so far, two years ago can barely write an essay, and now it can do some parts of your work pretty well. And other parts like that is a really dumb error. And so we're going to see not that much job, not that much job loss, like entry level stuff getting sort of squished around and then it's going to hit really, really quickly when it crosses the next threshold. Just like, like Mythos did.
- [84:41]
Tristan Harris
There's another confusing aspect about AI that people in our space call AI jaggedness, which is that there's certain capabilities, like in cyber hacking, that it is already superhuman. Yeah, already superhuman. While it'll still make a very basic dumb mistake on something else. And I think part of what's confusing for people that naturally has them say is this just hype. And these companies are trying to hype this stuff is if you just look at the dumb examples where it's messing up. You're like, this thing isn't that powerful. We have never been confronted with the technology that is simultaneously sci fi level superhuman that makes a person who's very deep insecurity. Call it like seeing Jesus.
- [85:17]
Gavin Newsom
Yeah.
- [85:18]
Tristan Harris
At the same time that that same technology can like mistake how many Rs are in the word strawberry.
- [85:22]
Aza Raskin
Yeah.
- [85:23]
Tristan Harris
Like we have just not seen that. And so it's just I want people to notice for their own psychology that this is a new psychological object that are our normal intuitions about how to evaluate something. We have to get more nuanced.
- [85:35]
Robert Smigel
Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy not quite on Humor Me with Robert Smigel and Friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier this week. My guests, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an acapella band with their between songs banter.
- [85:53]
Tristan Harris
Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes.
- [85:56]
Robert Smigel
Those people are starving for banter. Listen to Humor Me with with Robert Smigel and friends on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [86:06]
Podcast Host (various)
Why is everyone obsessed with romance right now? Like everyone your co worker who quote unquote doesn't read is reading romance your mom Book talk the entire Internet. I'm Sanjanah bhasker. I'm Tyler McCall and this is Radio831, a romance page podcast. The books, the tropes, the adaptations, the drama, the discourse and what all of it says about how we actually love, yearn and obsess. We're going to Wuthering Heights, which for the record, is not a romance novel. And yet it has haunted the romance genre for 200 years. We're getting into dark romance, age gaps, certain Russian hockey players and sentient objects in love, which is a thing. That's the kind of conversation we're having every episode. Listen to the Radio 831 podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts
- [87:05]
Dr. Dom or Terry Lomax
agency the ability to know that we're the experts in our own body on the podcast. Cultivating her space, Dr. Dom and Terry Lomax create a space where black women can show up fully and be heard. I wholeheartedly think, you know, you hit 30, you shouldn't have to share a room with anybody.
- [87:24]
Psychology Podcast Host
From navigating friendships and healing to setting boundaries and prioritizing your mental health, these are real, honest conversations. We don't always get to have out
- [87:34]
Dr. Dom or Terry Lomax
loud, totally unreasonable with different parts of life. Right? Like, oh, we'll have all three meals. And make sure you're mindful during all of them. Absolutely not. During one meal. I'm standing realistic. I'm standing and handing my children food.
- [87:46]
Psychology Podcast Host
Because healing, empowerment and resilience aren't just ideas, they're practices. And this Mental health awareness Month, there's no better time to pour back into yourself.
- [87:58]
Dr. Dom or Terry Lomax
Listen to cultivating her space on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
- [88:06]
Tom Boger
If you're watching the latest season of the Real Housewives of Atlanta, you already know there's a lot to break down.
- [88:13]
Gavin Newsom
Portia accusing Kelly of sleeping with a mirror.
- [88:15]
Robert Smigel
Married men, they holding K. Michelle back from fighting.
- [88:18]
Gavin Newsom
Drew Pinky has financial issues.
- [88:20]
Tristan Harris
I like the bougie style of Housewives show. I think it looks like it's gonna be interesting.
- [88:25]
Tom Boger
On the podcast Reality with the King, I, Carlos King, recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Real Housewives franchise, the drama, the alliances, and the tea everybody's talking about. As an executive producer in reality television, I. I'm not just watching it. I understand the game. As somebody who creates shows, I'll even say this at the end of the day, when people are at home, they want entertainment. To hear this and more. Listen to Reality with the king on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
- [89:01]
Gavin Newsom
And part of that nuance is a deeper understanding that we're not just talking about apps here, we're talking about the physical world as well.
- [89:07]
Tristan Harris
I.
- [89:07]
Aza Raskin
That's right.
- [89:08]
Gavin Newsom
Was a big headline that I hope people paid attention to when Elon announced that in his original factory here in Fremont, California, that he's converting the S and the X Tesla cars now to humanoid robotics. And his goal is ultimately a million. You know, that's Elon. Who the hell knows? You know, his goal setting, but the notion that he's converting that factory from cars to humanoid robotics and AI now into the physical world world is that, I mean, we're seeing driverless cars. If you haven't seen them in, you know, your home state, you're about to. Are you going to see flying cars? They're just quadcopters, basically, but they're coming soon and we're going to be doing a lot more of that, by the way.
- [89:50]
Tristan Harris
That's great. Like, we can have a world of quadcopters and, you know, innovation while not racing to replace us economically, replace us socially. So Mark Zuckerberg, you know, designs Your kids, friends, rather than you had them having actual friends. Friends replace us politically, not having political power, and then replace us physically by owning our physical presence in our. In our. In robots. So again, I think people might hear this as an anti technology conversation.
- [90:13]
Aza Raskin
Yeah.
- [90:14]
Tristan Harris
You know, you talked about your legacy and your father and grandfather. And we were talking backstage.
- [90:19]
Gavin Newsom
Yeah, yeah.
- [90:20]
Tristan Harris
You know, Aza's father started the Macintosh Project. You know, we come from a legacy where the word humane is about an inspiring vision about technology that's actually integrated and in service of our humanity.
- [90:31]
Gavin Newsom
That's right.
- [90:31]
Tristan Harris
Of a pro human future. That's what all of this is motivated for. So I get excited about, you know, flying, you know, cars that have cool, you know, AI.
- [90:39]
Aza Raskin
And just to say too, just as my own personal experience is, you know, I spend a big portion of my life, I founded a thing called Earth Species Project. We're now around 40 people.
- [90:48]
Gavin Newsom
You're the biggest consumer.
- [90:50]
Aza Raskin
I wouldn't say the biggest consumer. Yeah, exactly. It's me. I'm sorry, guys. First Infinite scroll, now this. But we were using AI to translate animal language, animal communication. One of our researchers just discovered, just before she joined us, that not only do dolphins have names that they call each other by that their mothers teach them, they will talk about each other in the third person. So they'll talk about another dolphin that isn't here. So it's like one of the biggest hallmarks of language to be able to talk about something that's not here and not now. But they will continue to use their mother's name even after she's died.
- [91:22]
Tristan Harris
Yeah.
- [91:23]
Aza Raskin
Sweet, right?
- [91:24]
Tristan Harris
It's beautiful.
- [91:25]
Aza Raskin
These are the kinds of things that AI can show us and teach us about the world and connect us with the natural world, the world around us, and show us things we couldn't possibly imagine. So I just want everyone to hear, it's not that we're just here saying no AI, it's just saying not AI in this way, that technological progress might be inevitable, but the way that AI rolls out is not.
- [91:46]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [91:47]
Aza Raskin
And every time somebody says it's inevitable, it's like casting a spell.
- [91:50]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [91:51]
Aza Raskin
Where. Because if it's inevitable, then there's nothing we can do, then shouldn't possibly act.
- [91:55]
Tristan Harris
There's a button we're hitting called commit suicide. Commit suicide. Is it inevitable that we all hit that button? No. When it's called 10% GDP growth and like innovation, we push the button if we collectively see that the button we're pushing is more nuanced. Than that. That there's some threshold by which we are essentially committing civilizational suicide. We're not going to have a human future. If you ask anybody what gives me hope, we've been on the road with this film. You walk people through the basic facts we've about talked through and you ask who here is stoked about the future that we're headed to? I was even at the Miami Tech Summit in front of a pro business, pro AI. A lot of people invested in it. Again, we're invested in positive technology too. But I was able to see that entire audience is like, no, I don't want that either.
- [92:36]
Gavin Newsom
Wow. Yeah.
- [92:37]
Tristan Harris
So again, I think it's like as long as you give people the off ramp, there are ways we can have technology that's in service of making life better. We need to be funding and innovating in that way way and we need to be blocking off the parts that are hurting our children that are, you know, diminishing people's cognitive capacities or replacing our. Their kids relationships with AI companions. And we can do that. And you've done some of that with here in California. So, you know, it's not that I am or we are by default optimistic about the default trajectory. Not at all. It's that if we have the clarity, we can put our hand in the steering wheel and we can steer it somewhere else.
- [93:11]
Gavin Newsom
This notion of acceleration and steer.
- [93:14]
Aza Raskin
Yeah, yeah, that's right. Exactly.
- [93:15]
Tristan Harris
What happens when you accelerate and you don't steer, you obviously crash. It's just, it's like not rocket science. They're just. It's 100% the likely outcome.
- [93:25]
Gavin Newsom
What just in. In as we wrap up this notion of governance going back to. That is. It's. It's the foundation here which the regulations and the relationships are formed, the partnerships to begin to address the common humanity and the common threat and the common cause, common opportunity opportunities that present themselves. This notion of capture. I mean you've got these packs, you've got so much concentrated wealth. We're going to likely have the first few trillionaires this year. Yeah, this calendar year.
- [93:55]
Aza Raskin
That's right, yeah.
- [93:56]
Tristan Harris
Yep.
- [93:57]
Gavin Newsom
These IPOs, I mean, it's just, I'm a. That's a big surplus in the state. The abundance, the gdp. I mean, it's frothy, as they say. But a lot of that now is going to. To make sure that we're protecting incumbents against innovation. Some incumbent capitalism, not entrepreneurial capitalism necessarily. Innovation capitalism. There's that friction that's always ongoing and those that are just Going to do everything to hammer, as they did with social media, to make sure there's no regulate. We're still debating section 230, for Christ's
- [94:30]
Aza Raskin
sake, in this country.
- [94:31]
Gavin Newsom
So how do we start to break that reality? I think money in politics.
- [94:37]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [94:38]
Aza Raskin
That's, that's up the ante just, just a little bit even further, which is that. So as we get more trillionaires, like they can hire private security, but that still requires relying on human beings. But you're just pointing out that we are heading into like a world. We have drone armies, we have humanoid robot armies. When trillionaires can just buy like their drone armies to fight like we enter into techno feudal right. And so like that is the world that if we see, if we don't do something, if we don't do something, we're going to end up into.
- [95:07]
Tristan Harris
But to answer your question, the. It's all about the campaign lobbying. It's all about that. And a hundred and million, $190 million has gone into basically AI accelerationist packs and funding is for this midterm. For this midterm election alone. Just the midterms. That's so 190 million. I believe the presidential is 2 billion. So basically 10 of the presidential is going into just the midterms for AI alone. Not even for the, the rest of it.
- [95:32]
Gavin Newsom
And it's not to regulate.
- [95:33]
Tristan Harris
It's not to regulate it.
- [95:34]
Aza Raskin
It's.
- [95:35]
Tristan Harris
It's to say, remove everything and go as fast as possible.
- [95:37]
Gavin Newsom
Right. Let it rip.
- [95:39]
Tristan Harris
If you had everyone in the world, I think hear the conversation we just had and at a basic level of common sense, looking your children in the eye and say, are you stoked about that future? No one wants that. So the, the key piece of agency is going into the midterm elections, not voting for people who have taken money from those AI accelerationist groups. Groups or don't have a position on AI that's trying to steer away from these outcomes. Now we obviously have to articulate that in a clearer way. What does it mean to have kind of a pro human platform in future? And the companies try to make the conversation inaccessible. Like, oh well, you don't understand AI. They're trying to make it seem like you don't know how to regulate it. Let's put us in charge.
- [96:18]
Aza Raskin
Yeah, we call this the under the hood bias, where it's as if people who know how to make the biggest engines know how to lay out cities and traffic lights, Lights. And that's just not true. Like our people who know how to make car engines are not the best people for knowing how to make cars safe and prevent car accidents.
- [96:34]
Tristan Harris
Exactly. So it's pretty simple. It's like, do you want an anti human future in which you will be permanently disempowered, where no one has an incentive, except for charity to pay your bills for you and for your kid? You want the companies that took your job, you want to be dependent on them for the rest of your life to pay your bills for, for you with no economic leverage? No. So this is the final window. You know, you want to vote for people who are going to protect you economically, protect you socially, protect you politically, meaning protect our jobs, protect our vote voting pro human. And obviously that has to get articulated even more clearly. But that is the number one way that people can make a difference in the short term. There's other things too, like boycotting companies that are enabling mass surveillance. You know, when the company's subscriptions go down by a lot, they really need their numbers to be going up. So the companies are more vulnerable than, you know, think. And you're more powerful than you think. Not just if you unsubscribe and boycott them, but get your company, get your church group to do that too. And when those numbers start to change, it actually has a difference.
- [97:31]
Gavin Newsom
Scott Galloway's been talking a lot about that as well. Absolutely. Got to use whatever power at your disposal. Let's just briefly talk then about the power. I mean, you know, free and fair elections. We talk about truth, trust, more broadly, deep fakes, political ads. I mean, I've seen stuff, you know, meetings, conversations I've had that are, I mean, next level. What's out there?
- [97:56]
Tristan Harris
Pics of you?
- [97:57]
Gavin Newsom
Yes. Just the BS that's already out there. The ability to manipulate the crowd in the context of, you know, social media, the algorithms. I mean, now you've got, you know, concentrated in the hands of a few in that respect. I mean, that whole thing, I mean, you guys have talked about free and fair elections. You. We talk about the timelines, not only in job displacement, but timelines to get this right.
- [98:19]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [98:20]
Gavin Newsom
Domestically, globally. I mean, 2026, you're talking midterms. Yeah, I mean, this is, I mean, we only have a few more at bats to get this right.
- [98:30]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [98:31]
Gavin Newsom
Or is that overstated?
- [98:32]
Tristan Harris
No, this is it.
- [98:33]
Gavin Newsom
There's a few more.
- [98:34]
Tristan Harris
This is the moment.
- [98:35]
Aza Raskin
By 2028, like, that'll be the last human election. Like it's going to be AIs running all of the election Election campaigns, the ads doing all the, both information and disinformation because human beings just can't operate at that speed and are not that effective.
- [98:47]
Tristan Harris
Yeah, so this is it, this is the window. But, and I know, I just want to like at the human experience level, we've been talking about some hard stuff the last little while and you know, I just want to say, you know, we struggle with how to communicate this in a way that's responsible because here's the, here's the trade.
- [99:01]
Aza Raskin
Right.
- [99:03]
Tristan Harris
It's hard to face this, but if we don't face it, if we just like look away, what are we going to get? We're going to get the default anti human path. And so there's this trade where, where we, the only way out is through like it is, we call it kind of like a rite of passage, like our ability to confront basically a shadow of a technology and the default future that that brings. If we can see that clearly and if we can know that, you know, and I know that we don't want that, and if Xi and Trump and you know, the people at the highest levels of these governments, because you ask any reasonable person at a very high level in national security on any side, and you say, do you want AIs that are going rogue, can hack into any computer system and are already mining cryptocurrency? Does that sound good to you? Does that sound safe to you? At a universal level it's not. So there's actually much more common ground and even, you know, 40. I think it's already the case that 57% of Americans think that the risks of AI currently outweigh the benefits. I don't like that stat because it makes it too like it's all bad versus all good or something like that. There's already the Pro Human AI Declaration where 46 groups came together and said we agree with on these five principles to make a pro human future. You can look it up. It's humanstatement.org that's the one that also includes again Glenn Beck, Bernie Sanders, Steve Bannon, all these people. I believe it's 65% of Americans believe we should not create super intelligence until we know how to do it provably, safely and controlled. Sounds like a pretty basic thing like let's not do something. It's like should we build a nuclear bomb that until we know how to do it safely or know that it won't set off of if we want to ignite the atmosphere, probably we should wait to do that. So this is not A radical proposal. This is not.
- [100:37]
Aza Raskin
Do you want to know how many, like what percentage of Americans think that we should just go as fast as possible, unfettered, non regulated AI? What percent of Americans? 5%.
- [100:47]
Gavin Newsom
Is it literally? Just.
- [100:48]
Tristan Harris
Literally 5%?
- [100:49]
Aza Raskin
Just 5%. So actually it's the most popular platform to run on.
- [100:52]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [100:53]
Aza Raskin
To do the like the safe thing.
- [100:54]
Tristan Harris
It was. And it's. And whether you're Democrat or Republican, you don't want to be surveilled by AIs. Whether you're a Democratic, Democrat or Republican, you don't want AIs taking your jobs. Which it will do equally to both sides.
- [101:02]
Gavin Newsom
But do you then subscribe to the Bernie AOC frame? Just shut down the data centers and moratorium and tell.
- [101:09]
Tristan Harris
I think of it as those data centers and it's like I want a pro human data center policy. It's like you get to build the data center when these conditions are met and we know that it's going to land us in a pro human future. I'm not saying that's easy. I'm not saying because I want people to hear. It's not just no to all of it. It's making sure that the conditions are. The steering is built in. So when you see that data center, you should ask, is that data center here to basically enhance my life and strengthen my family?
- [101:37]
Gavin Newsom
Well, you were even just saying data center was solar. Mostly data centers aren't solar.
- [101:41]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [101:42]
Gavin Newsom
We're turning back on coal plants. Old natural gas plants that are.
- [101:46]
Tristan Harris
Exactly.
- [101:46]
Gavin Newsom
Yeah.
- [101:47]
Aza Raskin
And you know, often in, in the sci fi movies, when is the. Is it the case that human beings actually stop all their bickering and they start coordinating? It's when the aliens come, right?
- [101:57]
Gavin Newsom
Yeah.
- [101:57]
Aza Raskin
We are summoning the demon, we are summoning the alien. And if we can see it that way, then it's sort of like a Game of Thrones. Winter is coming. We have to understand winter is coming. Then all the fighting in Westeros can pause for just long enough that we can deal with it. That's this moment. Because otherwise it just feels completely hopeless. How are we going to deal with all the finance reforms? And we can't. When has Congress actually done anything? And yet there is this one moment where like all of humanity is on one side. There is a human movement. Like that's what I think the social media stuff shows. If we don't think of this as just an AI problem, but as a technology encroaching onto our humanity, overreaching into our humanity problem, Then actually there is massive momentum, more than we ever thought was possible.
- [102:43]
Tristan Harris
Because what we have to do do
- [102:44]
Aza Raskin
is juice those like the momentum that's already there.
- [102:47]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [102:48]
Gavin Newsom
Yeah. Well, look, in the absence of. Of federal leadership, California will continue to assert itself. I believe in the power of emulation. Yes, success leaves clues. We'll continue to try to iterate on this and lean in. But, but look, this, you know, the clarity that you guys bring to this conversation, the importance of this conversation being brought to scale and broadening the consciousness and the imperative of. Seen this documentary again. The documentary is called the AI Doc,
- [103:15]
Tristan Harris
or How I Became an Apocalyptimist.
- [103:18]
Gavin Newsom
And. And we can't let that slip twice because you've used a word that people are not familiar with, which is a good way to end, and that is this convergence of optimism and pessimism. A little more optimism than pessimism and a better place.
- [103:35]
Tristan Harris
And it's about agency. And I'll just leave you with a quote that I loved from a meditation teacher who taught. Who happened to be a meditation teacher, and it's from the Army Corps of Engineers, which is that the difficult we do today, the impossible takes just a little longer.
- [103:52]
Gavin Newsom
I like it.
- [103:52]
Aza Raskin
Yeah.
- [103:53]
Tristan Harris
Yeah.
- [103:53]
Aza Raskin
And I just end by saying it really actually isn't about being an optimist or a pessimist, because to choose that label for yourself, it's a sort of, of is to take a back seat, like to sit down and just be like, I'm just going to accept that it'll either come out well or not, versus taking responsibility for trying to see clearly, to shift the world to go well. And I think that's what like everyone listening can. Can do is that this can all feel like too big. What. What can I do? And then you realize even like the, like the CEOs of the company sort of feel. Feel a similar way. But this is not just about a what we must do. This is fundamentally a question of, like, who we must be. That if we are the kind of people that aren't looking for a path, and the path is certainly not clear, doesn't seem obvious or even possible. But if we're the kind of people that don't look for the path, we definitely won't find it if it's there. If we are the kinds of people that do look for the path, then if it's there, we have the opportunity to find it.
- [104:56]
Tristan Harris
And just maybe one last thing is people listening to this. This is a lot. Your role is not to take on this Whole problem. You don't have to do that. There's some people who are soldiers and there's some people who are civilians. But your role is to be part of the collective immune system against this anti human future. And one simple way you can do that is to share this conversation with literally the most powerful people that you know and ask them to watch, watch it and to share it with the most powerful people that they know. And if you've done that, you can say, as long as you are spreading the word and being part of that immune system, you can rest at home, kiss your children at night, focus on the things that all of this is about anyway, which is what do we love about the world, what do we love about life that we want to continue and come from that place because that is the energy that we will, that will inspire other people to want to take those, those other actions too.
- [105:46]
Aza Raskin
And I know, Gavin, you ended up watching, watching an earlier presentation that we did, the AI Dilemma. Yeah, I think somebody said that you watched it like three times and shared with all your staff. How did you end up hearing about it?
- [105:55]
Gavin Newsom
Yeah, well, I mean, come on. Hearing about it from you guys. You guys, I was able to get the early, early preview from the two of you and was able to devour it, took notes and, and then shared it universally with everybody around me. Look, you know, I, I, I, the spirit you guys just ended. I couldn't agree with you more. This notion of agency is so important and we talk about that on the podcast all the time. But this notion of the future, it's not something to experience, something to manifest. Yeah, that's right. Futures inside of us.
- [106:25]
Tristan Harris
That's right.
- [106:25]
Gavin Newsom
That's exactly right. And so it's decisions, not conditions.
- [106:27]
Tristan Harris
That's exactly.
- [106:28]
Gavin Newsom
And so this idea that we are powerless, it's just bullshit. Yeah, it's complete bullshit.
- [106:33]
Tristan Harris
Yeah.
- [106:34]
Gavin Newsom
Everything that we laid out is an opportunity to do better and be better. And I think the spirit of the call to arms for everybody is we all have a role to play and some, and those roles are different and no one has to, to be, you know, you don't have to over be overwhelmed. But this notion of just being present in the conversation and indulging in the conversation and sharing it, I think is foundational. So guys, this is really important. The timing, the timeliness of this conversation, you cannot overstate. And so I'm very grateful for you to be out on the road all across this country sharing this remarkable documentary. I encourage everybody go out and watch it. And more importantly, certainly Share it and not fall prey to any of the cynicism and negativity. Maintain your sense of optimism. Again, we can shape the future. Thank you both.
- [107:32]
Robert Smigel
Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy not quite on Humor Me with Robert Smigel and Friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier this week. My guests, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an acapella band with their between songs banter.
- [107:50]
Tristan Harris
Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes.
- [107:53]
Robert Smigel
Those people are starving for banter. Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [108:02]
Psychology Podcast Host
Your twenties can be so exciting, but they can also be really overwhelming, confusing and honestly, just kind of lonely. May is Mental Health Awareness Month and the psychology of your twenties is breaking down the science behind the biggest roadblocks we face.
- [108:18]
Podcast Host (various)
I was six years into my career, the 80 hour weeks and just the first one in, the last one out and I ended up burning out.
- [108:24]
Tristan Harris
There was a large chunk of my twenties that I like was just so wanting to like be out of that
- [108:29]
Podcast Guest
phase, out of my skin and I just like really regret not living in the present more.
- [108:33]
Psychology Podcast Host
You don't need to have everything figured out right now, you just need to understand yourself a little bit better. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [108:46]
Tom Boger
American Soccer is about to explode.
- [108:48]
Gavin Newsom
The World cup is coming.
- [108:50]
Robert Smigel
Ramos sending on to Ernie Stewart the Chip.
- [108:55]
Gavin Newsom
I'm Tab Ramos.
- [108:57]
Tom Boger
I'm Tom Vogt. On our podcast Inside American Soccer, you'll get the win, the biggest decisions, and the truth about the U.S. national team.
- [109:06]
Gavin Newsom
It wouldn't be a huge surprise if
- [109:08]
Tristan Harris
our team ends up in the quarterfinals
- [109:10]
Gavin Newsom
or potentially a great run into the semifinals.
- [109:12]
Tom Boger
Listen to Inside American Soccer with Tom Boger and Tab ramos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.
- [109:21]
Diana Maria Riva
Hey, I'm Diana Maria Riva and on my new podcast, How Hard Can It Be? I call on my Gen X squad. From Ohio to Hollywood as we navigate mid life's most fantastic bs unfiltered conversations from night sweats to fupas to scheduling sex. Wait, what sex?
- [109:36]
Podcast Host (various)
Is it just me or does every
- [109:38]
Diana Maria Riva
woman my age want to look at
- [109:40]
Tristan Harris
Pinterest instead of having sex?
- [109:42]
Diana Maria Riva
Sometimes they say we can't polish a turd, but we're sure going to try. So let's get blunt with laughs, tears or tears of laughter. Listen to How Hard Can It Be With Diana Maria Riva on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [109:55]
Podcast Host (various)
This is an I Heart podcast, guaranteed human.