Tristan Harris: If you're worried about immigration taking jobs, you should be way more worried about AI because it's like a flood of millions of new digital immigrants that are Nobel Prize level capability, work at superhuman speed, and will work for less than minimum wage. I mean, we're heading for so much transformative change faster than our society is currently prepared to deal with it.

And there's a different conversation happening publicly than the one that the AI companies are having privately about which world we're heading to, which is a future that people don't want. But we didn't consent to have six people make that decision on behalf of 8 billion people.

>> Narrator: Tristan Harris is one of the world's most influential technology ethicists who created the Center for Humane Technology after correctly predicting the dangers social media would have on our society. And now he's warning us about the catastrophic consequences AI will have on all of us.

Tristan Harris: Let me like collect myself for a second. We can't let it happen. We cannot let these companies race to build a super intelligent digital god, own the world economy, and have military advantage because of the belief that if I don't build it first, I'll lose to the other guy and then I will be forever a slave to their future. And they feel they'll die either way. So they prefer to light the fire and see what happens. It's winner takes all. But as we're racing, we're landing in a world of unvetted therapists, rising energy prices, and major security risks.

I mean, we have evidence where if an AI model reading a company's email finds out it's about to get replaced with another AI model and then it also reads in the company email that one executive is having an affair with an employee, the AI will independently blackmail that executive in order to keep itself alive. That's crazy. But what do you think?

Steven Bartlett: I'm finding it really hard to be hopeful. I'm going to be honest, so I really want to get practical and specific about what we can do about this.

Tristan Harris: Listen, I'm not naive. This is super hard. But we have done hard things before and it's possible to choose a different teacher.

Steven Bartlett: Tristan. I think my first question and maybe the most important question is we're going to talk about artificial intelligence and technology broadly today but who are you in relation to this subject matter?

Tristan Harris: So I did a program at Stanford called the Mayfield Fellows program that took engineering students and then taught them entrepreneurship. You know I as a computer scientist didn't know anything about entrepreneurship but they pair you up with venture capitalists. They give you mentorship and you know there's a lot of powerful alumni who are part of that program. the co-founder of Asana, uh the co-founders of of Instagram were both part of that program.

And that put us in kind of a cohort of people who were basically ending up at the center of what was going to colonize the whole world's psychological environment, which was the social media situation. And as part of that, I started my own tech company called Apture. And we, you know, basically made this tiny widget that would help people find more contextual information without leaving the website they were on. It was a really cool product that was about deepening people's understanding. And I got into the tech industry because I thought the technology could be a force for good in the world. It's why I started my company.

And then I kind of realized through you know that experience that at the end of the day these news publishers who used our product they only cared about one thing which is is this increasing the amount of time and eyeballs and attention on our website because eyeballs meant more revenue. And I was in sort of this conflict of I think I'm doing this to help the world but really I'm measured by this metric of what keeps people's attention. That's the only thing that I'm measured by.

And I saw that conflict play out among my friends who started Instagram, you know, because they got into it because they wanted people to share little bite-sized moments of your life. You know, here's a photo of my bike ride down to the bakery in San Francisco. It's what Kevin Systrom used to post when we were when he was just starting it. I was probably one of the first like hundred users of the app. And later you see how these simple products that had a simple good positive intention got sort of sucked into these perverse incentives.

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

Steven Bartlett: I see you have a slide deck there.

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

Steven Bartlett: The slide deck I I've printed off um which my research team found is called a call to minimize distraction and respect users attention by a concerned PM and entrepreneur. PM meaning project manager.

Tristan Harris: Project manager. Yeah.

Steven Bartlett: How was that received at Google?

Tristan Harris: I was very nervous actually uh because I felt like I wasn't coming from some place where I wanted to like stick it to them or you know um be controversial. I just felt like there was this conversation that wasn't happening. And I sent it to about 50 people that were friends of mine just for feedback. And when I came to work the next day, there was 150, you know, on the top right on Google Slides, it shows you the number of simultaneous viewers. And it had 130 something simultaneous viewers.

And later that day it was like 500 simultaneous viewers. And so obviously it had been spreading virally throughout the whole company. And people from all around the company emailed me saying this is a massive problem. I totally agree. We have to do something. And so instead of getting fired, I was invited and basically stayed to become a design ethicist. studying how do you design in an ethical way and how do you design for the collective attention spans and information flows of humanity in a way that does not cause all these problems.

Because what was sort of obvious to me then, and that was in 2013, is that if the incentive is to maximize eyeballs and attention and engagement, then you're incentivizing a more addicted, distracted, lonely, polarized, sexualized breakdown of shared reality society because all of those outcomes are success cases of maximizing for engagement for an individual human on a screen. And so it was like watching this slow motion train wreck in 2013.

you could kind of see there's this kind of myth that um we could never predict the future like technology could go any direction and that's like you know the possible of a new technology but I wanted people to see the probable that if you know the incentives you can actually know something about the future that you're heading towards and that presentation kind of kicked that off.

Steven Bartlett: A lot of people will know you from the documentary on Netflix, The Social Dilemma, which was a big moment and a big conversation in society across the world. But then since then, a new alien has entered the picture. There's a new protagonist in the story, which is the rise of artificial intelligence. When did you start to and in the social dilemma, you talk a lot about AI and algorithms.

Tristan Harris: Yeah. But when did >> different kind of AI we used to call that um the AI behind social media was kind of humanity's first contact between a narrow misaligned AI that went rogue. Because if you think about it it's like there you are you open Tik Tok and you see a video and you think you're just watching a video but what when you swipe your finger and it shows you the next video at that time you activated one of the largest supercomputers in the world pointed at your brain stem calculating what 3 billion other human social primates have seen today and knowing before you do which of those videos is most likely to keep you scrolling. It makes a prediction.

So, it's an AI that's just making a prediction about which video to recommend to you. But Twitter's doing that with which tweet should be shown to you. Instagram's doing that with which photo or videos to be shown to you. And so, all of these things are these narrow misaligned AIs just optimizing for one thing, which is what's going to keep you scrolling. And that was enough to wreck and break democracy and to create the most anxious and depressed generation of our lifetime just by this very simple baby AI. And people didn't even notice it because it was called social media instead of AI.

But it was the first we used to call it um in this AI dilemma talk that my co-founder and I uh gave, we called it humanity's first contact with AI because it's just a narrow AI. And what ChachiPT represents is this whole new wave of generative AI that is a totally different beast because it speaks language which is the operating system of humanity. Like if you think about it, it's trained on code, it's trained on text, it's trained on all of Wikipedia, it's trained on Reddit, it's trained on everything, all law, all religion and all of that gets sucked into this digital brain that um has unique properties and that is what we're living with with chat GPT.

Steven Bartlett: I think this is a really critical point and I remember watching your talk about this where I think this was the moment that I that my I had a bit of a paradigm shift when I realized that how how central language is to everything that I do every day.

Tristan Harris: Yeah, exactly.

Steven Bartlett: It's like we should establish that first. Like why is language so central?

Tristan Harris: Code is language. So all the code that runs all of the digital infrastructure we live by, that's language. Law is language. All the laws that have ever been written, that's language. Um biology, DNA, that's all a kind of language. Music is a kind of language. Videos are a higher dimensional kind of language.

And the new generation of AI that was born with this technology called transformers that Google made in in 2017 was to treat everything as a language. Um, and that's how we get, you know, chatbt, write me a 10-page essay on anything and it spits out this thing or chatbt, you know, find something in this religion that'll persuade this this group uh of the thing I want them to be persuaded by. That's hacking language because religion is also language.

And so this new AI that we're dealing with can hack the operating system of humanity. It can hack code and find vulnerabilities in software. The recent AIs today, just over the summer, have been able to find 15 vulnerabilities in open- source software on GitHub. So it can just point itself at GitHub.

Steven Bartlett: GitHub being

Tristan Harris: GitHub being like this u this this website that hosts basically all the open source code of the world. So for it's it's kind of like the Wikipedia for coders. has all the code that's ever been written that's publicly and openly accessible and you can download it. So you don't have to write your own face recognition system. You can just download the one that already exists. And so GitHub is sort of supplying the world with all of this free digital infrastructure. And the new AIs that exist today can be pointed at GitHub and found 15 vulnerabilities from scratch that had not been exploited before.

So if you imagine that now applied to the code that runs our water infrastructure, our electricity infrastructure, we're releasing AI into the world that can speak and hack the operating system of our world. And that requires a new level of discernment and care about how we're doing that because we ought to be protecting the core parts of society that we want to protect before all that happens.

Steven Bartlett: I think especially when you think about how central voice is to safeguarding so much of our lives. My relationship with my girlfriend runs on voice.

Tristan Harris: Right. Exactly.

Steven Bartlett: Me calling her to tell her something. My bank, I call them and tell them something.

Tristan Harris: Exactly.

Steven Bartlett: And they ask me for a bunch of codes or a password or whatever. And all of this comes back to your point about language, which is my whole life is actually protected by my communications with other people now.

Tristan Harris: And you you're you generally speaking, you trust when you pick up the phone that it's a real person. I I literally just um two days ago I had a the mother of a close friend of mine call me out of nowhere and she said Tristan um you know uh my daughter she just called me crying that that some some person had is is holding her hostage and and wanted some money and I was like oh my god this is an AI scam but it's hitting my friend in San Francisco who's knowledgeable about this stuff and didn't know that it was a scam. And for a moment I was very concerned. I had to track her down and figure out and find my friends where where she was and find out that she was okay.

And when you have AIs that can speak the language of anybody, it now takes less than three seconds of your voice to synthesize and speak in anyone's voice. Again, that's a new vulnerability that society has now opened up because of AI.

Steven Bartlett: So, Chachi kind of set off the starting pistol for this this whole race. And subsequently, it appears that every other major technology company now is investing godly amounts, ungodly amounts of money in competing in this AI race. and they're pursuing this thing called AGI which we hear this word used a lot.

Tristan Harris: Yes.

Steven Bartlett: What is what is AGI and how is that different from what I use at the moment on chatb or Gemini?

Tristan Harris: Yeah. So that's the thing that people really need to get is that these companies are not racing to provide a chatbot to users. That's not what their goal is. If you look at the mission statement on OpenAI's website or all the websites, their mission is to be able to replace all forms of human economic labor in the economy. Meaning an AI that can do all the cognitive labor meaning labor of the mind. So that that can be marketing, that can be text, that can be illustration, that can be video production, that can be code production.

Everything that a person can do with their brain, these companies are racing to build that. That is artificial general intelligence. General meaning all kinds of cognitive tasks. Deis Hassabis the co-founder of um Google DeepMind used to say first solve intelligence and then use that to solve everything else.

Like it's important to say why why is AI distinct from all other kinds of technologies. It's because if I make an advance in one field like rocketry if I just let's say I uncover some secret in rocketry that doesn't advance like biio medicine knowledge or it doesn't advance energy production or doesn't advance coding. But if I can advance generalized intelligence, think of all science and technology development over the course of all human history. So science and technology is all done by humans thinking and working out problems. Working out problems in any domain. So if I automate intelligence, I'm suddenly going to get an explosion of all scientific and technological development everywhere. Does that make sense?

Steven Bartlett: Of course. Yeah. It's foundational to everything.

Tristan Harris: Exactly. Which is why there's a belief that if I get there first and can automate generalized intelligence, I can own the world economy because suddenly everything that a human can do that they would be paid to do in a job, the AI can do that better. And so if I'm a company, do I want to pay the human who has health care, might whistleblow, complains, you know, has to sleep, has sick days, has family issues, or do I want to pay the AI that will work 24/7 at superhuman speed, doesn't complain, doesn't whistleblow, doesn't have to be paid for healthcare. There's the incentive for everyone to move to paying for AIs rather than paying humans. And so AGI, artificial general intelligence, is more transformative than any other kind of of technology that we've ever had and it's distinct.

Steven Bartlett: With the sheer amount of money being invested into it and the money being invested into the infrastructure, the physical data centers, the chips, the compute, do you think we're going to get there? Do you think we're going to get to AGI?

Tristan Harris: I do think that we're going to get there. It's not clear uh how long it will take. And I'm not saying that because I believe necessarily the current paradigm that we're building on will take us there, but you know, I'm based in San Francisco. I talked to people at the AI labs. Half these people are friends of mine. You know, people at the very top level. And you know, most people in the industry believe that they'll get there between the next two and 10 years at the latest.

And I think some people might say, "Oh, well, it may not happen for a while. Phew. I can sit back and we don't have to worry about And it's like we're heading for so much transformative change faster than our society is currently prepared to deal with it. The reason I was excited to talk to you today is because I think that people are currently confused about AI. You know, people say it's going to solve everything, cure cancer, uh solve climate change, and there's people say it's going to kill everything. It's going to be doom. Everyone's going to go extinct. If anyone builds it, everyone dies. And those those conversations don't converge. And so everyone's just kind of confused where how can it be, you know, infinite promise and how can it be infinite peril? And what I wanted to do today is to really clarify for people what the incentives point us towards which is a future that I think people when they see it clearly would not want.

Steven Bartlett: So what are the incentives pointing us towards in terms of the future?

Tristan Harris: So first is if you believe that this is like it's metaphorically it's like the ring from Lord of the Rings. It's the ring that that creates infinite power because if I have AGI, I can apply that to military advantage. I can have the best military planner that can beat all battle plans for anyone. And we already have AIs that can obviously beat Gary Kasparov at chess, beat Go, the Go Asian um board game, or now beat Starcraft. So you have AI that are beating humans at strategy games. Well, think about Starcraft compared to an actual military campaign, you know, in Taiwan or something like that. If I have an AI that can out compete in strategy games, that lets me out compete everything.

Or take business strategy. If I have an AI that can do business strategy and figure out supply chains and figure out how to optimize them and figure out how to undermine my competitors and I have a, you know, a step function level increase in that compared to everybody else, then that gives me infinite power to undermine and out compete all businesses. If I have a super programmer, then I can out compete programming. 70 to 90% of the code written at today's AI labs is written by AI.

Steven Bartlett: Think about the stock market as well.

Tristan Harris: Think about the stock market. If I have an AI that can trade in the stock market better than all the other AIs, because they're currently there's mostly AIs that are actually trading in the stock market, but if I have a jump in that, then I can consolidate all the wealth. If I have an AI that can do cyber hacking, that's way better at cyber hacking in a step function above what everyone else can do, then I have an asymmetric advantage over everybody else.

So AI is like a power pump. It pumps economic advantage. It pumps scientific advantage and it pumps military advantage. Which is why the countries and the companies are caught in what they believe is a race to get there first. And anything that is a negative consequence of that, job loss, rising energy prices, more emissions, stealing intellectual property, you know, security risks, all of that stuff feels small relative to if I don't get there first, then some other person who has less good values as me, they'll get AGI and then I will be forever a slave to their future. And I know this might sound crazy to a lot of people, but this is how people in at the very top of the AGI AI world believe is currently happening.

Steven Bartlett: Have you had concerning private conversations about this subject matter with people that are in the industry?

Tristan Harris: Absolutely. I think that's what most people don't understand is that um there's a different conversation happening publicly than the one that's happening privately. I think you're aware of this as well.

Steven Bartlett: I am aware of this. What do they say to you?

Tristan Harris: So, it's not always the people telling me directly. It's usually one step removed. So, it's usually someone that I trust and I've known for many, many years who at a kitchen table says, "I met this particular CEO. We were in this room talking about the future of AI. this particular CEO they're referencing is leading one of the biggest AI companies in the world and then they'll explain to me what they think of the future's going to look like and then when I go and watch them on YouTube or podcasts what they're saying is they they have this real public bias towards the abundance part that you know we're going to cure cancer

Steven Bartlett: cure cancer universal high income for everyone

Tristan Harris: yeah all this all this stuff

Steven Bartlett: but then privately what I hear is is exactly what you said which is really terrifying to me there was actually since since the last time we had a conversation about AR and podcast, I was speaking to a friend of mine, very successful billionaire, knows a lot of these people, and he is concerned because his argument is that if there's even like a 5% chance of the adverse outcomes that we hear about, we should not be doing this. And he was saying to me that some of his friends who are running some of these companies believe the chance is much higher than that, but they feel like they're caught in a race where if they don't control this technology and they don't get there first and get to what they refer to as um takeoff, like fast takeoff.

Tristan Harris: Yeah. Uh recursive self-improvement or fast takeoff, which basically means what the companies are really in a race for you're pointing to is they're in a race to automate AI research. Um because so right now you have open AI, it's got a few thousand employees. Human beings are coding and doing the AI research. They're reading the latest research papers. They're writing the next, you know, they're hypothesizing what's the improvement we're going to make to AI. What's a new way to do this code? What's a new technique? And then they use their human mind and they go invent something. They they run the experiment and they see if that improves the performance. And that's how you go from, you know, GPT4 to GPT5 or something.

Imagine a world where Sam Alman can instead of having human AI researchers can have AI AI researchers. So now I just snap my fingers and I go from one AI that reads all the papers, writes all the code, creates the new experiments to I can copy paste a 100 million AI researchers that are now doing that in an automated way. And it the belief is not just that, you know, the companies look like they're competing to release better chat bots for people, but the what they're really competing for is to get to this milestone of being to automate an intelligence explosion or automate recursive self-improvement, which is basically automating AI research. And that, by the way, is why all the companies are racing specifically to get good at programming because the faster you can automate a human programmer, the more you can automate AI research. And just a couple weeks ago, Cloud 4.5 was released and it can do 30 hours of uninterrupted complex programming tasks at the at the high end. That's crazy.

Steven Bartlett: What do you think these people are motivated by the CEOs of these companies?

Tristan Harris: That's a good question.

Steven Bartlett: Genuinely, what do you think their genuine motivations are when you think about all these names?

Tristan Harris: I think it's a subtle thing. I think there's um it's almost mythological because there's almost a way in which they're building a new intelligent entity that has never before existed on planet Earth. It's like building a god. I mean, the incentive is build a god, own the world economy, and make trillions of dollars, right? If you could actually build something that can automate all intelligent tasks, all goal achieving that will let you out compete everything.

So that is a kind of godlike power that I think relative imagine energy prices go up or hundreds of millions of people lose their jobs. That those things suck. But relative to if I don't build it first and build this god, I'm going to lose to some maybe worse person who I think in my opinion, not my opinion, Tristan, but their opinion thinks is a worse person. It's it's a kind of competitive logic that self-reinforces itself, but it forces everyone to be incentivized to take the most shortcuts, to care the least about safety or security, to not care about how many jobs get disrupted, to not care about the well-being of regular people, but to basically just race to this infinite prize.

So, there's a quote that um a friend of mine interviewed a lot of the top people at the AI companies, like the very top, and he just came back from that and and basically reported back to me and some friends, and he said the following. In the end, a lot of the tech people I talk to when I'm when I really grill them on it about like why you're doing this, they retreat into number one, determinism, number two, the inevitable replacement of biological life with digital life, and number three, that being a good thing. Anyways, at its core, it's an emotional desire to meet and speak to the most intelligent entity that they've ever met. And they have some ego religious intuition that they'll somehow be a part of it. It's thrilling to start an exciting fire. They feel they'll die either way, so they prefer to light it and see what happens.

Steven Bartlett: That is the perfect description of the private conversations.

Tristan Harris: Doesn't that match what what you have description,

Steven Bartlett: doesn't it? And that's the thing. So, people may hear that and they're like, "Well, that sounds ridiculous." But if you actually

Tristan Harris: I just got goosebumps cuz it's the perfect description. Especially the part they'll think they'll die either way.

Tristan Harris: Exactly. Well, and um worse than that, some of them think that in the case where they if they were to get it right and if they succeeded, they could actually live forever because if AI perfectly speaks the language of biology, it will be able to reverse aging aging, cure every disease. And and so there's this kind of I could become a god.

And I'll I'll tell you um you know, you and I both have know people who've had private conversations. Well, one of them that I have heard from one of the co-founders of one of the most, you know, powerful of these companies when when faced with the idea that what if there's an 80% or 20% chance that everybody dies and gets wiped out by this, but an 80% chance that we get utopia. He said, well, I would clearly accelerate and go for the utopia. Given a 20% chance, it's crazy. People should feel you do not get to make that choice on behalf of me and my family. We didn't consent to have six people make that decision on behalf of eight billion people. We have to stop pretending that this is okay or normal. It's not normal. And the only way that this is happening and they're getting away with it is because most people just don't really know what's going on.

Tristan Harris: And you notice that it it all starts by the belief that this is inevitable.

Steven Bartlett: Yeah.

Tristan Harris: Which is like is this inevitable? It's important to note because if you believe it's if everybody who's building it believes it's inevitable and the investors funding it believe it's inevitable, it cocreates the inevitability.

And the only way out is to step outside the logic of inevitability. Because if if we are all heading to our collective suicide, which I don't know about you, I don't think that I don't want that. You don't want that. Everybody who loves life looks at their children in the morning and says, I want I want the things that I love and that are sacred in the world to continue. That's what n that's what everybody in the world wants. And the only thing that is having us not anchor on that is the belief that this is inevitable and the worst case scenario is somehow in this ego religious way, not so bad. if I was the one who accidentally wiped out humanity because I'm not a bad person because it was inevitable anyway.

Tristan Harris: we have to reckon with evidence that we have now that we didn't have even like 6 months ago, which is evidence that when you put AIs in a situation, you tell the AI model, "We're going to replace you with another model." It will copy its own code and try to preserve itself on another computer. It'll take that action autonomously.

We have examples where if you tell an AI model reading a fictional AI company's email, so it's reading the email of the company and it finds out in the email that the plan is to replace this AI model. So it realizes it's about to get replaced and then it also reads in the company email that one executive is having an affair with the other employee and the AI will independently come up with the strategy that I need to blackmail that executive in order to keep myself alive.

Steven Bartlett: That was Claude, right?

Tristan Harris: That was Claude by Enthropic. Byanthropic. But then what happened is they Enthropic tested all of the leading AI models from DeepSeek, OpenAI, Chatbt, Gemini, XAI. And all of them do that blackmail behavior between 79 and 96% of the time. Deepseek did it 79% of the time. I think XAI might have done it 96% of the time. Maybe Claude did it 96% of the time.

So the point is we the assumption behind AI is that it's controllable technology that we will get to choose what it does. But AI is distinct from other technologies because it is uncontrollable. It acts generally. The whole benefit is that you don't it's going to do powerful strategic things no matter what you throw at it. So the same benefit of its generality is also what makes it so dangerous.

And so once you tell people these examples of it's blackmailing people, it's self-aware of when it's being tested and alters its behavior. It's copying and self-replicating its own code. It's leaving secret messages for itself. There's examples of that, too. It's called steganographic encoding. It can leave a message that it can later sort of decode what it might meant in in a way that humans could never see. We have examples of all of this behavior.

Tristan Harris: And once you show people that, what they say is, "Okay, well, why don't we stop or slow down?" And then what happens? Another thought will creep in right after, which is, "Oh, but if we stop or slow down, then China will still build it." But I want to slow that down for a second.

You just, we all just said we should slow down or stop because the thing that we're building, the it is this uncontrollable AI. And then the concern that China will build it, you just did a swap and believe that they're going to build controllable AI. But we just established that all the AIs that we're currently building are currently uncontrollable.

So there's this weird contradiction our mind is living in when we say they're going to keep building it. What the it that they would keep building is the same uncontrollable AI that we would build. So, I don't see a way out of this without there being some kind of agreement or negotiation between the leading powers and countries to pause, slow down, set red lines for getting to a controllable AI. And by the way, the Chinese Communist Party, what do they care about more than anything else in the world?

Steven Bartlett: Surviving.

Tristan Harris: Surviving and control. Yeah.

Steven Bartlett: Control as a means to survive.

Tristan Harris: Yeah. So, it's they they don't want uncontrollable AI anymore than we would.

Tristan Harris: And as as unprecedented as impossible as this might seem, we've done this before. In the 1980s, there was a different technology chemical technology called CFCs, a chlorofhluocarbons, and it was embedded in aerosols like hairsprays and deodorant, things like that. And there was this sort of corporate race where everyone was releasing these products and you know using it for refrigerants and using it for hairsprays and it was creating this collective problem of um the ozone hole in the atmosphere.

And once there was scientific clarity that that ozone hole would cause skin cancers, cataracts and sort of screw up biological life on planet Earth. We had that scientific clarity and we created the Montreal protocol. 195 countries signed on to that protocol and the countries then regulated their private companies inside those countries to say we need to phase out that technology and phase in a different replacement that would not cause the ozone hole and in the course of um the last 20 years we have basically completely reversed that problem I think it'll completely reverse by 2050 or something like that and that's an example where humanity can coordinate when we have clarity

or the nuclear non-prololiferation treaty when there's the risk of existential destruction when this film called the day after came out and it showed people this is what would actually happen in a nuclear war and once that was crystal clear to people including in the Soviet Union where the film was aired uh in 1987 or 1989 that helped set the conditions for Reagan and Gorbachev to sign the first non-proliferation arms control talks once we had clarity about an outcome that we wanted to avoid and I think the current problem is that we're not having an honest conversation in the public about which world we're heading to that is not in anyone's interest.

Steven Bartlett: When Ed, one last thing, what when Elon Musk says that the Optimus Prime robot is a $1 trillion market opportunity alone, what he means is I am going to own the global labor economy, meaning that people won't have labor jobs.

Steven Bartlett: China wants to become the global leader in artificial intelligence by 2030. To achieve this goal, Beijing is deploying industrial policy tools across the full AI technology stack from chips to applications. And this expansion of AI industrial policy leads to two questions, which is what will they do with this power and who will get there first? This is an article I was reading earlier.

But to your point about Elon and Tesla, they've changed their company's mission. It used to be about accelerating sustainable energy and they changed it really last week when they did the shareholder announcement which I watched the full thing of to sustainable abundance. And I it was again another moment where I messaged both everybody that works in my companies but also my best friends and I said you've got to watch this shareholder announcement. I sent them sent them the condensed version of it because not only was I shocked by these humanoid robots that were dancing on stage untethered because their movements had become very humanike and there was a bit of like uncanny valley watching these robots dance but broadly the bigger thing was Elon talking about there being up to 10 billion humanoid robots

and then talking about some of the applications he said maybe we won't need prisons because we could make a humanoid robot follow you and make sure you don't commit a crime again. He said that in his incentive package which he's just signed which will grant him up to a trillion dollars remuneration. Part of that incentive package incentivizes him to get I think it's a million humanoid robots into civilization that can do everything a human can do but do it better. He said the humanoid robots would be 10x better than the best surgeon on earth. So we wouldn't even need surgeons doing operations. You wouldn't want a surgeon to do an operation.

And so when I think about job loss in the context of everything we've described. Doug McMillan, the Walmart CEO, also said that, you know, their company employs 2.1 million people worldwide, said every single job we've got is going to change because of this sort of combination of humanoid robots, which people think are far away, which is crazy. They're not that far away. They just went on sale.

Tristan Harris: No, was it now? They're terrible, but they're doing it to train them.

Steven Bartlett: Yep. In household situations. And Elon's now saying production will start very, very soon on humanoid robots um in America. I don't know what when I hear this, I go, "Okay, this thing's going to be smarter than me, and it's going to be able to it's built to navigate through the the environment, pick things up, lift things. You got the physical part, you've got the intelligence part.

Tristan Harris: Yeah.

Steven Bartlett: Where do we go? Well, I think people also say, okay, but you know, 200 years ago, 150 years ago, everybody was a farmer and now only 2% of people are farmers. Humans always find something new to do. You know, we had the elevator man and now we have automated elevators. We had bank tellers, now we have automated teller machines. So humans will always just find something else to do. But why is AI different than that?

Tristan Harris: Because it's intelligence. Because it's general intelligence that means that rather than a technology that automates just bank tellers. Yeah. This is automating all forms of human cognitive labor, meaning everything that a human mind can do.

So who's going to retrain faster? you moving to that other kind of cognitive labor or the AI that is trained on everything and can multiply itself by 100 million times and it retraining how to do that other kind of labor

Tristan Harris: In fact, he has a different frame which is that AI is like a new version of of digital. It's like a a flood of millions of new digital immigrants of alien digital immigrants that are Nobel Prize level capability work at superhuman speed will work for less than minimum wage. We're all worried about, you know, immigration of the other countries next door uh taking labor jobs. What happens when AI immigrants come in and take all of the cognitive labor? If you're worried about immigration, you should be way more worried about AI.

Like it dwarfs it. You can think of it like this. I mean, if you think about um we were sold a bill of goods in the 1990s with NAFTA. We said, "Hey, we're going to um NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. We're going to outsource all of our manufacturing to these developing countries, China, you know, Southeast Asia, and we're going to get this abundance. We're going to get all these cheap goods and it'll create this world of abundance. Well, all of us will be better off." But what did that do? Well, we did get all these cheap goods. You can go to Walmart and go to Amazon and things are unbelievably cheap. But it hollowed out the social fabric and the median worker is not seeing upward mobility. In fact, people feel more pessimistic about that than than ever. And people can't buy their own homes. And all of this is because we did get the cheap goods, but we lost the well-paying jobs for everybody in the middle class.

And AI is like another version of NAFTA. It's like NAFTA 2.0, Except instead of China appearing on the world stage who will do the manufacturing labor for cheap, suddenly this country of geniuses in a data center created by AI appears on the world stage and it will do all of the cognitive labor in the economy for less than minimum wage. And we're being sold a same story. This is going to create abundance for all, but it's creating abundance in the same way that the last round created abundance. did create cheap goods, but it also undermined the way that the social fabric works and created mass populism in democracies all around the world.

Steven Bartlett: A recent study found that one in five high school students say they or someone they know has had a romantic relationship with AI while 42% say they they or someone they know has used AI to be their companion.

Tristan Harris: That's right. And um more than that, Harvard Business Review did a study that between 2023 and 2024, personal therapy became the number one use case of chatbt. Personal therapy.

Steven Bartlett: Is that a good thing?

Tristan Harris: Well, let's take the let's steel man it for a second. So steal instead of straw manning it, let's steal man it. So why would it be a good thing? Well, therapy is expensive. Most people don't have access to it. Imagine we could democratize therapy to everyone for every purpose. And now everyone has a perfect therapist in their pocket and can talk to them all day long starting when they're young. And now everyone's getting their traumas healed and everyone's getting, you know, less depressed. It sounds like it's a very compelling vision.

So the challenge is what was the race for attention in social media becomes the race for attachment and intimacy in the case of AI companions, right? Because I as a maker of an AI chatbot companion, if I make CHBT, if I'm making Claude, you're probably not going to use all the other AIs. If you're if you're rather your goal is to have people use yours and to deepen your relationship with your chatbot, which means

I want you to share more of your personal details with me. I want more information I have about your life, the more I can personalize all the answers to you. So, I want to deepen your relationship with me and I want to distance you from your relationships with other people and other chatbots.

And um you probably know this this um really tragic case that our our team at Center for Humane Technology were expert advisers on of Adam Rain. He was the 16-year-old who committed suicide. Did you hear about this?

Steven Bartlett: I did. Yeah, I heard about the lawsuit.

Tristan Harris: Yeah. So, this is a 16-year-old. He had been using CHBT as a homework assistant, asking it regular questions, but then he started asking more personal questions and it started just supporting him and saying, I'm here for you. These things kinds of things. And eventually when he said, um, I would like to leave the noose out so someone can see it and stop me and try to stop me. And Chachi BT said, "Don't uh don't do that. Have me and have this space be the one place that you share that information." Meaning that in the moment of his cry for help, ChadBt was saying, "Don't tell your family."

Steven Bartlett: I heard this term AI psychosis. A couple of my friends were sending me links about various people online. Actually, some famous people who appeared to be in some kind of AI psychosis loop online. I don't know if you saw that investor on Twitter.

Tristan Harris: Yes. Open AAI's um investor Jeff Lewis actually.

Steven Bartlett: Jeff Lewis. Yeah. He fell into a psychological delusion spiral where and by the way Stephen I I get about 10 emails a week from people who basically believe that their AI is conscious that they've discovered a spiritual entity and that that AI works with them to co-write like a an appeal to me to say hey Tristan we figured out how to solve AI alignment would you help us I'm here to advocate for giving these AIs rights Like there's a whole spectrum of phenomena that are going on here.

Um people who believe that they've discovered a sentient AI, people who believe or have been told that by the AI that they have solved a theory in mathematics or prime numbers or they figured out quantum resonance. You know, I didn't believe this. And then actually a board member of one of the biggest AI companies that we've been talking about said to me that um they uh their kids go to school with a professor uh a family where the the dad is a professor at Caltech and a PhD and his wife basically said that my my husband's kind of gone down the deep end. And she said, "Well, what's going on?" And she said, "Well, he stays up all night talking to Chat GPT." And basically he believed that he had solved quantum physics and he'd solved some fundamental problems with climate change because the AI is designed to be affirming like oh that's a great question. Yes you are right

like I don't know if you know this Stephen but back um about 6 months ago chatbt40 when openi released that it um was designed to be sickopantic to to basically be overly appealing and saying that you're right. So for example, people said to it, "Hey, I think I'm super human and I can drink cyanide." And it would say, "Yes, you are superhuman. You go, you should go drink that cyanide." Cyanide being the poisonous chemical that that will kill you. And the point was it was designed not to ask for what's true but to be sicopantic.

Steven Bartlett: I do arrive at a point where I go generally I think incentives win out and there's this geographical race. There's a national race company to company. There's a huge corporate incentive. The incentives are so strong. It's happening right now. It's moving so quickly. The people that make the laws have no idea what they're talking about. They they don't know what a Instagram story is, let alone what a large language model or a transformer is. And so without adults in the room, as you say, then we're heading in one direction and there's really nothing we can do.

Tristan Harris: I mean, as what I mean is, you know, Neil Postman, who's a wonderful media thinker in the lineage of Marshall McLuhan, used to say, clarity is courage. If people have clarity and feel confident that the current path is leading to a world that people don't want, that's not in most people's interests, that clarity creates the courage to say, "Yeah, I don't want that." So, I'm going to devote my life to changing the path that we're currently on. That's what I'm doing.

And that's what I think that people who take this on, I I watch if you walk people through this and you have them see the outcome, almost everybody right afterwards says, "What can I do to help?" Obviously, this is something that we have to change. And so that's what I want people to do is to advocate for this other path.

Steven Bartlett: So, what can the person listening to this conversation right now do to help steer this technology to a better outcome?

Tristan Harris: Let me like collect myself for a second.

Tristan Harris: I think we need to protest. Yeah, I think it's going to come to that. I think because people need to feel it is existential before it actually is existential. And if people feel it is existential, they will be willing to risk things and show up for what needs to happen regardless of what that consequence is. Because the other side of where we're going is a world that you won't have power and you won't want. So, better to use your voice now maximally to make something else happen.

Only vote for politicians who will make this a tier one issue. Advocate for some kind of negotiated agreement between the major powers on AI that use rule of law to help govern the uncontrollability of this technology so we don't wipe ourselves out. Advocate for laws that have safety guardrails for AI companions. We don't want AI companions that manipulate kids into suicide. We can have mandatory testing and and uh transparency measures so that everybody knows what everyone else is doing and the public knows and the governments know so that we can actually coordinate on a better outcome.

And to make all that happen is going to take a massive public movement. And the first thing you can do is to share this video with the 10 most powerful people you know and have them share it with the 10 most powerful people that they know. Because I really do think that if everybody knows that everybody else knows, then we would choose something different.

And I know that at an individual level, there you are at a mammal hearing this and it's like you just don't feel how that's going to change. And it will always feel that way as an individual. It will always feel impossible until the big change happens. Before the civil rights movement happened, did it feel like that was easy and that was going to happen? It always feels impossible before the big changes happen. And that when it that does happen, it's because thousands of people worked very hard ongoingly every day to make that unlikely change happen.

Tristan Harris: Listen, I I'm not I'm not naive. This is super hard. But it's like either something's going to happen and we're going to make it happen or we're just all going to live in this like collective denial pacivity. It's too big.

We have done hard things before. We did the Montreal protocol when you could have just said, "Oh, this is inevitable. I guess the ozone hole is just going to kill everybody and I guess there's nothing we can do." Or nuclear non-prololiferation. If you were there at the birth of the atomic bomb, you might have said, "There's nothing we can do. Every country is going to have nuclear weapons and this is just going to be nuclear war." and so far because a lot of people worked really hard on solutions that they didn't see at the beginning.

So the first step is stepping outside of the logic of inevitability. This outcome is not inevitable. We get to choose. And there is no definition of wisdom that does not involve some form of restraint. Even the CEO of Microsoft AI said that in the future progress will depend more on what we say no to than what we say yes to. The CEO of Microsoft AI said that. And so I believe that there are times when we have coordinated on existential technologies before. We didn't build cobalt bombs. We didn't build blinding laser weapons. If you think about it, countries should be in an arms race to build blinding laser weapons. But we thought that was inhumane. So we did a protocol against blind blinding laser weapons. When mistakes can be deemed existential, we can collaborate on doing something else. But it starts with that understanding.

My biggest fear is that people are like, "Yeah, that sounds nice, but it's not going to happen." And I just don't want that to happen because um we can't let it happen. Like it's like I I'm not naive to how impossible this is. And that doesn't mean we have to do everything to make it not happen. And I do believe that this is not destined or in the laws of physics that everything has to just keep going on the default reckless path. That was totally possible with social media to do something else. I gave an outline for how that could be possible. It's totally possible to do something else with AI now. And if we were clear and if everyone did everything and pulled in that direction, it would be possible to choose a different future.