AI Expert Warns: “This Is The Last Mistake We’ll Ever Make” - Tristan Harris - #1079
Modern Wisdom
Chris Williamson
4.6 • 5.9K Ratings
🗓️ 2 April 2026
⏱️ 128 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | What is the journey of how you arrived thinking about the problems of AI? |
| 0:07.6 | Well, most people know me or our work through the film The Social Dilemma, |
| 0:13.5 | and I used to be a design ethicist at Google in 2012, 2013. |
| 0:19.9 | So that basically meant how do you ethically design technology that |
| 0:25.2 | is going to reshape, especially the attention and information environment of humanity. So it's like, |
| 0:31.1 | there I was at Google, it was 2012, 2013. This is in the heat of the kind of social media boom. |
| 0:36.9 | I think Instagram had just been bought by Facebook. |
| 0:38.9 | My friends in college started Instagram. |
| 0:40.6 | So, like, I was part of this cohort in milieu of people who really built this technology |
| 0:47.2 | that the rest of the world just thought was natural. |
| 0:49.4 | Like, this is just drinking water. |
| 0:50.6 | Like, I just drink Instagram. |
| 0:51.6 | I just live in this environment. |
| 0:53.5 | And so while, like, I saw billions of people enter into this psychological habitat that I knew the handful of, like, five or six people that were designing and tweaking it and making it work a certain way. Yeah, exactly. And I think that that's just like a fundamental thing I want people to get is, you know, you think of technology like it just |
| 1:10.8 | lands and it's just inevitable and there's just nothing we can do and it just comes from above. And it's like there are human beings making choices. And, you know, as someone who grew up in the era of, you know, the Macintosh, like my co-file, so I have a nonprofit called the Center for Human technology. My co-founder Azaraskin, his father invented the Macintosh project before Steve Jobs |
| 1:31.0 | took it over. |
| 1:31.5 | So this is the original Macintosh, you know, the thing that we now, the MacBook, the |
| 1:35.9 | MacBook, all of that started with his father, Jeff Raskin. |
| 1:41.0 | And the idea of creating humane technology where technology could be choicefully designed |
| 1:45.9 | to be really easy to use, to be accessible, to be an empowering extension of our humanity, |
| 1:51.1 | like a cello, like a piano, like a creative tool, like if you're a video person, you can |
| 1:56.1 | make films and videos. And just so people understand, because we're probably going to be |
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