This TED Talk features design thinker, philosopher, entrepreneur Tristan Harris, recorded live at TED 2017.

I want you to imagine walking into a room, control room with a bunch of people, a hundred people hunched over at desks with little dials,

and that that control room will shape the thoughts and feelings of a billion people.

This might sound like science fiction, but this actually exists right now, today.

I know because I used to be in one of those control rooms.

I was a design ethicist at Google where I studied how do you ethically steer people's thoughts?

Because what we don't talk about is a handful of people working at a handful of technology companies through their choices will steer

what a billion people are thinking today. Because when you pull out your phone and they design

how this works or what's on the feed, it's scheduling little blocks of time in our minds.

If you see a notification, it schedules you to have thoughts that maybe you

didn't intend to have. If you swipe over that notification, it schedules you into spending a little

bit of time getting sucked into something that maybe you didn't intend to get sucked into.

When we talk about technology, we tend to talk about it as this blue sky opportunity.

It could go any direction.

And I want to get serious for a moment and tell you why it's going in a very specific direction.

Because it's not evolving randomly.

There's a hidden goal driving the direction of all of the technology we make.

And that goal is the race for our attention. Because every news site, TED, elections, politicians,

games, even meditation apps have to compete for one thing, which is our attention.

And there's only so much of it.

And the best way to get people's attention is to know how someone's mind works.

And there's a whole bunch of persuasive techniques that I learned in college at a lab called the Persuasive Technology Lab

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