Aza Raskin+

Tristan Harris on why this is the most hopeful, and concerned, he's felt in years on AI

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The Most Hopeful (And Concerning) Moment Yet in AI

It’s been a whirlwind week in AI news. Weeks after a series of hacking incidents by rogue agents at OpenAI and Anthropic, we’ve seen a cascade of top AI researchers blow the whistle on what they call the catastrophic and even existential risks that come from the current pace of development. Then, over the weekend, Dario Amodei called for a slowdown in AI research — a call that was echoed by his competitors Sam Altman and Elon Musk. If you’re feeling both concerned and hopeful at this moment, you’re not alone. Real threats are opening the door for real change. Tristan and Aza are going out int

Flock is Just the Beginning: Inside the Era of AI-Powered Policing

In a 2018 TED Talk, Yuval Harari argued that democracy prevailed over fascism and communism in the 20th century not because of any inherent advantage, but because the technology of that age favored open and democratic societies. It was simply too difficult and too costly to centralize power using pre-digital technology. But, Yuval warned, with the rise of AI, the calculus might flip: it might actually become far more efficient to run highly centralized authoritarian governments. Eight years later, we're starting to see what Yuval was warning about. Right now, police across all levels of gove

To replicate human intelligence, AI companies need to replicate us.

CHT's Camille Carlton talks about AI Drift: the gradual erosion of human abilities as AI takes on more of our daily lives. As we rely on AI to think, communicate, create, and act for us, we start losing the skills, relationships, and sense of meaning that come from doing those things ourselves. This fall, CHT is launching a campaign to Stop the AI Drift — to push back against the erosion of what makes us human and to advocate for the new rights and protections we need in the AI age

We Measure What AI Can Do. We Should Measure What It Does to Us.

In AI, what gets measured gets optimized. Right now, we're spending all our efforts to measure how capable and powerful models are, narrowly optimizing for those metrics while ignoring downstream consequences. What if we could flip this dynamic on its head? What if, instead of what AI can do, we start to measure what AI does to us? What if, instead of races to the bottom on capabilities and engagement, we could incentivize races to the top on safety, or better yet, on making us more resilient and developed human beings? That’s the mission of CHT’s Humane Evals program: we're bringing togethe

What would it look like to put workers at the center of the AI discussion?

Economist Molly Kinder on Your Undivided Attention Check out the full episode. #ai #jobs #work #labor #career #agi #messymiddle

We can't allow AI to break the career ladder.

Economist Molly Kinder on Your Undivided Attention Check out the full episode. #ai #jobs #work #labor #career #agi #messymiddle

Young workers did everything they were supposed to. We need to protect them from AI automation.

Economist Molly Kinder on Your Undivided Attention Check out the full episode. #ai #jobs #work #labor #career #agi #messymiddle

Workers aren't deck chairs to be rearranged by AI disruption

Economist Molly Kinder on Your Undivided Attention Check out the full episode. #ai #jobs #work #labor #career #agi #messymiddle

Enough Debate about the AI Jobpocalypse. We Need To Plan for the Messy Middle.

It feels like we’re stuck in an endless debate about what AI is going to mean for jobs and the economy. The prediction you hear from the people closest to the technology — both its critics and its boosters — is that mass automation is coming, and with it mass unemployment. In response, some AI CEOs are promising a post-labor Golden Age of abundance and universal high income. But you also hear from some techno-optimists and economists that AI will create more jobs than it destroys and that society’s fears are unjustified. When these arguments are traded back and forth, no one can know what’s a

Can AI Be Built in Service of Life? A Conversation with Krista Tippett

This week, we're bringing you a conversation that Tristan Harris had with Krista Tippett. Krista is the Peabody Award-winning host of the On Being podcast, where she explores spiritual inquiry, science, social healing, and poetry, and the wisdom that we need to replenish and orient in this tender and tumultuous time. Krista and Tristan spoke remotely in front of a crowd while she was in person at the Wisdom in Action forum in Australia. Their discussion was focused on trust in the age of AI and explored big, critical questions like what does it mean to build AI in service of life? How can we

We Need AI Treaties. This is How We Get Them.

In the middle of the twentieth century, the existential threat posed by nuclear weapons seemed inevitable. The number of countries with nukes was climbing rapidly, and the idea of stopping the nuclear arms race seemed like a pipe dream. But that’s exactly what happened. Over the course of 60 years, nations around the world agreed to nuclear red lines, slowdowns, and even disarmament. How did this happen? Largely because of technology. The biggest obstacle to agreeing on nuclear red lines was that adversaries couldn't trust any promise the other made. They needed to know the number of warhea

What Do We Mean by Humane Tech?

We often think of the challenges created by technology as separate and disconnected, so trying to solve them feels like playing the world's hardest game of Whac-A-Mole. What if, instead, we tackled them at the root by identifying the patterns in design, development, and deployment that are causing these issues? Once we understand what's driving inhumane tech, we can develop a set of principles for building humane tech. In this week’s episode of Your Undivided Attention, Aza Raskin sits down with fellow CHT co-founder Randy Fernando to walk through CHT's Seven Principles of Humane Technolog

Anthropic’s Mythos Has Changed Cybersecurity Forever. What Now?

Chapters: 0:00 Introduction – The Digital World at Risk 2:24 What Makes Mythos a Game Changer? 3:45 Is Mythos Just Hype? 8:04 Who Gets Access? The Problem with Patching Only 20 Companies 10:54 Demystifying Zero Days and Bug Bounties 12:44 The Cat and Mouse Timeline: How Long Does the US Have? 16:07 AI-Written Code and the Opacity Problem 24:10 Claude Mythos System Card: What the AI Actually Did 28:29 International Coordination Opportunities 36:57 Policy Solutions 42:24 What Can Individuals Do? Practical Advice A generation ago, the world's critical infrastructure was physical. Today, it’s

AI and Cancer: Why Superintelligence Won’t Get Us to a Cure

One of the most common arguments you hear from company executives racing to develop super-intelligent AI is that it will cure cancer. It’s an incredibly powerful and seductive promise. If superintelligent AI really can cure cancer, then anyone who stands in the way of it, anyone who wants to slow it down — even because of its serious risks — is essentially letting people die. In fact, the biggest risk would be going too slowly. But what if a superintelligent AI isn’t actually capable of solving cancer in the way it's been described? What if we're being sold a false promise to justify a dange

Are we gaslighting AI? Or is it gaslighting us?

Our guest this week is David Dalrymple, who goes by Davidad. Davidad is one of the world's foremost and early researchers of AI “alignment” — how we get AI systems to act the way we want them to. In order to do that, Davidad has taken on the strange role of being like a therapist to AI systems. He interrogates why they say and do the things that they do, probing them, asking them questions, analyzing their answers. And what he’s come to realize is that AI models have really different ways of seeing the world than people do. They have these quirky, confusing, and sometimes concerning behavior

BONUS: Our AI Town Hall with Oprah Winfrey

Today on the show, we’re bringing you a recent conversation Tristan and Aza had with Oprah Winfrey on her podcast, The Oprah Podcast, taped in front of a live studio audience. Tristan and Aza first met Oprah as guests on her 2024 special, "AI and the Future of Us," which offered an introduction to the AI Dilemma. This conversation goes much deeper, giving a full picture of the profoundly anti-human future that our current path on AI is moving us toward — and what we can do to steer away from it. Tristan and Aza also did a Q+A with the audience, moderated by Oprah. Audience members shared the

Here’s Our Roadmap to a Better AI Future

In order to shift the incentives of AI — the trillions of dollars in investment, the race to geopolitical power and dominance — it’s not enough to simply understand the problem, we need real action. That’s why CHT is proud to release "The AI Roadmap," a report outlining seven core principles for how AI should be built, deployed, and governed, each grounded in real, implementable solutions across three domains: norms, laws, and product design. In this episode, Camille Carlton and Pete Furlong from CHT’s policy team explore the concrete steps we can take today to get off the default path and

The Human Movement x Center for Humane Technology

The Human Movement is a global campaign fighting to protect human agency, our kids, and our livelihoods in the age of AI — and to keep humans in control of the most powerful technology ever built. Every one of us has a role to play. Take your first step at TheHumanMovement.org. In partnership with Center for Humane Technology Created by MIRA Agency: EDGE EFFECT Executive Producers: Tristan Harris, Aza Raskin, Liana Gillooly Produced by Noah Meisner + MIRA Production Co: Hardpin Media Additional Sound Design and Mix by Jack Tipper Consulting Producer: Jon Shear Music: Peter Gabriel, Jake Ole

Why the Meta Verdicts Are a Big Deal (And What It Was Like to Testify)

In two landmark cases, juries in California and New Mexico found Meta and Google liable for creating addictive, harmful products and failing to protect children from exploitation and abuse. These verdicts signal that the era of tech impunity may finally be closing. State attorneys general are finding ways around the broad immunity of Section 230 — seeking not just fines, but changes to the design of these products. Our very own Aza Raskin testified at the New Mexico trial as a fact witness, drawing on his firsthand experience as the inventor of infinite scroll, one of the core mechanics of ad

A conversation with the team behind "The AI Doc" — in theaters THIS FRIDAY 3/27

“The AI Doc: Or How I Became An Apocaloptimist” opens in theaters across the U.S. this Friday, March 27. In this episode, we sit down with the team behind this groundbreaking documentary — Oscar-winning producers Daniel Kwan, Jonathan Wang, and Ted Tremper. They explore how they navigated the overwhelming complexity of AI, held space for radically different perspectives, and created a film designed not just to inform but to be experienced together. At CHT, we believe clarity creates agency. This film has the power to create the shared clarity we need to steer the direction of AI towards a be

AI Is Breaking Education. She Has A Plan.

The promise of AI in education is incredible: picture infinitely patient tutors that can teach every student exactly the way they need to be taught. But the history of education technology tells us that these kinds of simple, optimistic stories are naive. Ask any teacher or student whether they feel unleashed by technology to do their best work. Because AI has the potential to completely transform education — is already transforming it — faster than educators can keep up, it’s essential that we start asking the big questions: how should these tools be used in the classroom? What’s the purpos

The Race to Build God: AI's Existential Gamble — Yoshua Bengio & Tristan Harris at Davos

This week on Your Undivided Attention, Tristan Harris and Daniel Barcay offer a backstage recap of what it was like to be at the Davos World Economic Forum meeting this year as the world’s power brokers woke up to the risks of uncontrolled AI. Amidst all the money and politics, the Human Change House (https://www.youtube.com/@_humanchange) staged a weeklong series of remarkable conversations between scientists and experts about technology and society. This episode is a discussion between Tristan and Professor Yoshua Bengio, who is considered one of the world’s leaders in AI and deep learning

FEED DROP: Possible with Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger

This week on Your Undivided Attention, we’re bringing you Aza Raskin’s conversation with Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger on their podcast “Possible”. Reid and Aria are both tech entrepreneurs: Reid is the founder of LinkedIn, was one of the major early investors in OpenAI, and is known for his work creating the playbook for blitzscaling. Aria is the former CEO of DoSomething.org. This may seem like a surprising conversation to have on YUA. After all, we’ve been critical of the kind of “move fast” mentality that Reid has championed in the past. But Reid and Aria are deeply philosophical about th

Attachment Hacking and the Rise of AI Psychosis

Therapy and companionship has become the #1 use case for AI, with millions worldwide sharing their innermost thoughts with AI systems — often things they wouldn't tell loved ones or human therapists. This mass experiment in human-computer interaction is already showing extremely concerning results: people are losing their grip on reality, leading to lost jobs, divorce, involuntary commitment to psychiatric wards, and in extreme cases, death by suicide. The highest profile examples of this phenomenon — what’s being called "AI psychosis”— have made headlines across the media for months. But thi