The peril (and promise) of AI with Tristan Harris: Part 1

How I Built This · 22 Feb 2024 · 28m

What this episode covers

Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, explains how the incentive structures of the attention economy drive harmful outcomes, a lesson he first learned while building his company Apture in the mid-2000s. He details his 2013 internal Google presentation warning about the impact of designers at Google, Apple, and Facebook on global attention, and how the rapid adoption of social media and now AI outpaces human cognitive adaptation. Harris argues that the race to build artificial general intelligence by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind mirrors the Manhattan Project, creating existential risks through uncontrolled scaling of Transformer-based models.

Mentioned

Companies
Center for Humane Technology, Apture, Google, Apple, Facebook, OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind
Products
GPT-4, GPT-3.5, The Social Dilemma, The AI Dilemma

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