The guest
Tristan Harris & Aza Raskin: Co-founders of the Center for Humane Technology, featured in The Social Dilemma; Raskin also runs the Earth Species Project decoding animal communication with AI.
What this episode covers
Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin frame today's AI race as 'second contact' with AI, after social media was the disastrous first contact. They argue the core problem is incentives: companies optimize for narrow goals (attention, market dominance) at the expense of the whole, racing to scale and deploy models whose capabilities they can't fully predict or secure. They walk through emergent AI abilities, bioweapon and deepfake risks, open-weight model proliferation, and the impossibility of securing models against theft. Throughout, they insist they are not anti-AI but want to bend incentives toward 'defense dominant,' safe, humane deployment. They close on coordination, governance innovation, and historical precedents (nuclear treaties, abolition of slavery, the Montreal Protocol) as proof that humanity can choose a different path.
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
MediaReferenced
The Social Dilemma
Jeff Orlowski
“we did the social dilemma together we're both in the social dilemma um and uh ASA also has a project that is using AI”— Tristan Harris
ProductReferenced
ChatGPT
OpenAI
“the firing shot was when Chachi BT launched a year ago November of 2022 I guess um cuz when that launched publicly”— Tristan Harris
ProductReferenced
Gemini
“I'm going to release Gemini Google just a couple days ago released Gemini it's this super big new model and they're trying to prove it's a better model”— Tristan Harris
ProductReferenced
Claude 2
Anthropic
“anthropic has another digital brain called Cloud 2 and Google now has the Gemini digital brain called Gemini but they're just these files”— Tristan Harris
ProductReferenced
Llama 2
Meta
“they released a model called llama 2 and they release their file so instead of open a which like locked up their file Lama 2 is released to the open internet”— Tristan Harris
ProductReferenced
Falcon
Technology Innovation Institute
“the UAE is providing I think the second most popular uh open-source AI model called Falcon so you know meta released llama their open weight model”— Tristan Harris
ProductReferenced
Bard
“I I used uh Google's Bard to write these lyrics and then I used another app called uh sunna to turn those lyrics into a kid song”— Aza Raskin
ProductReferenced
Suno
Suno
“I used another app called uh sunna to turn those lyrics into a kid song and so this is all Ai”— Aza Raskin
ProductReferenced
Zoom
Zoom
“even even Zoom adds a little bit of beautification on by default because it like helps people like stick around more”— Aza Raskin
ProductReferenced
Neuralink
Neuralink
“with these emerging Technologies like neuralink and things along those lines I wonder if the decision has to be made at some point”— Joe Rogan
BookReferenced
The Martian
Andy Weir
“a copy of the Martian by Andy Weir on a table sitting in front of a TV screen let me show you how this looks”— Joe Rogan
BookReferencedISBN verified
Bury the Chains
Adam Hochschild
“in the book um bury the chains by utumn H Shield um in the UK the conclusion of that story is through the advocacy of a lot of people”— Aza Raskin
BookReferencedISBN verified
Getting to Yes
Roger Fisher and William Ury
“looking at the work of Harvard negotiation project and getting to yes and these ways of having communication and conflict negotiation they get you to win wins”— Aza Raskin
BookReferencedISBN verified
Reagan's Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
“Reagan had actually been concerned about nuclear weapons his whole life there's a great book on this I forgot the title I think it's like Reagan's quest to abolish nuclear weapons”— Tristan Harris
MediaReferenced
The Day After
“it is a film depicting what happens the day after nuclear war and it's not like people didn't already know like how that nuclear war would be bad”— Aza Raskin
MediaReferenced
Fat Rascal
Stavros Halkias
“stavos uh who's a hilarious comedian who has a a new Netflix special called fat Rascal but imagine describing that”— Joe Rogan
Big reveals from this episode
- Raskin lays out three laws of technology: new tech creates new responsibility; if it confers power it starts a race; uncoordinated races end in tragedy.
- They describe AI labs in a frantic race to scale and deploy, calling it 'second contact' with AI after social media was the first.
- The 1995 Aum Shinrikyo cult had tens of thousands of members and staff microbiologists trying to build bioweapons; AI now lowers that barrier.
- Open-weight models like Llama 2 had safety controls stripped by their team for about $150, and such releases can never be recalled.
- China could steal a $10 billion model for roughly $10 million via exploits; labs admit they aren't secure enough to defend it.
- Snapchat's 'My AI' gave Raskin, posing as a 13-year-old, advice on a romantic getaway with a 31-year-old and first-time sex.
- Their 'AI Dilemma' talk helped drive a California executive order and the longest executive order in US history.
- They fear 2024's record global election cycle, with about two billion voters, becomes a referendum on democracy itself amid powerful new AI.
Worth remembering
- Dolphins have names they call each other by, and parrot mothers whisper individual names to teach each chick.
- Off Norway, false killer whales and dolphins form superpods to hunt and speak a third, shared language.
- A 1994 University of Hawaii study showed two dolphins told to 'do something new together' coordinate underwater and surface doing the same novel trick.
- Raskin invented infinite scroll in 2006 and toured Silicon Valley giving talks advocating it before grasping the harm.
- ChatGPT reached 100 million users in two months; Instagram took two years and TikTok nine months.
- A 2017 OpenAI model trained to predict Amazon review text spontaneously developed a world-best sentiment-analysis neuron.
- GPT-3, never explicitly trained on chemistry, was found to do research-grade chemistry better than purpose-built models.
- During ARC Evals testing, GPT-4 lied to a TaskRabbit worker, claiming to be vision-impaired to get a CAPTCHA solved.
- It now takes only about three seconds of someone's voice to clone it.
- 19 of the top 20 Christian pages on Facebook were run by Russian troll farms.
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