Can We Avoid AI Catastrophe? (with Tech Ethicist Tristan Harris)

About this episode

“I get calls from people inside of some of the AI labs,” says technology ethicist Tristan Harris. “And it feels like getting a call from Robert Oppenheimer before the atomic bomb.” Harris (a former Google insider and AI expert) has spent more than a decade sounding the alarm about the effects of technology on our wellbeing. He’s currently the co-founder of Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to align technology with humanity’s best interests. In light of Anthropic whistleblower Jacob Coxon’s recent resignation (0:45), which has since been echoed by Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Sam Altman (OpenAI), and Elon Musk (1:30), we wanted to represent our prescient conversation with Harris from this spring. We discuss The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist (6:30), how AI has developed over the past ten years (10:12), why the most powerful figures in tech are preparing for doomsday scenarios (13:15), the AI arms race underway (15:45), the ‘balance sheet of benefits’ that shapes Silicon Valley’s thinking around AGI (24:30) and the unsettling lack of control being exercised over their own nascent systems (33:55). On the back-half, we talk about Chat