A New Paradigm for Technology | Tristan Harris, Jack Kornfield

[Music] I'm happy to be here with you tristana because he's another visionary and I love this guy he's really quite extraordinary you've been working for more than a decade now coming out of the the belly of Silicon Valley and becoming the conscience of some sedatives of of the valley and so forth and and speaking to people all around the world in Congress and Europeans and so forth and wanting to build a movement to transform technology all those kinds of things which feels really important so the first thing I want to ask is for your elevator pitch I'm going to get that because the work you doing is so important if you have an elevator pitch that says here's what I've seen and learned and where we are let's start with that and then I have some more follow-up questions that are more personal perhaps sure go ahead well I think many of you might already be aware of this overall work the issue is that technology is holding the pen of history right now what I mean by that is if 2 billion people every day more than the size of Christianity are jacked into Facebook for example and YouTube and that these products are not neutral but because of their stock prices being changed to how much human attention can we extract from society it creates this race to the bottom of the brainstem this competition for attention that determines increasingly the outcomes of everything we're seeing in society because people check their phones 80 times a day from the moment you wake up in the morning and you undo your alarm to the moment you go to bed and you set your alarm elections children's development mental health our culture our values are singly shaped by technology and it comes into conflict with the social fabric it across every layer layer it's very much like I mean Paul being the previous speaker is the perfect person to be after because this is kind of a form of climate change this is not about addiction it's not about being hooked to your phone it's a system that is designed to figure out what are deeper and deeper puppet strings in the human social psyche it's a pull and you win the lower you go so that's the problem that we have to solve and we can talk a lot more about all the things that have happened in the last year on progress has been made - but so in your Center Center for humane technology you've created the catalog of harms here's the way for you know chilled children's development were the harms of the misuse of it that feeds civil wars around the world or all of these kinds of things but I also know that you are trying to make a turn if you will and this really follows what Paul was saying of looking for the gift that Center for humane technology having seen the issues now is beginning to look toward building a movement to transform this can you say anything yeah so I guess I want to share some stuff that I haven't really shared before about what got us to this this point I used to be a technology entrepreneur my friends in college started some of these products one of my closest friends started Instagram at the Stanford persuasive technology lab we actually worked on an app together called send a sunshine which was the idea that you could use persuasive technology for good and if you had someone who was depressed because they were in a zip code where you had bad weather for seven days in a row it would send a text message to their friend and text text them and hey your friend sean has had bad weather would you send a photo of the sunshine to them and so that was actually something I worked on before the iPhone with the founder of Instagram and I saw how persuasive technology would be able to steer society there was actually the last class and this lab was on the future of persuasive technology in the ethics of persuasive technology and someone said well what if in the future you had a profile of every single person what would uniquely persuade their minds do they respond to signals of authority do they like jack Kornfield if you said jack Kornfield said something is true would they feel more likely to believe it and I realized how dangerous that would be if you had a perfect ability to manipulate every single human might and as they said in the introduction I was a magician as a kid and I've studied all the sort of lenses of persuasion and so I first tuned into it back then and then I landed at Google as a technology entrepreneur they bought our company and I was kind of depressed at Google because I was in the room with the people building Gmail and I thought if there was ever a room where people would be caring about their impact where emails impact on society email is a very stressful product it sort of shreds your attention it's a dopant you check your email once you check it again a minute later you read some bad climate news you check it again to run away from yourself it's a very stressful product and a lot I mean how many people here feel like they have a problem with email okay right so it's it's a thing right but no one talks about that so on the agenda right and I thought in the product design room that surely there must be some set of people that care about this but then if there was ever a room it would have been this room because this is the Gmail team this is the people building the product and there wasn't that conversation happening and I you know the story's been told but I made this presentation I actually went home every night from work around 6:00 7:00 p.m. and then I worked on it for about three or four hours every night for about a month and it was about how never before in history have you know billion people's thoughts that attention choices relationships been shaped by 50 designers engineers in Silicon Valley and this was a vacuum 2013 I was very nervous I was really lost at Google I didn't know what I was doing and I didn't know whether this presentation we had and but I released it and went viral and I sort of informally got this role as a design ethicists because no one had ever figured this out what does it mean to ethically shape two billion people's thoughts and I saw increasingly as I started with deeper you know this is just game theory everyone's caught in this race for attention they can't not do this YouTube has to get people's attention if they let go then Facebook's just going to swoop in so they're they're caught they're all bound it's not that there's evil bad people but they're caught by this race and in seeing all this I just want to say I mean there were probably two years that went by when I had almost no idea what to do it's amazing that so much of this conversation has transformed there's been a lot of huge accomplishments we can probably talk about but there were literally days or weeks where I felt like all I did was check my email and read Wikipedia and I say that because I had no idea it's like when you actually see climate change you see this huge thing like this is gonna affect attention mental health depression you know showing kids infinite evidence of their friends having fun without them we've never before done that we took we've just created a world where now hundred million teenagers it's never been easier to see infinite scrolling evidence your friends are having fun without you look what we did for the world yeah wiring kids together into social pressure you know social management reputation management so now they like you know my friend Susie like that photo but she didn't like this one but I saw her like that other friends photo that guy and if she doesn't like mine and all of that reputation management is this just ridiculous thing we've thrown on the backs of these young people anyway and seeing all of this in a way that you would see climate change right it's like it's easy to get distracted by one issued like addiction we're hooked to our phones or another issue you know mental health what we're doing to kid's mental health or elections but when you see it all together it's like connecting you know the coral reefs and the species lost in the Amazon and the Hurricanes and the wildfires and saying there's actually a common force that's driving all that and upon seeing that I felt incredibly hopeless because there really wasn't much support which is why I was saying you know I I would spend weeks inside of Google sometimes just answering emails and just saying once you see this big thing what do you do what do you do if you saw that right I had no idea and I tried for two years inside if we will try and change some things I didn't get very far and I decided in January 2016 to leave and to create a public conversation and I had no idea what that would look like I didn't know what it meant to say we're gonna launch a movement or we're gonna how do you do that I mean I literally I was a trained as a product designer product engineer computer scientist I don't know anything about social movements and you know there was just I just what I want to communicate is just the the many years in which almost nothing happens like for years basically until I think the thing that really kicked off was sixty minutes I was on 60 minutes in April 2017 and you know that really woke the whole world up to what was called brain hacking or persuasive technology and the fact that it's not by accident it's by design and that happening after the the election of Trump and the Russia stuff that came out I think just exploded this issue into the popular culture but what I want to get you know communicated to all of you is just how hopeless it felt for years and how when you're in the present experience of hopelessness not briefly but for years how you also couldn't see things that are happening now because but so you're in a way you're a whistleblower which is a really hard role to hold I've tried to connect you with Daniel Ellsberg who's very sympathetic to whistleblowers and to make this connection yeah so you carry that weight you were depressed you tried to do it without any compadres or people then all of a sudden you're invited into the halls of power it becomes a public conversation we have to look at what technology is doing what AI will do what and so forth but then you said a phrase we've heard elsewhere that there really aren't adults in the room that you can go to Congress and talk to people and they don't understand so what do you do you know you talked about amusing ourselves to death and and and so forth is it possible to get people to understand who how how does this move from having taken over our lives to be transformed when there are an adults in the room what have you found yeah not to wallow in the the dark stuff but it's a real I want to get to the positive but when you what I did say this last year too you know we found ourselves in the Senate Intelligence Committee when they're first starting the investigation of Russia I've met the former secretary of defense I've met you know heads of state I was a macron event and France last year and you with all these people and from a distance you think oh my god these majestic buildings these suits you know there's just power and then you you know it's my friend Michael Murphy the founder of Esalen says when you walk into the halls of power you realize the whole thing's held held together and with scotch tape and why would you know people and positions at the Pentagon or the Department of Defense know anything about how social medias nooks and crannies could be manipulated and then you realize that you know we and our friends are some of the best people that we had and that's an enormous responsibility and and then that's that's the hardest part and then the good part is so all of you will work so hard to try and change the world to the one you want it to be you suddenly find yourself in a position where you can change it and that creates now this whole wave of pressure to say the waves are coming grab your surfboard and jump on a wave because thanks and there is a huge cost to that I mean that some of you know from whatever activism that you do when when there suddenly is interest in an issue you've got to jump on it and and get it to go and I want to say it was just leading him with some of the positive things that have happened in the last year so here you have this situation this race to the bottom of the brainstem to you know grab human attention and through either fearful images or whatever it is that will activate them right most primitive parts of use to allure you or frighten you in some way whether it's political or social in any way exactly it starts with the autoplay on YouTube it's a five-four three-two-one will remove the stopping queue stopping queues or how your mind is to wake up and say maybe I want to do something else but if I take the stop in queue away you just keep going it's like a conversation you can't leave because the person keeps talking they're not giving you a stopping cues if you get out so but that's the innocuous part then we have to get deeper in the attention economy so we have to go into tribalism if you watch what Russia did there is a whole thing to pride an identity you know so you know tribalism works better than attention economy and it's race to the bottom of the brainstem outraged negative emotions spread faster than positive emotions false things spread six times faster than true things so okay sorry there this but this is the race to the bottom for the attention economy what I wanted to say was in the last year it was actually since wisdom last year and May of last year Apple and Google both launched digital well-being initiatives the same month setting off from a race to the bottom a race to the top for who can care more about people's well-being now I don't want to claim this as massive success because this is like in the road map of what we need to do point zero one baby steps in the direction of what we need but if you asked me back at Google back when there was those days of just rethink Wikipedia and answering emails and having no idea that this would ever change that Apple Google both launching digital wellbeing initiatives including the phrase time well-spent in their messaging implementing features like greyscale when you look at your Android phone or your friend's Android phone late at night and it's suddenly gray that's gonna ship on a billion phones by the end of the year now I'm not saying that's like the big success we're looking for but to go from no change to a now a race to the top through public pressure it's through language and conversation if you think about what does it mean to have pressure it's it's actually a human experience what does it mean for this to be a movement where does the movement exist where is it is there some blob in reality you can draw an outline and say that's the movement or is it just the way that language starts to and conversation starts to create a shared conversation so if you're at Google and you go to three meetings in one day and someone says have you heard of technology hijacking our minds their race for attention and why we need time well-spent and you have three meetings in one day that say that that's pressure and that's not a lot to create that surround sound that's just three conversations that a human embodied animal has to in their meetings throughout the day experience so what's been amazing for me is seeing the way that language and conversation are the movement and you all are in a position many of you are between the mindfulness worlds and have these values and you're also some of you inside the technology companies here or work with them or know them and it's actually a matter of creating that conversation that leads to that change so so take not Han famously said that the next Buddha will be the Sangha will be the community it's not going to be one person and in some way I think both for the predicament were in with the development of AI and with all the internet and all the things that like climate change we really have to look at how it's affecting our lives and our consciousness I worry about you as the whistleblower one of the carriers of this and I want you to have support and then I think about technology freeze in some way and realize that what's going to make the change is just what you're saying is having in some way realizing that the people who are going to make the change is is us you know you're able to be a voice for it but you need support in some way and I want to ask how many of you in this room feel that you would like in your own way to support a transformation to humane technology just to raise your hand awesome I want you to feel that and know that these are these are your peeps yeah you know so that's important to say Tristan we were just about to finish up Chris time he's going to be down at the Q & A stage just after this and two other things too to say is to connect it one is Paul talked so beautifully about how in the problem there is an opportunity or a gift and you've given years of your life and a kind of passion to show us the problem and now turning toward gift in solution but I want us to feel that with the in technology there is some possibilities yes that we could really change the world supporting the work you're doing in our ourselves collectively and one of the little things that we've been or projects we're talking about is to do what Paul did for climate change with draw down a kind of crowdsourcing of the best expert around the world to say what are the hundred things we can all do that will reverse global warming that we're also talking about doing a drawdown for technology and getting fifty or hundred people around the world to bring the best vision and say not one solution but what are the 50 things that we can do so if you're interested you can go to Q&A stage and listen to Tristan or sign up with him and with open source compassion which will also be down there and participate in some way mostly I want you to feel the goodwill of this room and all those hands my friend thinks it's hard being young and being whistleblowers ain't easy you know and then you go and talk to President McCrone and he's a nice guy but he's kind of clueless about what's happening you know and we don't have to talk about Washington DC so we need you he needs you and you need him and we're in it together and thank you - thank you so much - thank you [Applause]

Channel: Wisdom 2.0 with Soren Gordhamer

Views: 3,144

Keywords: Wisdom 2.0, 2019, Mindfulness, Meditation, San Francisco, Wisdom, Soren, Gordhamer, Practice

Id: 5VS_xoRXdBQ

Length: 20min 5sec (1205 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 23 2019