The Social Dilemma's Tristan Harris on Technology Moving Faster Than Regulation

The Joe Rogan Experience I do have an opinion on algorithms and I do have an opinion on what it does do to young girls self-esteem and you have teenage daughters yes I just think I mean in young girls are a point of focus for why their point of focus more than young boys I'm not entirely sure I guess it has to do with their emotional makeup and and there's higher risk of self-harm due to social media and Jonathan hate talked about that in his book The coddling of the American mind um it's it's very clear that it's very damaging and I my kids uh you know my 13 year old does have like interactions with their friends and I do see how they bully each other and talk about each other and it's it's they get so angry and mad at each other um it is a factor but it's a it's an algorithm issue right it's there's multiple things here so the first thing is um just to kind of set the stage a little bit uh I always use EO Wilson the sociobiologist who who uh sort of defined what what the problem statement for Humanity is he said the fundamental problem of humanity is we have Paleolithic emotions and brains like easy brains that are hackable for magicians we have medieval institutions you know government that's not really good at seeing the latest tech whether it was railroads or now social media or AI or deep fakes or whatever is coming next and then we have god-like technology so we have Paleolithic emotions medieval institutions god-like technology you combine that fact that's the fundamental problem statement how do we wield the power of gods without the love prudence and wisdom of gods there's actually something that Daniel taught me and um then you add to that the race to the bottom of the brain stem for attention what is their business model just to review the basics everybody knows this now but it's it's engagement it's like how do I get that attention at all costs yeah so algorithms is one piece of that meaning um when you're on a news feed like I don't want to just show you any news I want to show you the most viral engaging like longest argumentative comment threads news right so that's like pointing a trillion dollar market cap AI at your brain saying I'm going to show you the next perfect Boogeyman for your nervous system the thing that's going to make you upset angry whether it's masks vaccines Francis Haugen whatever the thing is it will just drive that over and over again and then repeat that thing and that's one of the the tools in the Arsenal to get attention is that the algorithms another one is technology making design decisions like how do we inflate people's sense of uh beautification filters in fact just recently since we talked last time um I think it's a MIT tech review article showing that um they're all they're all competing first of all to like inflate your sense of beauty so they're doing the the I think people know this stuff it's very obvious but they're competing for who can give you a nicer filter right and then now instead of waiting for you to actually add one Tick Tock was actually found to actually do like a two percent like just bare beautification filter on the no filter mode because the thing is once they do that the other guys have to do it too so I just want to name that all of this is taking place in this race to capture human attention because if I don't do it the other guy will and then it's happening with design decisions like the beautification filters and like the follow you and if you follow me I'll follow you back in the like button and check pull to refresh the dopamine stuff that's all design then there's the algorithms which is I'm pointing at a thing at your brain to figure out what how can I show you an infinite feed that just maximally enrages you and we should talk about that because that thing drives polarization which breaks democracy but that's a that's a we can get into that oh Daniel let's bring you in here so how did you guys uh meet and how did this uh sort of dynamic duo come about yeah I was working on studying kind of catastrophic risks writ large you've had people on the show talking about risks associated with AI and with crispr and genetic engineering and with climate change and environmental issues and pull up to the microphone there and there you go escalation Pathways to war and all these kinds of things and basically how can it depend right and I think it's a pretty common question of like how long do we have on which of these and are we doing a good job of tending to them so that we get to solve the rest of them and then for me it was there were so many of them what was in common driving them are there any kind of like societal generator functions of all the catastrophic risks that we can address with to make a more uh resilient civilization writ large Tristan was working on the social media issues and um when you had Eric on he talked about the twin nuclei problem of atomic energy and kind of genetic engineering and basically saying these are extremely powerful technologies that we don't have the wisdom to Steward that power well well in addition to that is all things computation does right there's a few other major categories and computation has the ability to as as you mentioned with Facebook get to billions of people in a very very short period of time compared to how quickly the railroads expanded or like any other type of tech get to a billion people a billion users which they did in like a few years versus before that it took software companies like Microsoft even longer than that before that took railroads even longer than that so the power of this Tech is you can compress the timeline so you're getting you know a scale of a billion people's uh you're impacting a billion people in deeper ways much faster which means that if you're blind to something if you don't know what you might be doing the consequences show up faster than you can actually remediate them when we say exponential Tech we mean a number of things we mean Tech that makes more powerful versions of itself so I can use computer chips to model how to make better computer chips and then those better computer chips can recursively do that we also mean exponential speed of impact exponential scale of impact exponentially more Capital return Burns exponentially smaller numbers of people capable of achieving a scale of impact and so when he's mentioning god-like powers and kind of medieval institutions the speed at which our Tech is having influences in the world and not just first order influences the obvious stuff but the second and third order ones Facebook isn't trying to polarize the population it's an externality it's a side effect of the thing they're trying to do which is to optimize ad Revenue but the speed at which new technologies are having effects on the world and the total amount of consequence is way faster than regulation can keep up with and just by that alone we should be skeptical of any government's ability to regulate something that's moving faster than it faster than it can appraise of what the hell is even happening in the first place not only that you need someone who really understands the technology and you're not going to get that from elected officials you're going to need someone who's working on it and has a comprehensive understanding of how the stuff works how it's engineered where it goes you're I mean I'm skeptical of the government being able to regulate almost everything

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Length: 6min 38sec (398 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 18 2021