Tristan Harris Quotes

Tristan [Harris] believes that what we are seeing is ‘the collective downgrading of humans and the upgrading of machines’. We are becoming less rational, less intelligent, less focused.

The average person checks their phone 150 times a day. Why do we do this? Are we making 150 conscious choices?

By shaping the menus we pick from, technology hijacks the way we perceive our choices and replaces them with new ones. But the closer we pay attention to the options we’re given, the more we’ll notice when they don’t actually align with our true needs.

The ultimate freedom is a free mind, and we need technology that’s on our team to help us live, feel, think and act freely. We need our smartphones, notifications screens and web browsers to be exoskeletons for our minds and interpersonal relationships that put our values, not our impulses, first. People’s time is valuable. And we should protect it with the same rigor as privacy and other digital rights.

The average person checks their phone 150 times a day. Why do we do this? Are we making 150 conscious choices? One major reason why is the #1 psychological ingredient in slot machines: intermittent variable rewards . . . Addictiveness is maximized when the rate of reward is most variable.

Right now it's as if all of our technology is basically only asking our lizard brain what's the best way to impulsively get you to do the nest tiniest thing with your time, instead of asking: in your life, what would be time well spent for you?

Social media start to look and feel more like products that's about maximising consumption and less like 'bicycles for our minds'.

Tristan Harris, un exgooglero y tecnofilósofo que ha dado con una nueva métrica del «tiempo bien invertido», ha sugerido un programa de dicho modelo alternativo.)

The former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris writes often and eloquently about the ways tech “hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities.

A handful of people, working at a handful of technology companies, through their choices will steer what a billion people are thinking today . . . I don’t know a more urgent problem than this . . . It’s changing our democracy, and it’s changing our ability to have the conversations and relationships that we want with each other.’ —Tristan Harris, former Google employee

I don't know a more urgent problem than this. Because this problem is underneath all other problems.

We shape more than eleven billion interruptions to people's lives every day. This is nuts!' The people sitting around you in the Googleplex, [Tristan Harris] explained, control more than 50 percent of all the notifications on all the phones in the whole world. We are 'creating an arms race that causes companies to find more reasons to steal people's time,' and it 'destroys our common silence and ability to think.

Imagine walking into a control room with a bunch of people hunched over a desk with little dials, and that that control room will shape the thoughts and feelings of a billion people. This might sound like science fiction, but this actually exists right now, today.

the phones we have, and the programs that run on them, were deliberately designed by the smartest people in the world to maximally grab and maximally hold our attention. [Tristan Harris] wants us to understand that this design is not inevitable. ...Humans could have made a different choice then, and they can make a different choice now. You could have all this technology, Tristan told me, but not design it to be maximally distracting. In fact, you could design it with the opposite goal: to maximally respect people's need for sustained attention, and to interrupt them as little as possible. You could design the technology not so that it pulls people away from their deeper and more meaningful goals, but so that it helps them achieve them. ...You could keep your phone on your laptop, and you could keep your social-media accounts - and have much better attention, if they were designed around a different set of incentives.

The popular 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma illustrates how AI’s personalization will cause you to be unconsciously manipulated by AI and motivated by profit from advertising. The Social Dilemma star Tristan Harris says: “You didn’t know that your click caused a supercomputer to be pointed at your brain. Your click activated billions of dollars of computing power that has learned much from its experience of tricking two billion human animals to click again.” And this addiction results in a vicious cycle for you, but a virtuous cycle for the big Internet companies that use this mechanism as a money-printing machine. The Social Dilemma further argues that this may narrow your viewpoints, polarize society, distort truth, and negatively affect your happiness, mood, and mental health. To put it in technical terms, the core of the issue is the simplicity of the objective function, and the danger from single-mindedly optimizing a single objective function, which can lead to harmful externalities. Today’s AI usually optimizes this singular goal—most commonly to make money (more clicks, ads, revenues). And AI has a maniacal focus on that one corporate goal, without regard for users’ well-being.

The job of a magician is - at heart - to manipulate your focus. That coin didn't really vanish - but your attention was somewhere else when the magician moved it, so when your focus comes back to the original spot, you're amazed. To learn magic is to learn to manipulate someone's attention without them even realising it - and once the magician controls their focus, Tristan [Harris] realised, he can do what he wants. One of the things that he was taught at camp is that a person's susceptibility to magic has nothing to do with their intelligence. 'It's about something more subtle,' he said later. It's 'about the weaknesses, or the limits, or the blind spots, or the biases that we're all trapped inside of.' Magic, in other words, is the study of the limits of the human mind. You think you control your attention; you think that if somebody messes with it, you will know, and you'll be able to spot and resist it right away, but, in reality, we are fallible sacks of meat, and we are fallible in predictable ways that can be figured out by magicians and messed with.

The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.”—Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google * “A handful of people, working at a handful of technology companies, through their choices will steer what a billion people are thinking today . . . I don’t know a more urgent problem than this . . . It’s changing our democracy, and it’s changing our ability to have the conversations and relationships that we want with each other.”—Tristan Harris, former Google employee

As the technology critic Tristan Harris likes to say, each time you open a social media app, there are “a thousand people on the other side of the screen” paid to keep you there—and so it’s unrealistic to expect users to resist the assault on their time and attention by means of willpower alone.

[Tristan Harris] told them: 'You can try having self-control, but there are a thousand engineers on the other side of the screen working against you.' ...I am in favour of each individual piece of advice [Nir Eyal] offers. You should really take out your phone now and turn off your notifications. You really should figure out your internal triggers. ...But it's not 'pretty simple' to get from that to being able to pay attention in an environment designed - in part by Nir himself - to invade and raid your focus.

this is a core insight of magic - you can manipulate people and they don't even know it's happening. They will swear to you that they made their own free choices ... 'It works because they don't have to know your strengths - they just have to know your weaknesses. How well do you know your weaknesses?' I wanted to believe I understood my weaknesses very well, but Tristan [Harris] shook his head gently. ...Magicians play on these weaknesses to delight and entertain us. As Tristan grew up, he became part of another group of people who were figuring out our weaknesses to manipulate us - but they had very different goals.

Aza [Raskin] said: 'For instance, Facebook tomorrow could start batching your notifications, so you only get one push notification a day ... They could do that tomorrow.' ....So instead of getting 'this constant drip of behavioural cocaine,' telling you every few minutes that somebody liked your picture, commented on your post, has a birthday tomorrow, and on and on - you would get one daily update, like a newspaper, summarising it all. You'd be pushed to look once a day, instead of being interrupted several times an hour. 'Here's another one,' he said 'Infinite scroll. ...it's catching your impulses before your brain has a chance to really get involved and make a decision.' Facebook and Instagram and the others could simply turn off infinite scroll - so that when you get to the bottom of the screen, you have to make a conscious decision to carry on scrolling. Similarly, these sites could simply switch off the things that have been shown to most polarise people politically, stealing our ability to pay collective attention. Since there's evidence YouTube's recommendation engine is radicalising people, Tristan [Harris] told one interviewer: 'Just turn it off. They can turn it off in a heartbeat.' It's not as if, he points out, the day before recommendations were introduced, people were lost and clamouring for somebody to tell them what to watch next. Once the most obvious forms of mental pollution have been stopped, they said, we can begin to look deeper, at how these sites could be redesigned to make it easier for you to restrain yourself and think about your longer-term goals. ...there could be a button that says 'here are all your friends who are nearby and are indicating they'd like to meet up today.' You click it, you connect, you put down your phone and hang out with them. Instead of being a vacuum sucking up your attention and keeping it away from the outside world, social media would become a trampoline, sending you back into that world as efficiently as possible, matched with the people you want to see. Similarly, when you set up (say) a Facebook account, it could ask you how much time you want to spend per day or per week on the site. ...then the website could help you to achieve your goal. One way could be that when you hit that limit, the website could radically slow down. In tests, Amazon found that even 100 milliseconds of delay in the pace at which a page loads results in a substantial drop-off in people sticking around to buy the product. Aza said: 'It just gives your brain a chance to catch up to your impulse and [ask] - do I really want to be here? No.' In addition, Facebook could ask you at regular intervals - what changes do you want to make to your life? ...then match you up with other people nearby... who say they also want to make that change and have indicated they are looking for the equivalent of gym buddies. ...A battery of scientific evidence shows that if you want to succeed in changing something, you should meet up with groups of people doing the same. At the moment, they said, social media is designed to grab your attention and sell it to the highest bidder, but it could be designed to understand your intentions and to better help you achieve them. Tristan and Aza told me that it's just as easy to design and program this life-affirming Facebook as the life-draining Facebook we currently have. I think that most people, if you stopped them in the street and painted them a vision of these two Facebooks, would say they wanted the one that serves your intentions. So why isn't it happened? It comes back... to the business model.

People were, [Tristan Harris] warned, living 'on a treadmill of continuous checking.

Tristan Harris, former Google design ethicist and expert in how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities, compares social media notifications to slot machines.51 They both deliver variable rewards: you’re curious, will I have two Likes or two hundred? You click the app icon and wait for the wheels to turn—a second, two, three, piquing your anticipation only makes the reward sweeter: you have nineteen Likes. Will it be more in an hour? You’ll have to check to find out. And while you’re there, here are these fake news stories that bots have been littering the information space with. Feel free to share them with your friends, even if you haven’t read them—you know you’ll get your tribe’s approval by sharing more of what they already believe.

Can I call you Daddy?” I tease. Tristan’s eyes flick over to me and then drop down to my breasts. Dirty bastard. “He’s not your daddy, Mom,” Patrick announces. “He’s ours, you already have a dad.” Tristan chuckles and picks up my hand and kisses my fingertips. “Oh for god’s sake, concentrate on the road,” Harry moans.

Digital technology often similarly constrains user choice. We often hear that design is a conversation with the user; in tech, the conversation is woefully one-sided. In the words of former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris, ‘whoever controls the menu controls the choices’. Short of learning a programming language, you can’t make a computer do anything its interface doesn’t allow. Design decisions, therefore, give technologies the power to enforce behaviour–and hence moral conduct–in the designer’s absence.

as revealed by whistleblowers and researchers like Tristan Harris, Sean Parker, Leah Pearlman, and Adam Alter, these technologies are in many cases specifically designed to trigger this addictive behavior. Compulsive use, in this context, is not the result of a character flaw, but instead the realization of a massively profitable business plan.