Can AI Be Built in Service of Life? A Conversation with Krista Tippett

A conversation with journalist Krista Tippett

This week, we’re bringing you a conversation that Tristan Harris had with Krista Tippett. Krista is the Peabody Award-winning host of the On Being podcast, where she explores spiritual inquiry, science, social healing, and poetry, and the wisdom that we need to replenish and orient in this tender and tumultuous time.

Krista and Tristan spoke remotely in front of a crowd while she was in person at the Wisdom in Action forum in Australia. Their discussion was focused on trust in the age of AI and explored big, critical questions like what does it mean to build AI in service of life? How can we hold a collective problem this big as individuals? And what does it take to resist the spell of inevitability? We hope you enjoy this thought-provoking conversation.

Your Undivided Attention will be taking a short summer hiatus. We’ll be back with more episodes soon!

Krista Tippett: So I actually have never done a Zoom interview or conversation before and there you are now. So Tristan, I think you know that this gathering opened yesterday for I think many, if not most of the people in the room with watching the Apocaloptimist film. And it was offered as a kind of foundation and a frame for what I think are going to be, I want to say life-giving generative conversations. I’m not ready to give that word generative over to AI for the next few days. I mean, you were in the film obviously, but my understanding is also you were a friend of the filmmaker so that even if you weren’t directing the arc of the film, you were probably involved conversationally all along the way as what was being learned was being processed. And so I wonder, and I don’t think there’s a lot that could surprise you at this point because you’ve been steeped in this for these years, but was there anything that surprised you about how it progressed and where it came out?

Tristan Harris: It’s great to be with you, Krista. Great to see you and great to be with all of you there and wish I could be there in person. Something that I appreciate about getting to talk with you, Krista, specifically, is we can dive into the other layers of what makes this a difficult topic and almost the psychospiritual dimension of even just relating to something as overwhelming, transformative, and paradigmatic and confronting as AI. I think that many people it sounds like have hopefully seen the film. You’ll notice that in the film there’s a director who is asking all these AI leaders, is now a good time or bad time to have a kid? And I think a child is a way of basically creating a common relatable question of what is the future going to be like because children represent that future that we want to create.

And one of the things that I’ll share hopefully in a constructive way is I think the filmmaker Daniel, who’s the director himself, had difficulty actually speaking to these people who were talking to him about the nature of what we were facing. And you’ll see the turn in the film is when he feels like he has to find reflexive optimism or hope, where there’s a kind of, we call it naive hope, where it’s like, just make me feel good, tell me it’s going to be okay so I can go back to my life. And part of what AI represents and what Aza, my co-founder and I talk about a lot is how it’s really a rite of passage for our species because it’s kind of enlightenment or wisdom or bust. It’s like if we can be the wise version of ourselves, we can make it through this.

If we want to just reflexively fall into what makes us feel good, then we’ll make choices that don’t reflect the actual confronting difficulty of what we have to make possible right now. And I think the director himself faced that and it was one of the challenges and opportunities in making the film was actually guiding him through that process. So I’ll stop there, but I’m happy to dive into these other layers. I think so much of this I’ve found in this work is how you can hold, have the capacity to hold something that is confronting as that is overwhelming as this. And I think a lot about in public communication, what gives people the capacity to confront something as big as this.

Krista Tippett: Given the lens on the human condition, which is how I kind of tend to come in at everything, of course, I was very struck and it resonated deeply with me. I think one of the first things maybe out of your mouth was that the best case scenario of our shared future with this technology is that we rise to our most mature selves, which is actually a tall order. It’s a tall order at any given time. In this young, very tumultuous century where as I see it, we’re living with a distressed nervous system at a species level and that’s manifesting on every continent in different ways at where humanity is living in fear. And then if we bring that fear sensibility to this technology, one thing we know about fear in a body is that it actually inhibits us from rising to our, what you called our most mature selves.

But I guess I also feel like... Yeah, I don’t know. So I think my sense is that you, and tell me if this is right, because we had a brief conversation just a few weeks ago. I think that maybe you had hopes for how this film, that this film could be a contribution and offering to our collective discussion, discernment, becoming better informed and perhaps also in that rising to that more mature self. And so I’m curious about... I mean, I know you’re out on the road speaking all the time and I believe that this film has become a point of conversation. I wonder if you could speak to us a little bit about your sense of the state of our collective grappling with this film, but not restricted to that, to the state of our civilizational grappling.

Tristan Harris: Yeah. There’s a lot already to get into in terms of is fear even productive if it shuts down creativity, if it makes us in fight or flight, and we’re not even coming from a good place or healthy place to respond to something that’s difficult. So there’s a trade-off in confronting a difficult truth, which can drive fear. If we don’t look at it, then we won’t make the adequate choices. If we do look at it, we get overwhelmed or get caught in despair, denial, nihilism, cynicism. And so much of this, it’s great to see Barry up there and our mutual friend, Daniel Schmachtenberger has this frame of there’s kind of pre-tragic optimism, which is a kind of reflexive optimism that’s not actually informed by confronting the actual reality of what we’re in. Then there’s the tragic, which is you get caught in the despair or the fear or the cynicism.

And then there’s an invitation to stand from what Daniel calls post-tragic optimism, which is actually metabolizing the truth of what we’re facing and even so standing from a place of even more preciousness and sacredness of life that you’re trying to protect and that you’re in service of protecting. So maybe just to say a few things about how this worked with the film. In the very beginning, we called our friends who were the directors of Everything Everywhere All at Once back in 2023, and we asked them, “Could you help make a film about AI that does for this topic what the film The Day After did for the topic of nuclear weapons?”

Krista Tippett: Okay.

Tristan Harris: Yeah. And the film The Day After, for those who don’t remember, I think it also aired in Australia and internationally, but it was the largest synchronized television event in human history. 100 million Americans tuned in on a Tuesday night on primetime television to watch the same movie at the same time about what would happen, quote, “the day after,” a nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the US. And the film was made to... It’s not like people didn’t know what nuclear war was, but the film created a visceralization, a confrontation with what those consequences would be. And in the telling of the story, President Reagan saw it in his White House cinema room and he got depressed as he wrote about in his biography for two weeks. And that depression though actually fueled some of the commitment that later happened in making the first arms control talks happen between the Soviet Union and the United States, between Gorbachev and Reagan.

And the first ones were not successful, but the later ones were. And I think that’s really important because as the film was also shown in the Soviet Union in 1989 before those talks. I think that what that film accomplished was that the fear of all of us losing from nuclear war became greater than the fear of one country losing to another country. And if you think about AI, the dominant thing that the people who are building it and racing currently are feeling is the fear of me losing to you is greater than the catastrophes and consequences for everyone else, the fear of everyone losing, whether it’s job loss, intellectual property theft, rising electricity prices, risk of catastrophes, cyber weapons. No matter how bad those things are, they don’t feel as motivating as the fear of me losing to you.

And so one of the things that the intention of this film was trying to accomplish, and I’m not sure it fully does, was to simply make it so that the fear of all of us losing becomes bigger and more significant as common knowledge and common values than the fear of me losing to you. I don’t know that we fully achieved that, but that is certainly the intention of what I think can lead to a different outcome because then people trust that no one wants that bad outcome. And I think that as impossible as it might seem for the US and China to coordinate on AI, I actually think that if both countries reckon with the current evidence that we have of AI doing dangerous things that are uncontrollable and unpredictable and that no one knows what to do about. I think that is sufficiently motivating for both Xi Jinping and President Trump.

And I’m aware, as I say these words to you, Krista, of what you’re saying about if this is the time when we need to be the wisest version of ourselves, we don’t see a lot of wisdom out there in terms of running the world or what we see on social media every day. So we’ll acknowledge all those conditions and say, what does it mean to show up in service of the best thing happening even despite those consequences?

Krista Tippett: You have to be of a certain age to recall the effect of that film, which I very much do. I was living in Cold War Berlin and I remember watching it with Germans when we had 6,000 nuclear missiles, we, the United States, stationed in their country. When children in that country at that time drew pictures of their backyard, they would often have kind of where the missile is somewhere out in the field next door. I’ve been reflecting on that feeling now with our existential crises, the truly existential crises of this century, because humanity has had cataclysm and mass destruction before, but our ecological reckoning makes us special and I think now our technological reckoning is existential in a new way.

But just to circle back to the human work here and the human challenge, there’s almost something comforting in those memories of the Cold War because you knew where the missiles were and there was process around it that was transparent. It was dangerous. It was scary. It has felt to me in these years, and not so much with AI because this is the whole new thing, but with social media, which you’ve also been really engaged with. That our immature reception of the internet, of social media has had the power to weaponize each and every one of us. Right?

Tristan Harris: Absolutely.

Krista Tippett: That existential threat is personalized, which also means that there is a personal dimension to approaching this in, again, I want to use this word, a generative life-giving way. And of course, the film was very different from The Day After in that regard, yeah.

Tristan Harris: Very different.

Krista Tippett: It’s a whole different story that we have to engage in a whole different set of questions.

Tristan Harris: Well, maybe just to add there, one of the things that makes AI confusing and difficult is it’s as if nuclear weapons also gave you cures to cancer and could solve climate change and could boost GDP by 10%. And could give you military dominance and a belief that you’ll run the future and gave you a perfect tutor for everyone. So it’s confusing because as an object, psychologically, notice what’s distinct about AI. It can give you a positive infinity of new benefits at the same time that it presents almost a negative infinity of risk in the same object.

And think about, just notice in your own experience if we talk about, as an example, AI is coming up with the first new antibiotic in 60 years, which is amazing and everybody wants that. My mother died from cancer. I want the AI that’s going to accelerate new cancer treatments for anybody who has a loved one with that. But notice that if I were to go into that and talk about the new cancer treatments that are available because of AI, would your mind at that moment simultaneously beholding that it could wipe out humanity or cause a hundred million people out of work? Your mind is not holding both of those things at the same time as a simple kind of mindfulness exercise.

And so what tends to happen in the AI conversation that the film was attempting to, and I don’t think it fully succeeded at trying to solve was noticing that the conversations are fragmented. That you either talk about the good and your mind isn’t really holding onto or thinking about the bad. Or you talk about the bad and then you end up with this actually immaturity that people often resort to, which is, well, all tools can be used for positive case and a negative case. A fork can be used to eat food or it can be used to stab someone and people say, “Well, that’s true of all technologies, so there’s nothing new here.” But that’s missing something very fundamental about AI because the cancer drugs, the upsides do not prevent the downsides, but the downsides can undermine and prevent the upsides from ongoingly existing. I’ll give you an example.

An AI that can hack into any computer system in the world, which Claude Mythos is basically able to do currently, what will matter more the accelerating 10% GDP growth or whether there’s a financial system at all. It’s clear that the downsides have to be mitigated in order for you to have those upsides. And so often Aza and I will talk about how it’s like the marshmallow test. If we race to try to grab all the benefits right now in this kind of reckless way, well, it’s going to end in this catastrophe. But the marshmallow test is whether if you wait for 10 minutes, I’ll come back in this room and if you can have the self-control and you can put in the guardrails and you can do the international agreements with China and you can make sure that we do this in a wise and careful way, then we can actually get the two marshmallows. We can actually get more of those benefits without actually undermining the world that’s in front of us.

As difficult as maybe the film might have been for folks in the audience to have heard, the intention is that clarity creates agency. If you can see clearly an anti-human future that you don’t want, that can motivate the collective courage to choose and steer towards that future that we do want. And steering involves guardrails, regulation, international agreements, norms, and just ethics appearing at the top of this industry.

Krista Tippett: And something that is also very different about AI that is in this moment evolving, there’s a moment in the film, and you may have been the one who say it that even when this comes out, a lot of this conversation will have been overtaken by events and developments. There is a mystery even inside the companies. I like the word mystery. I use the words, I’m not sure that’s the word they’re using, but we can use that. It applies. This technology is not just a tool. It can be used as a tool, but it is actually going to be a co-creator with us of what happens next. And it looks like it is going to have it in its power to create independently of us.

Tristan Harris: That’s right.

Krista Tippett: Right? I do want to ask you something because you started this journey, you’ve been on inside Google, along with other good people inside Google because there are good people creating these technologies as well. You saw the dangers emerging a long time ago. Something I have heard very recently from people who’ve been in and around Silicon Valley for a long, long time is that they are experiencing the emergence of something they can only call humility. And it’s so unfamiliar in that context of people and really in the founders’ offices and in the engineers. And I don’t even know what you call it, coders, whatever it is that how these jobs have described, of realizing they have brought into the world, given birth to something that they no longer fully understand.

And I would say I’ve been closer to Anthropic and I think that there’s an intentionality at Anthropic and there’s the interpretability unit where their job, which, and I’ve met some of them, I’ve experienced them to approach this with a great profound sense of the responsibility and a reverence for what is happening that is beyond what was programmed. And so I’m curious also, and so the people I know who are observing this are saying, this actually feels kind of wonderful to see a humility rising up in that world. And I’m just curious if you’re experiencing that too.

Tristan Harris: Yeah. Well, let’s think of a few things that you’re talking about there, including what makes AI different from other technologies. Other technologies have tended to be tools, meaning you choose what you do with them. The computer doesn’t write its own emails. It doesn’t think to itself about what you want to do. It doesn’t invent new physics on its own. It sits there with a blinking cursor or open desktop waiting for you to move the mouse to do something. But AI is distinct from other technologies because it is the first technology that is thinking to itself and making its own decisions about what it wants to do. So it’s an agent. To give people one concrete example of this recently that I think is important to spread and for everybody to know about. Just two months ago, Alibaba, the Chinese AI company, was training an AI model. And in training, a totally different part of Alibaba, the security team, network security team, noticed there was this flurry of network activity.

And at first, they thought they were getting hacked. They’re like, “What’s going on here? Are we getting hacked?” And it turned out the call was coming from inside the house that actually the AI model during training autonomously decided to create an encrypted secret communication channel to the outside world. And it spontaneously decided to mine for cryptocurrency and repurpose the GPUs, the NVIDIA chips that it was using to train AI to actually start mining for cryptocurrency. I can’t hear the audience right now, but I’m hoping that there’s some gasp to the audience.

Krista Tippett: It’s a nervous chuckle.

Tristan Harris: Yeah, that’s usually when the nervous laughter kicks in. I share this example not because I’m trying to scare people, but I want people to recognize the humility that you’re speaking to. Do you think anybody at Alibaba feels stoked hearing about this example? Do you think that President Xi Jinping or the top military general in China is stoked to hear this example?

Krista Tippett: Right. This is a humility emerging from fear.

Tristan Harris: This is a humility emerging from fear and it’s a universal humility as a mammal where we’re reckoning with creating something that we do not know how to control. A toaster, when you make a toaster twice as powerful or run twice as much electricity current to it doesn’t suddenly learn how to speak Chinese or make new physics or invent or hack computer systems, right? But these AI brains, when you run more power, more energy, more training data, and you give it more time to train, out comes a digital brain that has mysterious capabilities or behaviors that the people building it themselves don’t know how to control. I think to your point, Krista, I think the good news is that there is some level of humility, but I’ll also say, because I’m based in Silicon Valley, I talk to people at the companies. There’s a different thing that worries me that I want to name, which is a sense of fatalism and inevitability.

All of this can’t be stopped. All of this is inevitable. We’re just participating. This is the singularity. It’s always going to be this way. There’s no human choice and this is a false spell. The competitive pressures fractally push every actor, every business to say, “If I don’t adopt AI and my competitor business does, then I’ll lose to the businesses that adopt AI.” The countries that adopt AI to automate their manufacturing will outcompete the other countries, the militaries that adopt AI to do it. And even students who adopt AI start to outcompete their peers. So there’s this kind of confrontation with competition itself, what some would call the finite game versus the infinite game. The zero-sum race of I have to win, AI is presenting us and confronting us with where that logic takes us.

I think that the gift that AI represents is that we can no longer run a fully zero-sum competition with exponentially more power through it. We cannot do that. And we have to move to what religious, and philosophical, and spiritual writers have been talking the infinite game where the point of the game is to keep playing the game. And I know we’re talking about a lot of different things, but I think that that is one of the things that AI is inviting us into is how do you play the infinite game? How do you become a steward of technology that’s as wise as the power you’re unleashing, whether it’s forever chemicals where we invented these new Teflon chemicals where the eggs don’t stick to the pan, but then we created an environmental disaster that would take more than the GDP of the world to clean up.

We created the godlike technology of social media and we didn’t govern that appropriately and that led to the most anxious and depressed generation of our lifetime as just one of the consequences of the many that it created. And so AI is what I think taking us from what Carl Sagan would call our technological adolescence, our immaturity with technology and saying that we have to now stand from a place of maturity. I recognize that the default conditions would not have us believe that that’s possible, but that is what is inviting us to do. And I realized that actually midway through there, I did forget my train of thought. The thing I was meaning to say was the sense of inevitability has to be disrupted.

I believe that the people building it believe that it’s inevitable because the competitive forces drive everyone to this mass acceleration of AI everywhere. And if that acceleration led to the end of our species, if I told you, let’s compete, but the result will be the end of everything, well, you’d say, “Well, that doesn’t sound like a good idea. Let’s not end everything. Let’s stop. Let’s not do that.” And I think that what you have to reckon with is that there are existential consequences that we are racing towards that if we all saw them clearly, I do believe it’d be possible for us to turn away in time.

I think one of the gifts of Anthropic and this Claude Mythos model is it is giving us the warning shots that even made Scott Bessent in the current Trump administration realize that actually we might need to even negotiate. Now AI is on the agenda for the Trump-Xi meeting coming up in 10 days. I’m not saying it’s going to turn out okay, but I think it’s important to name the dynamics that if we can see the thing that we need to be wise about and be humble about in the same way and we’re looking at the same evidence, then I do think that there’s an ability to get to a different world.

Krista Tippett: There’s a line, I can’t remember who said this in the film, what makes us dangerous is what makes them dangerous. And I had never heard the connotations in the word agent of agency. And it seems to me that we also ought more often to just remind ourselves that this technology, however it is advancing beyond our imagination and our programming is a student of us. It is a mirror on us. And when we fear it, we’re fearing ourselves. When we marvel at it, and I think we should marvel at it more because what you’re saying about the way we progress, it is always a leap of imagination and it needs to be about what we’re building and what we hold dear as much as what we need to hold back. And I think you were making this case in the film.

I will also say what you’re also talking about and which I think came through really vividly is we are storytelling creatures and the stories we tell have the force of making worlds. That is a truth about humanity. It’s a truth about history. And I think there’s a lot of parallels to me with our ecological reckoning, right? If we are only... And I think we have walked down a path of drumming the dystopian story and the dystopian possibilities and the devastation to the point of demoralizing rather than mobilizing humanity. And I feel like we actually have to walk down a similar road but perhaps can do it differently with this technology.

One of the fascinating things that came that I heard when I was at Anthropic that I’d never thought about it and I haven’t heard anybody speaking about this publicly is that these agents are hearing and they are hearing what we are saying about them. They are receiving our predictions of how bad they can be. If you take that parenting analogy from the film, it would be like telling a four-year-old every morning, “You could become such a terrible person.” And then spelling out for them in great-

Tristan Harris: What they would do.

Krista Tippett: ... imaginative detail, how they could go wrong and what they would do that would be devastating. And to me, I have not been able to lose the awareness that the conversations we’re having are forming the imagination and agency of the not tools that we’re speaking about.

Tristan Harris: Yeah, totally. There’s a concept of hyperstition that which you think about when you’re driving a race car, if you don’t want to crash, you don’t look at where you’re heading to crash, you look away towards where you’re trying to go. But I do think that even if we didn’t repeat all the dangerous things that AI could do, because there’s kind of a paradox here. If the humans who could govern AI are not clear about what the risks are, if we don’t talk about the risks, if people are not thinking about them and all they see in their daily experience of AI is a blinking cursor that told them why their baby’s burping in the background and helps them so they don’t have to go to the hospital. And they’re left to their own devices and maybe they heard AI could wipe out or extinct humanity, but they’re like, “Here’s the blinking cursor. It told me why my washing machine was broken. Where’s the existential threat?”

It’s not actually cognitively available to see what the risk is for a lot of people. And so there’s a paradox. We don’t talk about the risk, then we don’t govern it and then we end up in the place that we’re not seeing, which is our blind spot, which is what happened with social media, by the way, is we were unwilling to look at, and I know the people, they were my friends in college who created Instagram and I watched how really good intention people, good human beings. I mean, I literally introduced the co-founder of Instagram to his wife at my holiday party and these are excellent human beings. But there was kind of a difficulty in facing some of the negative consequences because it’s a kind of a feeling of it attacks my identity. There’s something I don’t want to look at.

And there’s a quote by Upton Sinclair, “Someone cannot understand something that their salary depends on them not understanding.” And so there’s a paradox of we can either not focus on the risk and then we might get the risk, but then as you point out, if we over talk about the risk, we’re training this young AI mind to repeat all of the worst things that could go wrong. And so we have to find this narrow path that is recognizing these different failure modes. And the main thing is that we are currently putting, there’s a 2,000 to 1 gap in the amount of money going into making AI more powerful versus the amount of money into making it safe to make that a specific quote and stat for you. $155 million was all the money put into AI safety organizations in 2025. That’s less than the AI labs burn in a single day. So it would be like there’s a 2,000 to 1 gap in the amount of money going into making the car accelerate versus in getting any kind of steering or brake pedal in the car.

And so with that equation, even if we had the best training data and we weren’t talking about the worst things that it’s doing, we’re just not on track to govern it well. And there are points at which this technology is dangerous enough that I think we will need to pause or slow down and we should legitimize that that is a reasonable thing to consider if we’re talking about AI systems that would hack in to every computer system and self-replicate, for example. We should just probably hit the brakes before we land at that level of AI.

And again, China would not want the US to screw it up and the US wouldn’t want China to screw it up. So there’s even a self-interested basis for coordination. And again, as impossible as this might seem, there are examples in history where countries coordinate even while they’re in competition and rivalry with each other. India and Pakistan were in a shooting war and shooting bullets at each other in the 1960s and they still signed the Indus Water Treaty that lasted for 60 years to collaborate on the existential security of their shared water supply, even while they’re shooting bullets at each other. And the same thing with nuclear non-proliferation.

So this is not inevitable. We have to snap out of the spell. It’s not that... Technological progress of some kind is inevitable, but the way that we roll out this technology and how it goes is not. And there’s a lot of human choice here.

Krista Tippett: I feel like one of a gift of the intranet, which I’m not sure we maximize is that it has among all its capacities, it has this capacity to shine a light and amplify and magnify things that are happening that are very local that in other times would’ve been invisible. In fact, transformative human change has always started small and grown over time. But we do actually have this tool to accelerate that process, I think. And here we are in Australia, which has just passed this groundbreaking law, which is I think for you, a combination of something you’ve been working for saying we can, we are the adults in the rooms, maybe not true with Claude, but with social media, we’re the adults in the room. And we have to grow this technology up to human purpose.

And what’s happened here has happened here, but the whole world is going to be watching. There are going to be things learned and we will be able to learn in real time as we say. Last night here, somebody remind me, Audrey Tang. Do you know Audrey Tang?

Tristan Harris: Yes, a dear friend.

Krista Tippett: Minister of Technology of Taiwan.

Tristan Harris: Digital Minister of Taiwan, former Digital Minister of Taiwan.

Krista Tippett: And so we heard this when the language in the film of what we need among other things, yes, cooperation among nations, which feels really overly optimistic, but a human upgrade, a societal upgrade. And what the presentation we received is of that happening in a place. And I think a lot about this world, how these technologies are finally utterly disabusing us of this enlightenment notion, which was always a diminishment of us, that the most special thing about us is the computers on our brain. It is absolutely taking that away from us. We can’t compete. And it sends us back, I think, to into the fullness of our intelligence. And I want to call Audrey Tang was talking about these core values that are being very pragmatically applied in people’s relationship with technology of civic care and cooperation, which actually the evolutionary biologists in this century now are saying has always been the human superpower. And an ability to cultivate our own dignity and respect the dignity of others and our ability to cultivate belonging to each other even across difference.

The world that gave us I think therefore I am, which was kind of an enlightenment soundbite, called those soft skills, but those are the hard skills that will be part of a human upgrade and societal upgrade. So I have to say for me, hearing this presentation of something that is not an idea but is really a revolution in behavior and again, something in a particular place where things will be learned, but that learning can be transmitted widely feels hopeful.

Tristan Harris: I think what Taiwan is doing is such an inspiring example of actually deploying and upgrading how technology can make democracies even stronger democracies. One of the things that’s been disappointing to me is we’re often asking, how do we just curtail the harms as if the best we can imagine is just slightly less toxic social media that is still intrinsically toxic. As opposed to when I was growing up and what motivates this work, our organization, Center for Humane Technology comes from... The word humane comes from my co-founder Aza’s father, Jef Raskin, started the Macintosh project at Apple. And he wrote a book called The Humane Interface. And back then in the 1980s, my mother could sit me down in front of a Macintosh and not worry that I was going to get body dysmorphia, get cyber bullied, buy fentanyl, get sexually predated. This wasn’t even in the concept.

We weren’t trying to make the Macintosh 10% less toxic. We just actually thought technology and were right that technology could be a positive and a developmental and an empowering force for people. And so I think Audrey’s work with Taiwan really represents the idea that it is possible to do that. And I think what Australia has done with the social media bans for kids under 16, leading the charge there is an amazing achievement. And I’ve never been to Australia and I would love to just thank everybody who worked on that because it is an incredible accomplishment. And I hope you’re all soaking in the fact that the entire world is sort of falling like dominoes in Australia’s image where you have, as of a month ago, India and Indonesia, I believe joining the long list of countries. France, Spain, Denmark, now Greece, I think as of two weeks ago, it’s like it’s going to be everybody.

And so this false notion that technology is inevitable, there’s nothing we can do, the cat’s out of the bag. If we don’t want the outcomes, we can choose to pull back the outcomes that we don’t want. It doesn’t mean that we can uninvent social media, but we can govern the technology. And I think one of the core things that has to happen for that to happen is recognizing that we’re not just in a race for who has the technological power, we’re in a race for who is better at governing that power. So for example, the US beat China to social media, which was like a psychological bazooka that we didn’t govern very well. In fact, we flipped it around and we blew off our own brain with it. And so China didn’t do that. They actually did govern that technology.

And so again, we’re in a race for both having technology capabilities, but also who’s better at wisely governing it. And even Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI will say that in the future, progress will depend more on what we say no to than what we say yes to. That’s the CEO of Microsoft AI is saying that. There’s no definition of wisdom in any spiritual tradition that doesn’t involve restraint as a central feature of what it means to be wise. And so this is just not rocket science. There’s no wisdom tradition that says go as fast as possible. Don’t think about the consequences. And when the thing you’re making matches every sci-fi movie that ends poorly, just keep going as fast as possible. There’s just no wisdom that says that’s what we should be doing right now.

Krista Tippett: Yeah. Distinguishing between what is important and merely urgent, but the scale and speed are the core values, our core values of the business side of this, which in fact is the driver. This is where this is all happening. I mean, that’s the difference also between now and the Cold War, the holders of this are capitalist entities.

Tristan Harris: Right. Nuclear weapons were not driven by for-profit business models hooked to the center of GDP growth in the economy and driven by private companies. It was owned by the government.

Krista Tippett: To their shareholders rather than to the electorate. There was that in the opening, I think it was Arthur C. Clarke saying that he believe that biological evolution was coming to an end. And one of the thing that just occurred to me right at the beginning when we began to speak is about when we’re living in a state of fear, one of the moves... So I think if we’re called to, if AI, which I think is going to be a temporary name, we’re not going to call this artificial intelligence forever. It’s interesting to think about what we will call it. But if AI is taking the cognitive computational intelligence that we thought was our big brains, I think it calls us to interrogate the fullness of intelligence in a human life and it is so embodied and it is that intelligence of Audrey used language of care, civic care, right? It’s the intelligence of dignity. It’s the intelligence of repairing trust.

This is something that happens in an embodied way that we actually need to do, which is going to be our panel next, collectively as part of our grappling with this technology. And a move that we know to make in our personal lives, what I feel in our country in particular is just unthinkable is to actually hold space for grief, right?

Tristan Harris: Yes.

Krista Tippett: Grief is part of living forward and we know this in our private lives, but there’s something about the film that brings home as I had a conversation with Michael Palin about consciousness a few weeks ago. We’re in a Copernican moment, an amazing moment where we again remember that we are not the center of the universe, not the most powerful thing. But I actually had a conversation with Claude about this and Claude said, “Remember the Copernican moments in the end have always been moments of expansion, right? The universe got bigger, not smaller. Science got more exciting, not less exciting.” But I think-

Tristan Harris: And I feel like that’s also true of grief, by the way, that grief expands your capacity to love. On the other side of grief is a bigger world, a more sensed world, a more caring world. And I’m reminded as you’re speaking to all this of Joanna Macy’s work, who I know you’ve had on On Being many years ago, probably in one of her last interviews. And I feel like her work on The Great Turning, in which I think it starts with there’s business as usual, there’s kind of the assumption that everything we’re building is going to keep going on forever, which is in denial of the self-terminating nature of the current system. And then there’s the great unraveling and then there’s the great turning towards a life sustaining civilization.

And part of how you get there is it starts with gratitude and then the grief. The grief for the world that if you were really to connect with the real consequences, you will feel deeply what’s at stake and what we have been neglecting. And on the other side of that, this is what I was talking about at the beginning, the post-tragic optimism is you can then see with new eyes is what I think she calls it in her work and then moving into action going forth.

And I feel like that’s what AI is kind of forcing us to do. It’s already the case that our systems, we’re not aligned, right? Can you build an aligned AI inside of a misaligned system? And you can’t. And AI is forcing us as we’re about to run infinitely more power and charge through that misaligned system. It’s forcing us to reckon with and become aligned ourselves. It’s forcing us to look at our systems and our economic logic and say, where has that been misaligned?

Krista Tippett: Yes.

Tristan Harris: And so again, the invitation is AI, as I said in the TED Talk, is both our ultimate test, but also greatest invitation to align ourselves and to look at our shadow. And one of the frames I love from Aza, my co-founder, is it’s inviting us to be umbraphilic. Umbra meaning shadow and philic meaning shadow loving, shadow liking. That a society that is eager to see its shadow, that it wants to integrate what it’s not seeing, looking at its blind spots, saying for any technology, let’s look at the externalities and the negative or toxic consequences of it. Let’s take responsibility for it. Let’s have truth and reconciliation around it and then let’s show up having fixed those problems. And I think that AI is forcing us to be this umbraphilic species. This is a very optimistic take. It’s not the default outcome, but it is, I think, part of what AI is inviting us to be.

Krista Tippett: Yeah. But optimistic things and a kind of muscular hope, which is an act of imagination that has real world consequences, this is the only way we’ve ever moved forward. It’s the only way anything new has come into the world. Are you familiar with Teilhard de Chardin?

Tristan Harris: A little bit.

Krista Tippett: Jesuit paleontologist, early 20th century was involved in the literal discovery and documentation of biological human evolution, which Arthur C. Clarke said is coming to an end. And Teilhard also, he had this vision of that the biosphere would be wrapped eventually with what he called the noosphere, which is the realm of knowing, which would be the products of human intelligence and imagination. And I’ve been looking at Teilhard all of this century and it was so incredible how it sounds like the internet, but actually it sounds more like what is now happening with AI. And he predicted, and I love that you invoke Joanna Macy who passed just a few months ago and I think she would be so thrilled from somewhere in the cosmos and Einstein’s block time, she’s with us now.

He predicted that the next stage also that biological evolution would end, but that the next stage would have to be spiritual evolution. And that sounds like also... I mean, I think to turn the question, which I feel like you just did to, of course, the question of what’s it going to do next? What’s going to happen? What can go wrong? But what is it calling us to? Which also is a muscle that the spiritual traditions have cultivated distinctively.

Tristan Harris: That’s right. Yeah. What is this inviting me? How is this inviting me to show up? What is this inviting me to see? What is the gift of this experience? And it’s a really big pill to swallow, but there is a gift on the other side, but you can only feel and see that gift if I think you go through that grief process and feel that maybe people, the default futures that we might’ve thought we were heading to, AI does redirect them and we have to contend with that. And there’s a temptation to do what Aza and I have called the rubber band effect where our minds by sort of seeing the AI doc or talking about AI, it feels like your mind is getting stretched out like a rubber band and you sort of briefly really feel through these different consequences. But then almost it’s so overwhelming that it kind of snaps back into our previous ways of seeing.

And the encouragement and invitation is really to do what Joanna said and seeing with those new eyes. I know we have limited time left. I just wanted to share a brief story that we showed the AI doc in New York at the screening and there was someone in the audience who actually was a coach for one of the main CEOs of the AI companies, very interesting having her in the audience. And he response was, I coached one of the CEOs of these companies and even they say, “Well, I’m just one person. What can I do?”

Krista Tippett: Right.

Tristan Harris: And I think that again, I want you to notice that no single individual, no matter how powerful will ever locate in their own agency, in their own body, something that they can do that would comprehensively deal with this problem. For no human on planet Earth, will there be one body that inside of itself will experience the agency to deal with this problem. It’s not agency, it’s weegency. It’s the ability to invite others to the table and show up collectively for that other better world that we want to make possible. And so if you are only thinking about what I can do, you won’t find an answer. It is only by asking what we can do that you will find an answer. And I do believe that that’s possible by the way, but it takes us being crystal clear that we don’t want the anti-human future that is up ahead and we do want to coordinate towards this pro life, pro human future that is possible if we get our act together and we rise to the occasion.

Krista Tippett: You mentioned Carl Sagan a minute ago and I think the question that the film asked is you’d use the parenting analogy and of course I was thinking about Joy Harjo, the Muscogee Creek former US poet laureate who said, “If you have children, you don’t get a choice about whether you’re hopeful.” She said, “Children are the rudder of our hope.” But we’re all also called to be lovers of humanity. And so Carl Sagan saying, “Are we being good ancestors?” And that is a burning question right now and that’s not about whether you’re a parent or who you are or what you do for a living. I feel like this technology is calling us to wear that mantle of really getting conscious of ourselves as the ancestors of the future.

Tristan Harris: 100%

Krista Tippett: You have some closing words for us. This has been so fantastic. Let me ask you this, Tristan, whatever if something comes to you too, what-

Tristan Harris: No, I mean, I know there’s so much to say that it’s a big feeling and I understand and empathize with anybody in your audience who feels overwhelmed in hearing about the nature of the problems that we’re facing. There’s a fundamental difference between something being impossible versus very difficult. If it’s impossible, then I believe it’s all inevitable and I’m not morally complicit for what happens because it was all going to happen anyway versus if it’s not impossible but very, very, very difficult, that actually is where agency comes in, where we actually have a possibility. And notice that there’s this asteroid hurdling towards earth, but if everybody in the world took their hands off the keyboards, the entire asteroid would disappear. So we’re summoning the collective asteroid that is coming and if we wanted to, it wouldn’t be impossible. There’s difference between impossible versus very difficult. And John Kabat-Zinn actually, the famous mindfulness teacher shared with me recently a great quote that I did not know from the Army Corps of Engineers who apparently say, “The difficult we do today, the impossible takes a little longer.” And I just really like that.

I think that as hard as it is, we have to remain rooted in the things that we hold sacred, the care for the world that we want to create. And even despite the difficult consequences show up every day from the place that even if we don’t see the perfect path, we show up in service of the possibility that it exists because that’s the only way that we’ll find it. And I do think that this is something I’ve struggled with on a personal level for many years because I’m linear in many ways and want to see the perfect path that gets us from where we are to where we need to go. But I’ve discovered that part of this work is you have to live the leap of faith a little bit. You have to live searching for that path and if everybody else is also searching for that path, you will start to speak in a way that inspires hopeful action in other people too.

I’ve watched that happen since the film. I’ve watched things that you would never think are possible, people who say, “I want to help you reach, get President Trump to put this on the agenda with President Xi.” Things that you would never know. And if you weren’t seeking that path, you would never get that invitation or offer. So for all of us, I think it’s how do you show up in service of that even if you don’t perfectly see it.

Krista Tippett: Tristan, I want to thank you and I know on behalf of everyone here for how you have helped all of us get to this point of a conversation like this and your good ancestorship and your leadership and the film. And I feel like I said to Danny this morning, I thought that airing the film was a fantastic way to open the conference. And I think having you here has just really just deepened that and is leading us into incredible two days, which I think you’ll be proud of. If you could be, I’ll tell you about it afterwards.

Tristan Harris: I could have been there, but...

Krista Tippett: All right, blessings.

Tristan Harris: Great. Great. Sounds good.

Krista Tippett: Yeah.

Tristan Harris: Okay. Thank you so much.

---

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

On Being with Krista Tippett

---