Podcast Notes: Making Technology Less Manipulative by Tristan Harris (Stanford eCorner)
Tristan talks about the impact of AI today. While there’s an ongoing discussion about the future of AI people are forgetting that products like Facebook newsfeed & YouTube recommended videos are using AI heavily to fight for users attention. We saw AI winning in Chess and in Go but we also need to be aware (if not scared) that we have powerful AI designed to grab our attention. Like the Go bot that began with moves that looked weird at the beginning but eventually won the AIs designed to grab our attention are already winning and we start to see consequences (such as then recent congressional hearing).
Another important topic in the talk is how important is the alignment between the business model and the users you are trying to serve. Dan built Apture which was designed to help people learn about topics in the context of the context they are reading. They got paid by publishers for users stickiness which results in misalignment between the business model and the vision.
Dan Ariely used to raise this topic often in our early product discussions @ Yodas and it’s still something that we often think about.
Favorite quotes
Facebook, Google & Twitter stock prices are critically dependent on keeping people attention. Everything else they say is a dream, something that they have liked to have happen. At the end of the day, the thing that they are beholden to is capturing human attention.
We already built a runaway AI that’s steering what two billion people’s thoughts are and we hid it from society by calling it something else…. because if you call it a newsfeed or YouTube recommended videos or you call it Tinder recommendations people won’t even notice.
As a founder of the company I couldn’t admit that there’s a gap between my positive intentions and the ultimate thing that we were measured by which was to capture human attention.
You can not ask someone to question the thing that their salary depends on — Upton Sinclair
It’s even harder to get someone to question something that they deeply believe is their purpose.
