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Tristan Harris

The Center for Humane Technology

Aza Raskin

Join co-hosts Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin every other Thursday to understand how new technologies are shaping the way we live, work, and think. 

Your Undivided Attention is produced by our Senior Producer Julia Scott and our Executive Producer Josh Lash. We are a member of the TED Audio Collective.

Your Undivided Attention

It’s been a whirlwind week in AI news. Weeks after a series of hacking incidents by rogue agents at OpenAI and Anthropic, we’ve seen a cascade of top AI researchers blow the whistle on what they call the catastrophic and even existential risks posed by the current pace of development. Then, over the weekend, Dario Amodei called for a slowdown in AI research — a call that was echoed by his competitors Sam Altman and Elon Musk.

If you’re feeling both concerned and hopeful at this moment, you’re not alone. Real threats are opening the door for real change. Tristan and Aza are going out into the world, talking to the media, technologists, and policymakers to turn this momentum into action.

Today on the show, Tristan shares how he’s feeling in this critical moment, breaks down the headlines from an insider's perspective, and points to tangible steps we can take right now to avoid the worst-case scenario.

You probably have questions about what’s happening. Good news: Tristan and Aza are gearing up for their annual Ask Us Anything episode. Pull out your phone, record your question, and send it to undivided@humanetech.com.

CORRECTIONS

The quote from Ajeya Cotra that Tristan cites is from her personal Substack, not the official METR report. She is also one of three contributors to the report, not the sole author.

Tristan incorrectly referred to Dario Amodei’s warning that an AI swarm could “take down” the internet. His actual phrasing was “take over” the internet.

President Trump’s call-in to the All In Summit occurred on Monday, 9/14, not Sunday, 9/13.

 

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

Watch “The AI Doc” on Netflix

Sign The Pro-Human AI Declaration 

METR’s investigation of the Hugging Face incident

Dario Amodei’s call to “Pace the Frontier”

The Pacing the Frontier Open Letter

“On the Loose” by Dean Ball

"An Alien Mind" by Jakub Pachoki

"AI May Become the Third Superpower" by Paul Tudor Jones

 

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

“Rogue AI” Used to be a Science Fiction Trope. Not Anymore.

The Self-Preserving Machine: Why AI Learns to Deceive

Daniel Kokotajlo Forecasts the End of Human Dominance

Former OpenAI Engineer William Saunders on Silence, Safety, and the Right to Warn

Mustafa Suleyman Says We Need to Contain AI. How Do We Do It?

 

 

 

 
 

 
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The Most Hopeful (And Concerning) Moment Yet in AI

In a 2018 TED Talk, Yuval Harari argued that democracy prevailed over fascism and communism in the 20th century not because of any inherent advantage, but because the technology of that age favored open and democratic societies. It was simply too difficult and too costly to centralize power using pre-digital technology.

But, Yuval warned, with the rise of AI, the calculus might flip: it might actually become far more efficient to run highly centralized authoritarian governments.

Eight years later, we're starting to see what Yuval was warning about. Right now, police across all levels of government, from small-town sheriffs to massive federal agencies, are adopting AI at a staggering rate and using it to build the kind of efficient, centralized surveillance-state apparatus that Yuval warned about.

Take, for example, the recent deployment of hundreds of thousands of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) across the country by companies like Flock and Axon. These cameras have made headlines in recent weeks, but as you’ll hear in this episode, they are just the most visible frontier of an AI-powered digital dragnet that gives police the ability to analyze extraordinary amounts of data about private citizens.

Today on the show, Tristan speaks with two experts on how police are using AI technology today, what we can expect in the near future, and what protections we need to create now before it's too late. 

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is a law professor at George Washington University who studies how policing technology collides with constitutional law. He's the author of Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance.

Garance Burke is an investigative journalist at The Associated Press, where she leads high-impact projects on the intersection of technology and society. Her investigations into the global surveillance industry were part of a package that won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.

 

RECOMMENDED MEDIA 

Your Data Will Be Used Against You by Andrew Guthrie Ferguson

Yuval Noah Harari’s 2018 TED talk: “Why fascism is so tempting -- and how your data could power it”

The full series of AP stories produced by Grance Burke and her Pulitzer Prize-winning colleagues

Further reading on Estonia’s data tracker tool

 

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

Why Are Migrants Becoming AI Test Subjects? With Petra Molnar

America and China Are Racing to Different AI Futures

Laughing at Power: A Troublemaker’s Guide to Changing Tech

Corrections

Andrew said that real-time crime centers are in 300 cities across the US, which matches the findings of the National Real Time Crime Center Association; however, this figure is disputed, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation putting it at 150.

Andrew incorrectly described the resolution of the case of a man misidentified by AI in New Orleans. He said the man was acquitted, but in fact the charges were dropped. 

Clarifications

As noted in the episode, Andrew’s discussion of agentic AI was a theoretical account of a tool that police may use in the future, not something actively used on the ground today.

Garance referred to the protests in Ferguson as the impetus for police-worn body cameras. Body cameras were being piloted in the US and UK prior to Ferguson, but federal grants in the wake of the protests made them much more common. 
 

 

 

 
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Flock is Just the Beginning: Inside the Era of AI-Powered Policing

In AI, what gets measured gets optimized. Right now, we're spending all our efforts to measure how capable and powerful models are, narrowly optimizing for those metrics while ignoring downstream consequences.

What if we could flip this dynamic on its head? What if, instead of what AI can do, we start to measure what AI does to us? What if, instead of races to the bottom on capabilities and engagement, we could incentivize races to the top on safety, or better yet, on making us more resilient and developed human beings?

That’s the mission of CHT’s Humane Evals program: we're bringing together researchers, psychologists, engineers, and technologists from across the entire AI ecosystem and beyond to build out the expertise and infrastructure we need to measure AI's impact on humans.

Today on the show, Aza Raskin explores the Humane Evals project with Imran Khan, a researcher and strategist who's been leading CHT's efforts in this area, and Jared Moore, a computer scientist and researcher who's been at the forefront of measuring AI's psychological impact on users.

If this sounds like something you're interested in working on, you can email us at evals@humanetech.com.

 

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

You can read more about Jared’s work at his website.

Related pieces by Imran on the CHT Substack:

 What is AI doing to humans? Why aren’t we measuring it? 
 Will Human-Like AI Hijack Human Psychology?
 A Black Box Problem: Missing Data On How AI Affects the Human Mind

The website for the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics

KoraBench, the child safety AI benchmark that Imran referenced

 

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

The AI Dilemma

Attachment Hacking and the Rise of AI Psychosis

How OpenAI's ChatGPT Guided a Teen to His Death

 

Corrections: 

Aza gave the wrong year for Sewell Setzer’s death. It was in 2024, not 2025. 

Aza referred to Joseph Henrich as an evolutionary psychologist; he was actually a biological anthropologist. 

 
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We Measure What AI Can Do. We Should Measure What It Does to Us.

It feels like we’re stuck in an endless debate about what AI is going to mean for jobs and the economy. The prediction you hear from the people closest to the technology — both its critics and its boosters — is that mass automation is coming, and with it mass unemployment. In response, some AI CEOs are promising a post-labor Golden Age of abundance and universal high income. But you also hear from some techno-optimists and economists that AI will create more jobs than it destroys and that society’s fears are unjustified.

When these arguments are traded back and forth, no one can know what’s actually true, and nothing happens. And caught in the middle of this debate are actual workers trying to figure out what this means for their family and themselves, or whether their kids should go to college. And as long as that debate stays alive, nobody plans or takes action ahead of what’s coming.

So this week on Your Undivided Attention, rather than continuing to referee this debate, we follow the incentives and show you where they’re actually taking us in the very near future.

Our guest, economist Molly Kinder, argues that we’re entering what she calls the “messy middle”: a period of concentrated and uneven workforce disruption. She has evidence-based arguments about where, specifically, AI will affect the labor force, what the second and third-order consequences of those effects might be, and what we need to do today to protect people’s livelihoods.

Molly recently left her position as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution to become the founding CEO of a new organization dedicated to addressing AI’s impact on jobs. Her Substack, Kinder Futures: Dispatches on AI, Work & What Comes Next, features some of the clearest-eyed analysis of AI’s impact on the economy.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

Kinder Futures: Dispatches on AI, Work & What Comes Next (Molly’s Substack)

Molly’s blog posts at Brookings

The Yale Budget Lab’s AI Labor Market Tracker

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

AI and the Future of Work: What You Need to Know

Is AI Productivity Worth Our Humanity? with Prof. Michael Sandel

AI and Jobs: How to Make AI Work With Us, Not Against Us with Daron Acemoglu

 

Corrections

Molly incorrectly referred to cuts to “Medicare for the neediest populations.” The cuts she describes are to Medicaid.

 
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Enough Debate about the AI Jobpocalypse. We Need To Plan for the Messy Middle.

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!

Your Undivided Attention is produced by Center for Humane Technology. You can find a transcript of this conversation on our Substack.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

On Being with Krista Tippett

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

Since stepping into the Papacy, Pope Leo XIV has been a forceful voice pushing back against the anti-human path we’re on with AI. In May, he released “Magnifica Humanitas,” a sprawling encyclical warning of the dangers to human dignity and agency posed by runaway AI. Tristan had the incredible opportunity to meet with the Pope ahead of the encyclical's release. 

In the modern world, you’d think we would have developed governance structures to deal with powerful new technologies like AI. It's worth asking why a 2,000-year-old religious institution is the only one standing up and loudly declaring that the default path is unacceptable. 

In this episode, Tristan and Aza discuss what it was like for Tristan to be at the Vatican, why this is such a critical step toward a pro-human future, and how we can build on the momentum of the Pope’s call to action.

Your Undivided Attention is produced by Center for Humane Technology. You can find a transcript of this conversation on our Substack.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

The Pope’s encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas”

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

The Tech-God Complex: Why We Need to be Skeptics

What Do We Mean by Humane Tech?

Corrections:

 • Tristan said that Pope John XXIII gave his radio address weeks after the Cuban Missile Crisis. It actually occured during the crisis.

 • Tristan paraphrased the full quote from Pope Leo's encyclical on AI disarmament. Here is the full quote: "Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of “armed” competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance."

 • Aza slightly misquoted Dr. King Jr. The full quote begins "The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live."

 • The delegates for Bretton Woods came from just 44 countries, not "hundreds" as Tristan said.

 

 

 
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“Magnifica Humanitas:” Pope Leo’s Clarion Call on AI

In the middle of the twentieth century, the existential threat posed by nuclear weapons seemed inevitable. The number of countries with nukes was climbing rapidly, and the idea of stopping the nuclear arms race seemed like a pipe dream. 

But that’s exactly what happened. Over the course of 60 years, nations around the world agreed to nuclear red lines, slowdowns, and even disarmament. How did this happen? Largely because of technology. 

The biggest obstacle to agreeing on nuclear red lines was that adversaries couldn't trust any promise the other made. They needed to know the number of warheads, the amount of enriched uranium, or whether a nuclear device was for a weapon or a power plant. None of that was possible until we built the tech needed to verify those things. 

Today, we're in a similar situation with AI. For adversaries like the United States and China to agree on reasonable AI red lines on issues like bioweapons, cyber hacking, or the risk of recursive self-improvement, they first need to be able to trust each other. We urgently need to build the verification technology that would make that trust possible. 

In this episode, Tristan sits down with two experts in this field to discuss the kinds of verification technology we need for AI, the challenges of building it, and the world it could unlock if we do. Tim Fist is the Director of Emerging Technology Policy at the Institute for Progress, and Janet Egan is Senior Fellow and Deputy Director for the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for New American Security.

 Your Undivided Attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. You can find a transcript of this episode on our Substack. 

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

Anthropic’s open letter warning about recursive self-improvement and calling for a pause in development.

The website for the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI)

Further reading on the different mechanisms of verification for international AI governance.

 

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

America and China Are Racing to Different AI Futures

Can We Govern AI? with Marietje Schaake

The Crisis That United Humanity—and Why It Matters for AI

Daniel Kokotajlo Forecasts the End of Human Dominance

Correction: Tim referred to the CargoScan technology as being jointly developed by the US and the USSR. It was actually developed solely in the US and administered in Soviet nuclear facilities. 

 

 
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We Need AI Treaties. This is How We Get Them

We often think of the challenges created by technology as separate and disconnected, so trying to solve them feels like playing the world's hardest game of Whac-A-Mole. 

What if, instead, we tackled them at the root by identifying the patterns in design, development, and deployment that are causing these issues? Once we understand what's driving inhumane tech, we can develop a set of principles for building humane tech. 

In this week’s episode of Your Undivided Attention, Aza Raskin sits down with fellow CHT co-founder Randy Fernando to walk through CHT's Seven Principles of Humane Technology. For each principle, they draw on real-world examples from the podcast and beyond to clearly illustrate how these principles (and their absence) show up in the world. 

There’s so much more here than can go into a single podcast. If you want to go deeper, visit humanetech.com/course and sign up to learn more. 

Your Undivided Attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Follow us on X: @HumaneTech_ and subscribe to our Substack.

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

What Happened in Vegas with Natasha Dow Schüll 

Down the Rabbit Hole by Design. Guest: Guillaume Chaslot

Forever Chemicals, Forever Consequences: What PFAS Teaches Us About AI 

The Power of Solutions Journalism with Tina Rosenberg and Hélène Biandudi Hofer 

The Invisible Cyber-War with Nicole Perlroth

Anthropic’s Mythos Has Changed Cybersecurity Forever. What Now?

How OpenAI's ChatGPT Guided a Teen to His Death

Attachment Hacking and the Rise of AI Psychosis

Digital Democracy is Within Reach with Audrey Tang

The Tech We Need for 21st Century Democracy with Divya Siddarth

Mind the (Perception) Gap with Dan Vallone 

CORRECTIONS

Aza incorrectly named Tina Rosenberg as one of the founders of Solutions Journalism. Her organization's name is the Solutions Journalism Network. 

Aza stated that “chatbots are better than any human at persuading people out of conspiracy theories.” This is in reference to a study that found AIs to be very slightly more persuasive than human experts; we can’t extrapolate from that that they are better than any human. The point stands that they are remarkably good persuasion machines.

Aza referred to EO Wilson as the “father of evolutionary biology,” but the field he is largely credited with founding is sociobiology. 

Aza cited Spain and Denmark as examples of countries that have banned social media for teens. However, these countries have only proposed such bans; they have not been enacted. 

 
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What Do We Mean by Humane Tech?

A generation ago, the world's critical infrastructure was physical. Today, it’s largely digital. Your bank vault is a database, your filing cabinet is a server, your car is a robot on wheels. And in a world where these systems are mostly secure, life is more convenient and efficient. But all that comes into question when an AI system can break through the security that runs the world.

That’s what’s happened with Claude Mythos, Anthropic’s most powerful AI model yet. In a very short time, Claude found thousands of flaws and vulnerabilities in the software that runs the world, in every major operating system and web browser — systems that human security researchers had thought were secure for years.

How do we live in a world where a private company suddenly has a skeleton key that can unlock the entire digital world with little oversight or accountability? And what does Mythos mean for all of us who rely on digital security to go about our lives?

In this episode, we speak with two cybersecurity experts to answer these questions:

Josephine Wolff is a professor of cybersecurity policy at Tufts University, where she focuses on the economic impact of cyberattacks. 

Fred Heiding is a research fellow at the Defense, Emerging Technology, and Strategy Program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

Your Undivided Attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Follow us on X: @HumaneTech_ and subscribe to our Substack.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA 

The Claude Mythos System Card

The Project Glasswing announcement

“Black-hat LLMs,” a talk on AI’s hacking capabilities by senior Anthropic researcher Nicholas Carlini

You'll See This Message When It Is Too Late: The Legal and Economic Aftermath of Cybersecurity Breaches

 by Josephine Wolff

“America’s Endangered AI: How Weak Cyberdefenses Threaten U.S. Tech Dominance,” by Fred Heiding and Chris Ingles

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

America and China Are Racing to Different AI Futures

“Rogue AI” Used to be a Science Fiction Trope. Not Anymore.

The Self-Preserving Machine: Why AI Learns to Deceive

 
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Anthropic’s Mythos Has Changed Cybersecurity Forever. What Now?

One of the most common arguments you hear from company executives racing to develop super-intelligent AI is that it will cure cancer. It’s an incredibly powerful and seductive promise. 

If superintelligent AI really can cure cancer, then anyone who stands in the way of it, anyone who wants to slow it down — even because of its serious risks — is essentially letting people die. In fact, the biggest risk would be going too slowly. But what if a superintelligent AI isn’t actually capable of solving cancer in the way it's been described? What if we're being sold a false promise to justify a dangerous race?

That’s exactly what our guest this week argues is happening. Dr. Emilia Javorsky is a physician, public health researcher, and director of the Futures Program at the Future of Life Institute. She's worked across scientific research, clinical trials, tech startups, and AI policy. Emilia recently wrote a paper titled “How AI Can and Can't Cure Cancer,” in which she argues that the promise of superintelligence curing cancer falls apart under scrutiny. 

Emilia lost a parent to cancer, so her criticism of this promise comes from a place of real concern, not cynicism. It also comes from her belief that AI can be really revolutionary for medicine, if we build it the right way.

Your Undivided Attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Follow us on X: @HumaneTech_ and subscribe to our Substack.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

How AI Can and Can’t Cure Cancer by Emilia Javorsky

The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

Decoding Our DNA: How AI Supercharges Medical Breakthroughs and Biological Threats with Kevin Esvelt

Forever Chemicals, Forever Consequences: What PFAS Teaches Us About AI

Big Food, Big Tech and Big AI with Michael Moss

CLARIFICATIONS:

 • Emilia’s claim that “the doubling rate of medical knowledge has gone from 50 years in the 1950s down to 73 days” comes from an oft-cited 2011 paper from the NIH. However, this paper does not include any methodology for arriving at this claim.

 • Emilia stated that we have yet to cure any complex, chronic disease in humans. However, we have been able to cure Hepatitis C, which is considered a complex infectious disease, and we have managed to effectively cure some types of Leukemia

Correction: Tristan incorrectly paraphrased a quote from Charlie Munger about incentives. The actual quote is “The basic rule of incentives is you get what you were owed for. So if you have a dumb incentive system, you get dumb outcomes."

 

 

 
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AI and Cancer: Why Superintelligence Won’t Get Us to a Cure

A new documentary called The Social Dilemma comes out on Netflix today, September 9, 2020. We hope that this film, full of interviews with tech insiders, will be a catalyst and tool for exposing how technology has been distorting our perception of the world, and will help us reach the shared ground we need to solve big problems together.

 
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Spotlight: The Social Dilemma

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