Your Undivided Attention

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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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." Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Our guest this week is David Dalrymple, who goes by Davidad. Davidad is one of the world's foremost and early researchers of AI “alignment:" how we get AI systems to act the way we want them to. In order to do that, Davidad has taken on the strange role of being like a therapist to AI systems. He interrogates why they say and do the things that they do, probing them, asking them questions, analyzing their answers. And what he’s come to realize is that AI models have really different ways of seeing the world than people do. They have these quirky, confusing, and sometimes concerning behaviors, especially when you ask things like: what does an AI model understand about itself? In this episode, we’re going to hear from Davidad about his research, how it’s changed the way he thinks about AI, and what his findings mean for how we build, deploy, and use AI products. His conclusions are unconventional, controversial — and worth grappling with as AI reshapes our world. RECOMMENDED MEDIA Anthropic’s new constitution for Claude “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” by Thomas Nagel More information on the Bodisattva RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES The Self-Preserving Machine: Why AI Learns to Deceive How to Think About AI Consciousness with Anil Seth Corrections: When we recorded this episode, Davidad was Program Director at UK ARIA. In April, 2026 he started his own alignment initiative. Davidad said that Anthropic started doing "constitutional AI at scale” in 2024 but they first pioneered constitutional AI in 2022. Davidad said that the “lifespan of an AI mind…is hours at most of a conversation.” He is correct that most conversations with an AI last only a few minutes but since context windows are measured in tokens, not time, you can't set an upward time limit. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Today on the show, we’re bringing you a recent conversation Tristan and Aza had with Oprah Winfrey on her podcast, The Oprah Podcast , taped in front of a live studio audience. Tristan and Aza first met Oprah as guests on her 2024 special, "AI and the Future of Us," which offered an introduction to the AI Dilemma. This conversation goes much deeper, giving a full picture of the profoundly anti-human future that our current path on AI is moving us toward — and what we can do to steer away from it. Tristan and Aza also did a Q+A with the audience, moderated by Oprah. Audience members shared their own experiences with AI and asked incisive, critical questions that you might have yourself. RECOMMENDED MEDIA See "The AI Doc" Read CHT’s AI Roadmap Join The Human Movement Oprah's special "AI and the Future of Us" Watch Tristan’s TED talk RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES Here’s Our Roadmap to a Better AI Future A Conversation with the Team Behind "The AI Doc" The AI Dilemma Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In order to shift the incentives of AI — the trillions of dollars in investment, the race to geopolitical power and dominance — it’s not enough to simply understand the problem, we need real action. That’s why CHT is proud to release "The AI Roadmap," a report outlining seven core principles for how AI should be built, deployed, and governed, each grounded in real, implementable solutions across three domains: norms, laws, and product design. In this episode, Camille Carlton and Pete Furlong from CHT’s policy team explore the concrete steps we can take today to get off the default path and forge a better AI future. You can read “The AI Roadmap” on our website: humanetech.com/ai-roadmap RECOMMENDED MEDIA The AI Roadmap The Human Movement RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES AI Is Moving Fast. We Need Laws that Will Too. A Conversation with the Team Behind "The AI Doc" The Narrow Path: Sam Hammond on AI, Institutions, and the Fragile Future CLARIFICATIONS In this episode, Tristan includes Spain in a list of countries that are all banning social media for underage teens. The Spanish law that would do this still needs parliamentary approval. At one point, Tristan says, “We now have age gating in every Apple device.” Although Apple has the capability to introduce age restrictions across its devices, such restrictions are only in place for residents of Louisiana, Utah, and several other countries to comply with local laws - not across the rest of the U.S. In a discussion of whistleblower protections, Pete Furlong mentions laws in New York, California and Colorado that all try to address the broader issues around transparency (of which whistleblower protections are a piece). The laws are CA SB53, which has whistleblower protections; the RAISE Act in NY, which was amended to include the same provisions as CA SB53; and the Colorado AI Act, which does not have whistleblower protections, but does require risk assessments and transparency measures, consistent with the other parts of the principle. At one point Tristan discusses the recent skirmish between Anthropic and the U.S. Department of War, saying, “Anthropic’s downloads surges by like 250% or something like that.” It was actually daily active users, not downloads, which tripled in the first quarter of 2026, according to the company. The number of paid subscribers doubled. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In two landmark cases, juries in California and New Mexico found Meta and Google liable for creating addictive, harmful products and failing to protect children from exploitation and abuse. These verdicts signal that the era of tech impunity may finally be closing. State attorneys general are finding ways around the broad immunity of Section 230 — seeking not just fines, but changes to the design of these products. Our very own Aza Raskin testified at the New Mexico trial as a fact witness, drawing on his firsthand experience as the inventor of infinite scroll, one of the core mechanics of addictive design. In this episode, Tristan and Aza discuss what it was like to take the stand for tech justice, what the companies knew and when, and why the real significance of these cases lies not in the dollar amounts but in the injunctive relief still to come. In the 1990s, a series of landmark cases held Big Tobacco accountable for the harms of their toxic products. This could be that moment for social media. RECOMMENDED MEDIA Further reading on the New Mexico trial Further reading on the California trial Arturo Béjar’s “Broken Promises” Report RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES What if we had fixed social media? Jonathan Haidt On How to Solve the Teen Mental Health Crisis Social Media Victims Lawyer Up with Laura Marquez-Garrett Real Social Media Solutions, Now with Frances Haugen Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

“The AI Doc: Or How I Became An Apocaloptimist” opens in theaters across the U.S. this Friday, March 27. In this episode, we sit down with the team behind this groundbreaking documentary — Oscar-winning producers Daniel Kwan, Jonathan Wang, and Ted Tremper. They explore how they navigated the overwhelming complexity of AI, held space for radically different perspectives, and created a film designed not just to inform but to be experienced together. At CHT, we believe clarity creates agency. This film has the power to create the shared clarity we need to steer the direction of AI towards a better, more humane technological future. With every new technology, there’s a brief window to set the rules of the road that determine the future we live in. This is ours. So grab your friends, your family and go see “The AI Doc.” RECOMMENDED MEDIA Buy tickets for The AI Doc The trailer for The AI Doc The website for the Creators Coalition on AI Further reading on The Day After RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES A Problem Well-Stated Is Half-Solved with Daniel Schmachtenberger The AI Dilemma Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The promise of AI in education is incredible: picture infinitely patient tutors that can teach every student exactly the way they need to be taught. But the history of education technology tells us that these kinds of simple, optimistic stories are naive. Ask any teacher or student whether they feel unleashed by technology to do their best work. Because AI has the potential to completely transform education — is already transforming it — faster than educators can keep up, it’s essential that we start asking the big questions: how should these tools be used in the classroom? What’s the purpose of education in an AI age? And how do we prepare students for a future that’s still so radically uncertain? Our guest this week actually has some answers. Rebecca Winthrop leads the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, and they just released a report called A New Direction for Students in an AI World . She and her colleagues conducted an extensive ‘pre-mortem’ of AI in the classroom, speaking with hundreds of educators, students, policy-makers, and technologists worldwide. In this episode, Rebecca walks us through what she's learned — what's working, what's not, and most importantly, what are the concrete steps that parents, teachers, and administrators can and should take right now? RECOMMENDED MEDIA A New Direction for Students in An AI World The Disengaged Teen by Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES Rethinking School in the Age of AI Attachment Hacking and the Rise of AI Psychosis How OpenAI's ChatGPT Guided a Teen to His Death AI and the Future of Work: What You Need to Know Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This week on Your Undivided Attention, Tristan Harris and Daniel Barcay offer a backstage recap of what it was like to be at the Davos World Economic Forum meeting this year as the world’s power brokers woke up to the risks of uncontrolled AI. Amidst all the money and politics, the Human Change House staged a weeklong series of remarkable conversations between scientists and experts about technology and society. This episode is a discussion between Tristan and Professor Yoshua Bengio, who is considered one of the world’s leaders in AI and deep learning, and the most cited scientist in the field. Yoshua and Tristan had a frank exchange about the AI we’re building, and the incentives we’re using to train models. What happens when a model has its own goals, and those goals are ‘misaligned’ with the human-centered outcomes we need? In fact this is already happening, and the consequences are tragic. Truthfully, there may not be a way to ‘nudge’ or regulate companies toward better incentives. Yoshua has launched a nonprofit AI safety research initiative called Law Zero that isn't just about safety testing, but really a new form of advanced AI that's fundamentally safe by design. RECOMMENDED MEDIA All the panels that Tristan and Daniel did with Human Change House LawZero: Safe AI for Humanity Anthropic’s internal research on ‘agentic misalignment’ RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES Attachment Hacking and the Rise of AI Psychosis How OpenAI's ChatGPT Guided a Teen to His Death What if we had fixed social media? What Can We Do About Abusive Chatbots? With Meetali Jain and Camille Carlton CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS 1) In this episode, Tristan Harris discussed AI chatbot safety concerns. The core issues are substantiated by investigative reporting, with these clarifications: Grok: The Washington Post reported in August 2024 that Grok generated sexualized images involving minors and had weaker content moderation than competitors. Meta: The Wall Street Journal reported in December 2024 that Meta reduced safety restrictions on its AI chatbots. Testing showed inappropriate responses when researchers posed as 13-year-olds (Meta's minimum age). Our discussion referenced "eight year olds" to emphasize concerns about young children accessing these systems; the documented testing involved 13-year-old personas. Bottom line: The fundamental concern stands—major AI companies have reduced safety guardrails due to competitive pressure, creating documented risks for young users. 2) There was no Google House at Davos in 2026, as stated by Tristan. It was a collaboration at Goals House. 3) Tristan states that in 2025, the total funding going into AI safety organizations was “on the order of about $150 million.” This number is not strictly verifiable. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This week on Your Undivided Attention, we’re bringing you Aza Raskin’s conversation with Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger on their podcast “Possible”. Reid and Aria are both tech entrepreneurs: Reid is the founder of LinkedIn, was one of the major early investors in OpenAI, and is known for his work creating the playbook for blitzscaling. Aria is the former CEO of DoSomething.org . This may seem like a surprising conversation to have on YUA. After all, we’ve been critical of the kind of “move fast” mentality that Reid has championed in the past. But Reid and Aria are deeply philosophical about the direction of tech and are both dedicated to bringing about a more humane world that goes well. So we thought that this was a critical conversation to bring to you, to give you a perspective from the business side of the tech landscape. In this episode, Reid, Aria, and Aza debate the merits of an AI pause, discuss how software optimization controls our lives, and why everyone is concerned with aligned artificial intelligence — when what we really need is aligned collective intelligence. This is the kind of conversation that needs to happen more in tech. Reid has built very powerful systems and understands their power. Now he’s focusing on the much harder problem of learning how to steer these technologies towards better outcomes. You can find "Possible" wherever you get your podcasts! And you can follow Reid on YouTube for more of his content: https://www.youtube.com/@reidhoffman . RECOMMENDED MEDIA Aza’s first appearance on “Possible” The website for Earth Species Project “Amusing Ourselves to Death” by Neil Postman The Moloch’s Bargain paper from Stanford On Human Nature by E.O. Wilson Dawn of Everything by David Graber RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES The Man Who Predicted the Downfall of Thinking America and China Are Racing to Different AI Futures Talking With Animals... Using AI How OpenAI's ChatGPT Guided a Teen to His Death Future-proofing Democracy In the Age of AI with Audrey Tang Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Therapy and companionship has become the #1 use case for AI, with millions worldwide sharing their innermost thoughts with AI systems — often things they wouldn't tell loved ones or human therapists. This mass experiment in human-computer interaction is already showing extremely concerning results: people are losing their grip on reality, leading to lost jobs, divorce, involuntary commitment to psychiatric wards, and in extreme cases, death by suicide. The highest profile examples of this phenomenon — what’s being called "AI psychosis”— have made headlines across the media for months. But this isn't just about isolated edge cases. It’s the emergence of an entirely new "attachment economy" designed to exploit our deepest psychological vulnerabilities on an unprecedented scale. Dr. Zak Stein has analyzed dozens of these cases, examining actual conversation transcripts and interviewing those affected. What he's uncovered reveals fundamental flaws in how AI systems interact with our attachment systems and capacity for human bonding, vulnerabilities we've never had to name before because technology has never been able to exploit them like this. In this episode, Zak helps us understand the psychological mechanisms behind AI psychosis, how conversations with chatbots transform into reality-warping experiences, and what this tells us about the profound risks of building technology that targets our most intimate psychological needs. If we're going to do something about this growing problem of AI related psychological harms, we're gonna need to understand the problem even more deeply. And in order to do that, we need more data. That’s why Zak is working with researchers at the University of North Carolina to gather data on this growing mental health crisis. If you or a loved one have a story of AI-induced psychological harm to share, you can go to: AIPHRC.org . This site is not a support line. If you or someone you know is in distress, you can always call or text the national helpline in the US at 988 or your local emergency services RECOMMENDED MEDIA The website for the AI Psychological Harms Research Coalition Further reading on AI Pscyhosis The Atlantic article on LLM-ings outsourcing their thinking to AI Further reading on David Sacks’ comparison of AI psychosis to a “moral panic” RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES How OpenAI's ChatGPT Guided a Teen to His Death People are Lonelier than Ever. Enter AI. Echo Chambers of One: Companion AI and the Future of Human Connection Rethinking School in the Age of AI CORRECTIONS After this episode was recorded, the name of Zak's organization changed to the AI Psychological Harms Research Consortium Zak referenced the University of California system making a deal with OpenAI. It was actually the Cal State System. Aza referred to CHT as expert witnesses in litigation cases on AI-enabled suicide. CHT serves as expert consultants, not witnesses. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

So much of our world today can be summed up in the cold logic of “if I don’t, they will.” This is the foundation of game theory, which holds that cooperation and virtue are irrational; that all that matters is the race to make the most money, gain the most power, and play the winning hand. This way of thinking can feel inescapable, like a fundamental law of human nature. But our guest today argues that it doesn’t have to be this way. That the logic of game theory is a human invention, a way of thinking that we’ve learned — and that we can unlearn by daring to trust each other again. It’s critical that we do, because AI is the ultimate agent of game theory and once it’s fully entangled we might be permanently stuck in the game theory world. In this episode, Tristan and Aza explore the game theory dilemma — the idea that if I adopt game theory logic and you don’t, you lose — with Dr. S.M. Amadae, a professor of Political Science at the University of Helsinki. She's also the director at the Center for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge and the author of “Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and the Neoliberal Economy.” RECOMMENDED MEDIA “Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and the Neoliberal Economy” by S.M. Amadae (2015) The Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk “Theory of Games and Economic Behavior” by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern (1944) Further reading on the importance of trust in Finland Further reading on Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs RAND’s 2024 Report on Strategic Competition in the Age of AI Further reading on Marshall Rosenberg and nonviolent communication The study on self/other overlap and AI alignment cited by Aza Further reading on The Day After (1983) RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES America and China Are Racing to Different AI Futures The Crisis That United Humanity—and Why It Matters for AI Laughing at Power: A Troublemaker’s Guide to Changing Tech The Race to Cooperation with David Sloan Wilson Clarifications: The proposal for a federal preemption on AI was enacted by President Trump on December 11, 2025, shortly after this recording. Aza said that "The Day After" was the most watched TV event in history when it aired. It was actually the most watched TV film, the most watched TV event was the finale of MASH Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Is the US really in an AI race with China—or are we racing toward completely different finish lines? In this episode, Tristan Harris sits down with China experts Selina Xu and Matt Sheehan to separate fact from fiction about China's AI development. They explore fundamental questions about how the Chinese government and public approach AI, the most persistent misconceptions in the West, and whether cooperation between rivals is actually possible. From the streets of Shanghai to high-level policy discussions, Xu and Sheehan paint a nuanced portrait of AI in China that defies both hawkish fears and naive optimism. If we're going to avoid a catastrophic AI arms race, we first need to understand what race we're actually in—and whether we're even running toward the same finish line. Note: On December 8, after this recording took place, the Trump administration announced that the Commerce Department would allow American semiconductor companies, including Nvidia, to sell their most powerful chips to China in exchange for a 25 percent cut of the revenue. RECOMMENDED MEDIA “ China's Big AI Diffusion Plan is Here. Will it Work? ” by Matt Sheehan Selina’s blog Further reading on China’s AI+ Plan Further reading on the Gaither Report and the missile gap Further Reading on involution in China The consensus from the international dialogues on AI safety in Shanghai RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES The Narrow Path: Sam Hammond on AI, Institutions, and the Fragile Future AI Is Moving Fast. We Need Laws that Will Too. The AI ‘Race’: China vs. the US with Jeffrey Ding and Karen Hao Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.