AI Endgame: Center for Humane Technology exposes the risk of AI hijacking human beliefs
Newsletter #16
https://debbiecoffey.substack.com/p/ai-endgame-center-for-humane-technology
December 27, 2024
By Debbie Coffey, AI Endgame
As 2024 comes to an end, AI Endgame is focusing on some organizations and people fighting to protect us from the risks of AI. The Center for Humane Technology is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to align technology with humanity’s best interests.
You may be familiar with Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, the co-founders of the Center for Humane Technology. They were featured in The Social Dilemma, the award-winning documentary that has been viewed by over 100 million viewers in 190 countries. This film detailed how social media is dangerously reprogramming our brains and human civilization.
Aza Raskin and Tristan Harris (photo: The AI Dilemma)
In 2023, the Center for Humane Technology produced The AI Dilemma. Harris and Raskin discuss how existing AI capabilities already pose catastrophic risks to a functional society, and how AI companies are caught in a race to deploy as quickly as possible without adequate safety measures.
AI technology can hijack human attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs. Basically, AI can hijack reality.
The Center for Humane Technology website states “We live in a time of unprecedented technological advancement. New innovations like social media and artificial intelligence have brought many benefits to society…
However, many of these advancements also have dire consequences.
Artificial intelligence…can easily lead to a world with bot-manipulated democracies, massive unemployment, exploitation of children and other vulnerable populations, and a world where no one can tell synthetic media from reality.
…our focus goes beyond the negative effects of social media. We work to expose the drivers behind all extractive technologies steering our thoughts, behaviors, and actions.
We believe that by understanding the root causes of harmful technology, we can work together to build a more humane future.”
Harris and Raskin want to “close the gap between what the world hears publicly about AI from splashy CEO presentations and what the people who are closest to the risks and harms inside AI labs are telling us.”
Tristan Harris regularly briefs heads of state, technology CEOs, and US Congress members, in addition to mobilizing millions of people around the world through mainstream media.
Listen to the Center for Humane Technology podcast Your Undivided Attention, HERE. Co-hosts Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin explore the unprecedented power of emerging technologies and the drivers behind social media’s race for attention, its destabilization of society, and potential solutions.
Learn how social media hacks our brains HERE.
Learn about the people working for the Center for Humane Technology HERE.
Harris and Raskin warn the AI “race to recklessness” could have dire consequences. You can watch their NBC news interview with Lester Holt HERE.
What you can do:
You can donate to the Center for Humane Technology, a non-profit organization founded in 2018, HERE.
Read all AI Endgame newsletters HERE.