There's nothing in your life or in our collective problems that does not require our ability to put our attention where we care about. At the end of our lives, all we have is our attention and our time.
Tristan HarrisRead
YouTube has a hundred engineers who are trying to get the perfect next video to play automatically. And their techniques are only going to get more and more perfect over time, and we will have to resist the perfect.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the need to consciously resist the increasingly refined technology that aims to dictate our choices.
Tristan Harris highlights the advancements in technology, particularly in automated systems like YouTube's recommendation algorithms, which simulate perfection in delivering content tailored to our preferences. He warns that as these technologies evolve, they can lead to a loss of personal agency and intentionality in our viewing habits, urging us to critically evaluate and resist such manipulative influences.
Themes
TechnologyAutomationChoiceControlAgency
In practice
Example use cases
In a keynote speech discussing the implications of technology on society.
More from Tristan Harris
All quotes →Technology steers what 2 billion people are thinking and believing every day. It's possibly the largest source of influence over 2 billion people's thoughts that has ever been created. Religions and governments don't have that much influence over people's daily thoughts.
Tristan HarrisRead
You're either on, and you're connected and distracted all the time, or you're off, but then you're wondering, am I missing something important? In other words, you're either distracted or you have fear of missing out.
Tristan HarrisRead
Technology is causing a set of seemingly disconnected things - shortening of attention spans, polarization, outrage-ification of culture, mass narcissism, election engineering, addiction to technology.
Tristan HarrisRead
I'm an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities. That's why I spent the last three years as a Design Ethicist at Google caring about how to design things in a way that defends a billion people's minds from getting hijacked.
Tristan HarrisRead
If we really wanted to have a reorientation of the tech industry toward what's best for people, then we would ask the second question, which is, what would be the most time well spent for the thing that people are trying to get out of that situation?
Tristan HarrisRead
Similar quotes
Once the Xerox copier was invented, diplomacy died.
Andrew YoungRead
If I had taken a proprietary control of the Web, then it would never have taken off. People only committed their time to it because they knew it was open, shared: that they could help decide what would happen to it next.. and I wouldn't be raking off 10%!
Tim Berners-LeeRead
In the early stages of Internet in Japan, many said that Japanese and Americans are different. There are 10 reasons why Japanese Internet is not taking off. I said none of them are right; it's just a time lag. And, of course, Japanese Internet took off.
Masayoshi SonRead
I've been to so many manufacturing plants. I've yet to walk into one where I did not think AI solutions wouldn't help.
Andrew NgRead
Marketers use big data profiling to predict who is about to get pregnant, who is likely to buy a new car, and who is about to change sexual orientations. That's how they know what ads to send to whom. The NSA, meanwhile, wants to know who is likely to commit an act of terrorism - and for this, they need us.
Douglas RushkoffRead
With the cloud, you don't own anything. You already signed it away.
Steve WozniakRead