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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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