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Tristan Harris
Nonprofit organization focused on humane technology and digital infrastructure
Tristan Harris: Co-Founder of the Center for Humane Technology
Tristan Harris is an American technology ethicist and the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology (CHT), a nonprofit organization dedicated to realigning technology with humanity's best interests.123
Early Life and Education
Harris was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He studied computer science at Stanford University, where he took a class from B.J. Fogg at the Persuasive Technology Lab before dropping out.2
Career
In 2007, Harris launched a startup called Apture, which Google acquired in 2011. He then worked on Google Inbox.2
In 2013, while at Google, Harris authored a presentation titled "A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users' Attention", which sparked conversations about the company's responsibilities.2 He left Google in 2015 to co-found Time Well Spent, later renamed the Center for Humane Technology.23
At CHT, Harris advocates for understanding and minimizing the negative impacts of digital technologies, such as addiction, distraction, isolation, polarization, and fake news.2 He was featured in the Netflix documentary "The Social Dilemma", which examined how social media's design and business model manipulates people's views, emotions, and behavior.24
Harris has expanded his focus to close the gap between the accelerating pace of technology and the capacity of culture and institutions to respond adequately.2 He has testified before the U.S. Congress about the risk of online deception and manipulative tactics employed by social media platforms.4
Impact
Harris' work has had a significant impact on the tech industry and public awareness. In 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg described feeling a "responsibility to make sure our services aren't just tools that are used to make people's lives worse".4 The Center for Humane Technology's online course on building ethical technology has received notable media coverage and had over 10,000 participants as of June 2022.4
Highlights
This week, I sat down with experts @selinaxuxinyue and @mattsheehan88 on our podcast to talk about the state of AI in China.
The AI arms race is driven by a fear that China will beat the US to an imagined finish line of AGI. But are we really racing towards the same finish line?
I highly recommend this conversation for anyone who wants to better understand how the AI race is viewed in China compared to the US, and whether international negotiation on AI is still possible (spoiler: it is).
📺 Watch: https://t.co/qy5kC8adYp 🎧 Listen: https://t.co/hiqUg1g4z2
Fascinating and unsurprising paper. LLMs "brain rot" from attending to junk content.

