creators

Tristan Harris: Center for Humane Technology

Tristan Harris, co-founder and president of the Center for Humane Technology, co-hosts Your Undivided Attention and works on the societal risks of AI.

Tristan Harris is co-founder and president of the Center for Humane Technology (CHT), the nonprofit he started in 2018 with Aza Raskin and Randima Fernando. He co-hosts CHT's podcast Your Undivided Attention with Raskin, released every other Thursday. He studied at Stanford, including coursework in its Persuasive Technology Lab, and co-founded the startup Apture with Can Sar; Apture launched in 2008 and Google bought it in November 2011. At Google he worked as a design ethicist. His 2013 internal presentation, 'A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users' Attention', circulated widely inside and outside the company and gave rise to the Time Well Spent movement, out of which CHT grew as an independent nonprofit. Harris was the primary subject of the 2020 Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, which CHT says reached an estimated 100 million people in 190 countries. TIME named him to its TIME100 Next list in February 2021, describing him as someone who had built public awareness of platform harms more successfully than anyone before him; CHT also cites Rolling Stone's '25 People Shaping the World'. TIME had also named him to its 2023 TIME100 AI list. His work has since moved from social media to the societal risks of AI, and he has briefed heads of state, company executives and members of the US Congress.

Specialization

technology ethics, AI policy, attention economy

Country

United States