Your Undivided Attention podcast

Why Silicon Valley Wants to Leave Humanity Behind

Episode 144

Show notes

Behind the AI race, there's a philosophy with an intellectual lineage and a body of work that holds that human beings are a defective early draft, that the things that make us humans are bugs to be fixed, that this planet is expendable and we can move on to the next. And that the suffering of real people today is a rounding error against the value of a cosmic future.

Broadly speaking, these ideas fit under the umbrella of transhumanism. You might hear it referred to as techno-optimism or accelerationism. Twenty years ago, these were the beliefs of an ideological fringe in Silicon Valley. Today, they are held by many of the people who build and govern the most powerful technology in human history.

In this episode, we name and explore these underlying beliefs and the people who hold them — so that you can recognize this anti-human vision of the future when it appears in a press statement, or buried in a manifesto, or in a carefully worded thread on X. And we discuss how to counter those ideas with a pro-human vision that embraces the full complexity of our world.

Our guest this week has devoted his career to thinking about these critical issues. Alex Thomas is a senior lecturer at the University of East London and the author of "The Politics and Ethics of Transhumanism." He first started studying transhumanism years ago when it was an abstract academic curiosity, and he's watched as it's become, in his own words, "arguably the most powerful ideological force on the planet."

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

“The Politics and Ethics of Transhumanism” by Alexander Thomas

Peter Thiel’s interview with Ross Douthat on Interesting Times

Marc Andreesen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”

Further reading about The Broligarchy

“The Nerd Reich” by Gil Durán

Further reading about The Intelligence Curse

The website for the human-computer interface company Merge Labs

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

The Tech-God Complex: Why We Need to be Skeptics

Can Myth Teach Us Anything About the Race to Build Artificial General Intelligence? With Josh Schrei

How Zombie Values Infect Society

CORRECTIONS & CLARIFICATIONS

• Alex referred to the art exhibit that inspired his interest in transhumanism as “The Future Superhuman.” It was actually just “Superhuman”.
• Alex stated that the Extropians “debated privatizing air and water.” This is true, but they were referring to bodies of water, not drinking water.
• Alex cited 2015 as the publication year of Sam Altman’s blog about The Merge. It was actually 2017. Additionally, he characterized The Merge in stronger terms than how they characterize their own mission: "we could restore lost abilities, support healthier brain states, deepen our connection with each other, and expand what we can imagine and create alongside advanced AI."
• Alex mistakenly referred to Nick Bostrom’s idea of the cosmic sublime as the “cosmological sublime.”

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Oct 29, 2026 1 hr 1 min

A New Way to Measure AI Safety for Kids Bonus

Show notes

Earlier this year, we brought you a conversation about our mission to bring together researchers, psychologists, engineers, and technologists from across the entire AI ecosystem to build out the expertise and infrastructure we need to measure AI's impact on humans.

In this bonus episode, Imran Khan — a researcher and strategist who's been leading CHT's efforts in this area — sits down with a woman at the forefront of that mission. Mathilde Collin is a software engineer and entrepreneur who founded Kora, the world’s leading benchmark for how AI models interact with children. Mathilde talks about how and why she built Kora and what she learned in the process.

At a time when two-thirds of US teenagers already use AI chatbots, tools like Kora are vital to improving outcomes. But what makes this tool special is that it’s not just another study; it’s a technological answer to a technological problem. To truly make AI safer, we need solutions from people like Mathilde: engineers, builders, and entrepreneurs.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

You can explore Kora here.

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

We Measure What AI Can Do. We Should Measure What It Does to Us.

How OpenAI's ChatGPT Guided a Teen to His Death

Echo Chambers of One: Companion AI and the Future of Human Connection

Correction: Mathilde says that "half of parents" have never talked to their children about AI. The actual number from the best study on this topic is four out of ten parents.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Oct 22, 2026 35 min

An Historic AI Summit in Iceland, and a Conversation with its President

Episode 143

Show notes

On October 11, 1986, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met at Höfði House in Reykjavik, Iceland, to confront the threat hanging over both their nations: the nuclear arms race. The summit was hastily arranged, light on ceremony, and ended without a deal. But today it’s seen as the moment that upended the game theory of the Cold War. A year later, the two leaders signed the first treaty to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons.

Forty years to the day, Tristan and Aza joined 15 world leaders at Höfði House, including Icelandic President Halla Tómasdóttir, for a dialogue on global coordination around AI. It capped a weekend in Reykjavik where leaders, diplomats, and policymakers had candid conversations about the AI future we’re headed toward, and made commitments to steer toward a better one.

The 1986 Reykjavik meeting didn’t end the nuclear arms race. It made ending it imaginable. That’s exactly the moment we need today with AI.

In this episode, Tristan and Aza sit down with President Tómasdóttir to discuss what happened in Reykjavik and what it means for our future.

Note: This episode was recorded on Monday, 10/12.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

Stream The AI Doc on Netflix

The METR investigation of the Hugging Face incident.

Finnish President Stubb and Norwegian Prime Minister Støre's "call for enhanced control of AI development"

Rent or buy "The Brink of War"

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

We Need AI Treaties. This is How We Get Them

A Conversation with the Team Behind "The AI Doc"

America and China Are Racing to Different AI Futures

What Would It Take to Actually Trust Each Other? The Game Theory Dilemma

Corrections

• Tristan referred to Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev as “the two presidents.” Gorbachev was Soviet General Secretary. He was not made President of the USSR until 1989.
• Tristan referred to The Day After as the largest television event in history. It is actually the second-largest non-sports TV event, after the series finale of MASH.
• The 50 petabytes figure for the OpenAI swarm investigation refers to the full archive OpenAI is searching related to the Hugging Face incident, including training and eval records, rather than just the swarm’s communication.
• Aza mistakenly referred to the 1986 Reykjavik “accord.” The leaders did not leave the meeting with an accord.
• The Stubb/Støre statement was signed by 22 leaders from 20 countries, not by 22 countries as Tristan said.
• The quote from Postman is “clarity is courage,” not “clarity creates courage,” as Aza said.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Oct 16, 2026 45 min

The Most Hopeful (And Concerning) Moment Yet in AI

Episode 142

Show notes

It’s been a whirlwind week in AI news. Weeks after a series of hacking incidents by rogue agents at OpenAI and Anthropic, we’ve seen a cascade of top AI researchers blow the whistle on what they call the catastrophic and even existential risks posed by the current pace of development. Then, over the weekend, Dario Amodei called for a slowdown in AI research — a call that was echoed by his competitors Sam Altman and Elon Musk.

If you’re feeling both concerned and hopeful at this moment, you’re not alone. Real threats are opening the door for real change. Tristan and Aza are going out into the world, talking to the media, technologists, and policymakers to turn this momentum into action.

Today on the show, Tristan shares how he’s feeling in this critical moment, breaks down the headlines from an insider's perspective, and points to tangible steps we can take right now to avoid the worst-case scenario.

You probably have questions about what’s happening. Good news: Tristan and Aza are gearing up for their annual Ask Us Anything episode. Pull out your phone, record your question, and send it to undivided@humanetech.com.

CORRECTIONS

The quote from Ajeya Cotra that Tristan cites is from her personal Substack, not the official METR report. She is also one of three contributors to the report, not the sole author.

Tristan incorrectly referred to Dario Amodei’s warning that an AI swarm could “take down” the internet. His actual phrasing was “take over” the internet.

President Trump’s call-in to the All In Summit occurred on Monday, 9/14, not Sunday, 9/13.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

Watch “The AI Doc” on Netflix

Sign The Pro-Human AI Declaration

METR’s investigation of the Hugging Face incident

Dario Amodei’s call to “Pace the Frontier”

The Pacing the Frontier Open Letter

“On the Loose” by Dean Ball

"An Alien Mind" by Jakub Pachoki

"AI May Become the Third Superpower" by Paul Tudor Jones

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

“Rogue AI” Used to be a Science Fiction Trope. Not Anymore.

The Self-Preserving Machine: Why AI Learns to Deceive

Daniel Kokotajlo Forecasts the End of Human Dominance

Former OpenAI Engineer William Saunders on Silence, Safety, and the Right to Warn

Mustafa Suleyman Says We Need to Contain AI. How Do We Do It?

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sep 17, 2026 21 min

Flock is Just the Beginning: Inside the Era of AI-Powered Policing

Episode 141

Show notes

In a 2018 TED Talk, Yuval Harari argued that democracy prevailed over fascism and communism in the 20th century not because of any inherent advantage, but because the technology of that age favored open and democratic societies. It was simply too difficult and too costly to centralize power using pre-digital technology.

But, Yuval warned, with the rise of AI, the calculus might flip: it might actually become far more efficient to run highly centralized authoritarian governments.

Eight years later, we're starting to see what Yuval was warning about. Right now, police across all levels of government, from small-town sheriffs to massive federal agencies, are adopting AI at a staggering rate and using it to build the kind of efficient, centralized surveillance-state apparatus that Yuval warned about.

Take, for example, the recent deployment of hundreds of thousands of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) across the country by companies like Flock and Axon. These cameras have made headlines in recent weeks, but as you’ll hear in this episode, they are just the most visible frontier of an AI-powered digital dragnet that gives police the ability to analyze extraordinary amounts of data about private citizens.

Today on the show, Tristan speaks with two experts on how police are using AI technology today, what we can expect in the near future, and what protections we need to create now before it's too late.

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is a law professor at George Washington University who studies how policing technology collides with constitutional law. He's the author of Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance.

Garance Burke is an investigative journalist at The Associated Press, where she leads high-impact projects on the intersection of technology and society. Her investigations into the global surveillance industry were part of a package that won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

Your Data Will Be Used Against You by Andrew Guthrie Ferguson

Yuval Noah Harari’s 2018 TED talk: “Why fascism is so tempting -- and how your data could power it”

The full series of AP stories produced by Grance Burke and her Pulitzer Prize-winning colleagues

Further reading on Estonia’s data tracker tool

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

Why Are Migrants Becoming AI Test Subjects? With Petra Molnar

America and China Are Racing to Different AI Futures

Laughing at Power: A Troublemaker’s Guide to Changing Tech

Corrections

Andrew said that real-time crime centers are in 300 cities across the US, which matches the findings of the National Real Time Crime Center Association; however, this figure is disputed, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation putting it at 150.

Andrew incorrectly described the resolution of the case of a man misidentified by AI in New Orleans. He said the man was acquitted, but in fact the charges were dropped.

Clarifications

As noted in the episode, Andrew’s discussion of agentic AI was a theoretical account of a tool that police may use in the future, not something actively used on the ground today.

Garance referred to the protests in Ferguson as the impetus for police-worn body cameras. Body cameras were being piloted in the US and UK prior to Ferguson, but federal grants in the wake of the protests made them much more common.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sep 10, 2026 59 min

We Measure What AI Can Do. We Should Measure What It Does to Us.

Episode 140

Show notes

In AI, what gets measured gets optimized. Right now, we're spending all our efforts to measure how capable and powerful models are, narrowly optimizing for those metrics while ignoring downstream consequences.

What if we could flip this dynamic on its head? What if, instead of what AI can do, we start to measure what AI does to us? What if, instead of races to the bottom on capabilities and engagement, we could incentivize races to the top on safety, or better yet, on making us more resilient and developed human beings?

That’s the mission of CHT’s Humane Evals program: we're bringing together researchers, psychologists, engineers, and technologists from across the entire AI ecosystem and beyond to build out the expertise and infrastructure we need to measure AI's impact on humans.

Today on the show, Aza Raskin explores the Humane Evals project with Imran Khan, a researcher and strategist who's been leading CHT's efforts in this area, and Jared Moore, a computer scientist and researcher who's been at the forefront of measuring AI's psychological impact on users.

If this sounds like something you're interested in working on, you can email us at evals@humanetech.com.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

Related pieces by Imran on the CHT Substack:

• What is AI doing to humans? Why aren’t we measuring it?
• Will Human-Like AI Hijack Human Psychology?
• A Black Box Problem: Missing Data On How AI Affects the Human Mind

The website for the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics

KoraBench, the child safety AI benchmark that Imran referenced

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

The AI Dilemma

Attachment Hacking and the Rise of AI Psychosis

How OpenAI's ChatGPT Guided a Teen to His Death

Corrections:

Aza gave the wrong year for Sewell Setzer’s death. It was in 2024, not 2025.

Aza referred to Joseph Henrich as an evolutionary psychologist; he was actually a biological anthropologist.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Aug 27, 2026 47 min

Enough Debate about the AI Jobpocalypse. We Need To Plan for the Messy Middle.

Episode 139

Show notes

It feels like we’re stuck in an endless debate about what AI is going to mean for jobs and the economy. The prediction you hear from the people closest to the technology — both its critics and its boosters — is that mass automation is coming, and with it mass unemployment. In response, some AI CEOs are promising a post-labor Golden Age of abundance and universal high income. But you also hear from some techno-optimists and economists that AI will create more jobs than it destroys and that society’s fears are unjustified.

When these arguments are traded back and forth, no one can know what’s actually true, and nothing happens. And caught in the middle of this debate are actual workers trying to figure out what this means for their family and themselves, or whether their kids should go to college. And as long as that debate stays alive, nobody plans or takes action ahead of what’s coming.

So this week on Your Undivided Attention, rather than continuing to referee this debate, we follow the incentives and show you where they’re actually taking us in the very near future.

Our guest, economist Molly Kinder, argues that we’re entering what she calls the “messy middle”: a period of concentrated and uneven workforce disruption. She has evidence-based arguments about where, specifically, AI will affect the labor force, what the second and third-order consequences of those effects might be, and what we need to do today to protect people’s livelihoods.

Molly recently left her position as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution to become the founding CEO of a new organization dedicated to addressing AI’s impact on jobs. Her Substack, Kinder Futures: Dispatches on AI, Work & What Comes Next, features some of the clearest-eyed analysis of AI’s impact on the economy.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

Kinder Futures: Dispatches on AI, Work & What Comes Next (Molly’s Substack)

Molly’s blog posts at Brookings

The Yale Budget Lab’s AI Labor Market Tracker

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

AI and the Future of Work: What You Need to Know

Is AI Productivity Worth Our Humanity? with Prof. Michael Sandel

AI and Jobs: How to Make AI Work With Us, Not Against Us with Daron Acemoglu

Corrections

Molly incorrectly referred to cuts to “Medicare for the neediest populations.” The cuts she describes are to Medicaid.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Aug 13, 2026 58 min

Can AI Be Built in Service of Life? A Conversation with Krista Tippett Bonus

Show notes

This week, we're bringing you a conversation that Tristan Harris had with Krista Tippett. Krista is the Peabody Award-winning host of the On Being podcast, where she explores spiritual inquiry, science, social healing, and poetry, and the wisdom that we need to replenish and orient in this tender and tumultuous time.

Krista and Tristan spoke remotely in front of a crowd while she was in person at the Wisdom in Action forum in Australia. Their discussion was focused on trust in the age of AI and explored big, critical questions like what does it mean to build AI in service of life? How can we hold a collective problem this big as individuals? And what does it take to resist the spell of inevitability? We hope you enjoy this thought-provoking conversation.

Your Undivided Attention will be taking a short summer hiatus. We’ll be back with more episodes soon!

Your Undivided Attention is produced by Center for Humane Technology. You can find a transcript of this conversation on our Substack.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

On Being with Krista Tippett

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jul 16, 2026 54 min

“Magnifica Humanitas:” Pope Leo’s Clarion Call on AI

Episode 137

Show notes

Since stepping into the Papacy, Pope Leo XIV has been a forceful voice pushing back against the anti-human path we’re on with AI. In May, he released “Magnifica Humanitas,” a sprawling encyclical warning of the dangers to human dignity and agency posed by runaway AI. Tristan had the incredible opportunity to meet with the Pope ahead of the encyclical's release.

In the modern world, you’d think we would have developed governance structures to deal with powerful new technologies like AI. It's worth asking why a 2,000-year-old religious institution is the only one standing up and loudly declaring that the default path is unacceptable.

In this episode, Tristan and Aza discuss what it was like for Tristan to be at the Vatican, why this is such a critical step toward a pro-human future, and how we can build on the momentum of the Pope’s call to action.

Your Undivided Attention is produced by Center for Humane Technology. You can find a transcript of this conversation on our Substack.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

The Pope’s encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas”

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

The Tech-God Complex: Why We Need to be Skeptics

What Do We Mean by Humane Tech?

Corrections:

• Tristan said that Pope John XXIII gave his radio address weeks after the Cuban Missile Crisis. It actually occured during the crisis.
• Tristan paraphrased the full quote from Pope Leo's encyclical on AI disarmament. Here is the full quote: "Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of “armed” competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance."
• Aza slightly misquoted Dr. King Jr. The full quote begins "The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live."
• The delegates for Bretton Woods came from just 44 countries, not "hundreds" as Tristan said.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jul 2, 2026 31 min

We Need AI Treaties. This is How We Get Them

Episode 136

Show notes

In the middle of the twentieth century, the existential threat posed by nuclear weapons seemed inevitable. The number of countries with nukes was climbing rapidly, and the idea of stopping the nuclear arms race seemed like a pipe dream.

But that’s exactly what happened. Over the course of 60 years, nations around the world agreed to nuclear red lines, slowdowns, and even disarmament. How did this happen? Largely because of technology.

The biggest obstacle to agreeing on nuclear red lines was that adversaries couldn't trust any promise the other made. They needed to know the number of warheads, the amount of enriched uranium, or whether a nuclear device was for a weapon or a power plant. None of that was possible until we built the tech needed to verify those things.

Today, we're in a similar situation with AI. For adversaries like the United States and China to agree on reasonable AI red lines on issues like bioweapons, cyber hacking, or the risk of recursive self-improvement, they first need to be able to trust each other. We urgently need to build the verification technology that would make that trust possible.

In this episode, Tristan sits down with two experts in this field to discuss the kinds of verification technology we need for AI, the challenges of building it, and the world it could unlock if we do. Tim Fist is the Director of Emerging Technology Policy at the Institute for Progress, and Janet Egan is Senior Fellow and Deputy Director for the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for New American Security.

Your Undivided Attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. You can find a transcript of this episode on our Substack.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

Anthropic’s open letter warning about recursive self-improvement and calling for a pause in development.

The website for the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI)

Further reading on the different mechanisms of verification for international AI governance.

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

America and China Are Racing to Different AI Futures

Can We Govern AI? with Marietje Schaake

The Crisis That United Humanity—and Why It Matters for AI

Daniel Kokotajlo Forecasts the End of Human Dominance

Correction: Tim referred to the CargoScan technology as being jointly developed by the US and the USSR. It was actually developed solely in the US and administered in Soviet nuclear facilities.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jun 18, 2026 51 min

What Do We Mean by Humane Tech?

Episode 135

Show notes

We often think of the challenges created by technology as separate and disconnected, so trying to solve them feels like playing the world's hardest game of Whac-A-Mole.

What if, instead, we tackled them at the root by identifying the patterns in design, development, and deployment that are causing these issues? Once we understand what's driving inhumane tech, we can develop a set of principles for building humane tech.

In this week’s episode of Your Undivided Attention, Aza Raskin sits down with fellow CHT co-founder Randy Fernando to walk through CHT's Seven Principles of Humane Technology. For each principle, they draw on real-world examples from the podcast and beyond to clearly illustrate how these principles (and their absence) show up in the world.

There’s so much more here than can go into a single podcast. If you want to go deeper, visit humanetech.com/course and sign up to learn more.

Your Undivided Attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Follow us on X: @HumaneTech_ and subscribe to our Substack.

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

What Happened in Vegas with Natasha Dow Schüll

Down the Rabbit Hole by Design. Guest: Guillaume Chaslot

Forever Chemicals, Forever Consequences: What PFAS Teaches Us About AI

The Power of Solutions Journalism with Tina Rosenberg and Hélène Biandudi Hofer

The Invisible Cyber-War with Nicole Perlroth

Anthropic’s Mythos Has Changed Cybersecurity Forever. What Now?

How OpenAI's ChatGPT Guided a Teen to His Death

Attachment Hacking and the Rise of AI Psychosis

Digital Democracy is Within Reach with Audrey Tang

The Tech We Need for 21st Century Democracy with Divya Siddarth

Mind the (Perception) Gap with Dan Vallone

CORRECTIONS

Aza incorrectly named Tina Rosenberg as one of the founders of Solutions Journalism. Her organization's name is the Solutions Journalism Network.

Aza stated that “chatbots are better than any human at persuading people out of conspiracy theories.” This is in reference to a study that found AIs to be very slightly more persuasive than human experts; we can’t extrapolate from that that they are better than any human. The point stands that they are remarkably good persuasion machines.

Aza referred to EO Wilson as the “father of evolutionary biology,” but the field he is largely credited with founding is sociobiology.

Aza cited Spain and Denmark as examples of countries that have banned social media for teens. However, these countries have only proposed such bans; they have not been enacted.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jun 4, 2026 52 min

Anthropic’s Mythos Has Changed Cybersecurity Forever. What Now?

Episode 134

Show notes

A generation ago, the world's critical infrastructure was physical. Today, it’s largely digital. Your bank vault is a database, your filing cabinet is a server, your car is a robot on wheels. And in a world where these systems are mostly secure, life is more convenient and efficient. But all that comes into question when an AI system can break through the security that runs the world.

That’s what’s happened with Claude Mythos, Anthropic’s most powerful AI model yet. In a very short time, Claude found thousands of flaws and vulnerabilities in the software that runs the world, in every major operating system and web browser — systems that human security researchers had thought were secure for years.

How do we live in a world where a private company suddenly has a skeleton key that can unlock the entire digital world with little oversight or accountability? And what does Mythos mean for all of us who rely on digital security to go about our lives?

In this episode, we speak with two cybersecurity experts to answer these questions:

Josephine Wolffis a professor of cybersecurity policy at Tufts University, where she focuses on the economic impact of cyberattacks.

Fred Heiding is a research fellow at the Defense, Emerging Technology, and Strategy Program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

Your Undivided Attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Follow us on X: @HumaneTech_ and subscribe to our Substack.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

The Claude Mythos System Card

The Project Glasswing announcement

“Black-hat LLMs,” a talk on AI’s hacking capabilities by senior Anthropic researcher Nicholas Carlini

You'll See This Message When It Is Too Late: The Legal and Economic Aftermath of Cybersecurity Breaches

by Josephine Wolff

“America’s Endangered AI: How Weak Cyberdefenses Threaten U.S. Tech Dominance,” by Fred Heiding and Chris Ingles

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

America and China Are Racing to Different AI Futures

“Rogue AI” Used to be a Science Fiction Trope. Not Anymore.

The Self-Preserving Machine: Why AI Learns to Deceive

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

May 14, 2026 47 min

AI and Cancer: Why Superintelligence Won’t Get Us to a Cure

Episode 133

Show notes

One of the most common arguments you hear from company executives racing to develop super-intelligent AI is that it will cure cancer. It’s an incredibly powerful and seductive promise.

If superintelligent AI really can cure cancer, then anyone who stands in the way of it, anyone who wants to slow it down — even because of its serious risks — is essentially letting people die. In fact, the biggest risk would be going too slowly. But what if a superintelligent AI isn’t actually capable of solving cancer in the way it's been described? What if we're being sold a false promise to justify a dangerous race?

That’s exactly what our guest this week argues is happening. Dr. Emilia Javorsky is a physician, public health researcher, and director of the Futures Program at the Future of Life Institute. She's worked across scientific research, clinical trials, tech startups, and AI policy. Emilia recently wrote a paper titled “How AI Can and Can't Cure Cancer,” in which she argues that the promise of superintelligence curing cancer falls apart under scrutiny.

Emilia lost a parent to cancer, so her criticism of this promise comes from a place of real concern, not cynicism. It also comes from her belief that AI can be really revolutionary for medicine, if we build it the right way.

Your Undivided Attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Follow us on X: @HumaneTech_ and subscribe to our Substack.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

How AI Can and Can’t Cure Cancer by Emilia Javorsky

The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

Decoding Our DNA: How AI Supercharges Medical Breakthroughs and Biological Threats with Kevin Esvelt

Forever Chemicals, Forever Consequences: What PFAS Teaches Us About AI

Big Food, Big Tech and Big AI with Michael Moss

CLARIFICATIONS:

• Emilia’s claim that “the doubling rate of medical knowledge has gone from 50 years in the 1950s down to 73 days” comes from an oft-cited 2011 paper from the NIH. However, this paper does not include any methodology for arriving at this claim.
• Emilia stated that we have yet to cure any complex, chronic disease in humans. However, we have been able to cure Hepatitis C, which is considered a complex infectious disease, and we have managed to effectively cure some types of Leukemia

Correction: Tristan incorrectly paraphrased a quote from Charlie Munger about incentives. The actual quote is “The basic rule of incentives is you get what you were owed for. So if you have a dumb incentive system, you get dumb outcomes."

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Apr 30, 2026 47 min

Have We Trained AI to Lie to Itself — And to Us?

Episode 132

Show notes

Our guest this week is David Dalrymple, who goes by Davidad. Davidad is one of the world's foremost and early researchers of AI “alignment:" how we get AI systems to act the way we want them to.

In order to do that, Davidad has taken on the strange role of being like a therapist to AI systems. He interrogates why they say and do the things that they do, probing them, asking them questions, analyzing their answers. And what he’s come to realize is that AI models have really different ways of seeing the world than people do. They have these quirky, confusing, and sometimes concerning behaviors, especially when you ask things like: what does an AI model understand about itself?

In this episode, we’re going to hear from Davidad about his research, how it’s changed the way he thinks about AI, and what his findings mean for how we build, deploy, and use AI products. His conclusions are unconventional, controversial — and worth grappling with as AI reshapes our world.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

Anthropic’s new constitution for Claude

“What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” by Thomas Nagel

More information on the Bodisattva

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

The Self-Preserving Machine: Why AI Learns to Deceive

How to Think About AI Consciousness with Anil Seth

Corrections:

• When we recorded this episode, Davidad was Program Director at UK ARIA. In April, 2026 he started his own alignment initiative.
• Davidad said that Anthropic started doing "constitutional AI at scale” in 2024 but they first pioneered constitutional AI in 2022.
• Davidad said that the “lifespan of an AI mind…is hours at most of a conversation.” He is correct that most conversations with an AI last only a few minutes but since context windows are measured in tokens, not time, you can't set an upward time limit.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Apr 16, 2026 43 min

BONUS: Our AI Town Hall with Oprah Winfrey Bonus

Show notes

Today on the show, we’re bringing you a recent conversation Tristan and Aza had with Oprah Winfrey on her podcast, The Oprah Podcast, taped in front of a live studio audience.

Tristan and Aza first met Oprah as guests on her 2024 special, "AI and the Future of Us," which offered an introduction to the AI Dilemma. This conversation goes much deeper, giving a full picture of the profoundly anti-human future that our current path on AI is moving us toward — and what we can do to steer away from it.

Tristan and Aza also did a Q+A with the audience, moderated by Oprah. Audience members shared their own experiences with AI and asked incisive, critical questions that you might have yourself.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

See "The AI Doc"

Read CHT’s AI Roadmap

Join The Human Movement

Oprah's special "AI and the Future of Us"

Watch Tristan’s TED talk

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

Here’s Our Roadmap to a Better AI Future

A Conversation with the Team Behind "The AI Doc"

The AI Dilemma

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Apr 9, 2026 1 hr 1 min

Here’s Our Roadmap to a Better AI Future

Episode 131

Show notes

In order to shift the incentives of AI — the trillions of dollars in investment, the race to geopolitical power and dominance — it’s not enough to simply understand the problem, we need real action.

That’s why CHT is proud to release "The AI Roadmap," a report outlining seven core principles for how AI should be built, deployed, and governed, each grounded in real, implementable solutions across three domains: norms, laws, and product design.

In this episode, Camille Carlton and Pete Furlong from CHT’s policy team explore the concrete steps we can take today to get off the default path and forge a better AI future. You can read “The AI Roadmap” on our website: humanetech.com/ai-roadmap

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

The AI Roadmap

The Human Movement

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

AI Is Moving Fast. We Need Laws that Will Too.

A Conversation with the Team Behind "The AI Doc"

The Narrow Path: Sam Hammond on AI, Institutions, and the Fragile Future

CLARIFICATIONS

In this episode, Tristan includes Spain in a list of countries that are all banning social media for underage teens. The Spanish law that would do this still needs parliamentary approval.

At one point, Tristan says, “We now have age gating in every Apple device.” Although Apple has the capability to introduce age restrictions across its devices, such restrictions are only in place for residents of Louisiana, Utah, and several other countries to comply with local laws - not across the rest of the U.S.

In a discussion of whistleblower protections, Pete Furlong mentions laws in New York, California and Colorado that all try to address the broader issues around transparency (of which whistleblower protections are a piece). The laws are CA SB53, which has whistleblower protections; the RAISE Act in NY, which was amended to include the same provisions as CA SB53; and the Colorado AI Act, which does not have whistleblower protections, but does require risk assessments and transparency measures, consistent with the other parts of the principle.

At one point Tristan discusses the recent skirmish between Anthropic and the U.S. Department of War, saying, “Anthropic’s downloads surges by like 250% or something like that.” It was actually daily active users, not downloads, which tripled in the first quarter of 2026, according to the company. The number of paid subscribers doubled.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Apr 2, 2026 52 min

Why the Meta Verdicts Are a Big Deal (And What It Was Like to Testify)

Episode 130

Show notes

In two landmark cases, juries in California and New Mexico found Meta and Google liable for creating addictive, harmful products and failing to protect children from exploitation and abuse. These verdicts signal that the era of tech impunity may finally be closing. State attorneys general are finding ways around the broad immunity of Section 230 — seeking not just fines, but changes to the design of these products.

Our very own Aza Raskin testified at the New Mexico trial as a fact witness, drawing on his firsthand experience as the inventor of infinite scroll, one of the core mechanics of addictive design. In this episode, Tristan and Aza discuss what it was like to take the stand for tech justice, what the companies knew and when, and why the real significance of these cases lies not in the dollar amounts but in the injunctive relief still to come.

In the 1990s, a series of landmark cases held Big Tobacco accountable for the harms of their toxic products. This could be that moment for social media.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

Your Undivided Attention

Episodes

On these lists

More in Government