Your Undivided Attention

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

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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.” 

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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. 

 

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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

President Tómasdóttir’s “Call for Responsible Leadership in Turbulent Times”​​​​‌‍​‍​‍‌‍‌​‍‌‍‍‌‌‍‌‌‍‍‌‌‍‍​‍​‍​‍‍​‍​‍‌​‌‍​‌‌‍‍‌‍‍‌‌‌​‌‍‌​‍‍‌‍‍‌‌‍​‍​‍​‍​​‍​‍‌‍‍​‌​‍‌‍‌‌‌‍‌‍​‍​‍​‍‍​‍​‍‌‍‍​‌‌​‌‌​‌​​‌​​‍​‍‌‍‌‍‌‍‌​‍‌​‌‍‌‌‌‌​‌‍‍‌​‍‌‌‍‍‌‌​‌‍​‌‍​‌‌‍‍‌‍‌​‌​​‍‍‌‌‍‌‍‌‌‌​‍‌‍​‌‍‌‌‌‍​​‍‍‌‍​‌‌​​‌​​​‍‌​‌‌​‌‌‌‌‍‌​‌‍‍‌‌‍​‍‌‍‍‌‌‍‍‌‌​‌‍‌‌‌‍‍‌‌​​‍‌‍‌‌‌‍‌​‌‍‍‌‌‌​​‍‌‍‌‌‍‌‍‌​‌‍‌‌​‌‌​​‌​‍‌‍‌‌‌​‌‍‌‌‌‍‍‌‌​‌‍​‌‌‌​‌‍‍‌‌‍‌‍‍​‍‌‍‍‌‌‍‌​​‌‌‍‌​​​‌​‍​‌‍​‍​‌‌‍‌‌​‍‌‌‍​‌​‍‌​​‍​‍​​‌​​​​‍‌​‌​‌‍​​​‌‌‍‌‍​‍‌‌‍​‍‌‍​‌‍‌​​​‌​‍‌​‌‍​‌‌​​‌‍‌‍‌‍‌‌​‌​‌​​​​​‍​‌‍​‍‌​​​​‍‌‌​‌‍‌‌​​‌‍‌‌​‌‌‍‍‌‍‌‌‌‌‌​​‍‌​​‌‍​‌‌‌​‌‍‍​​‌‌‌​‌‍‍‌‌‌​‌‍​‌‍‌‌​‌‍​‍‌‍​‌‌​‌‍‌‌‌‌‌‌‌​‍‌‍​​‌‌‍‍​‌‌​‌‌​‌​​‌​​‍‌‌​​‍‌​‌‍​‍‌‌​​‍‌​‌‍‌‍‌‍‌‍‌​‍‌​‌‍‌‌‌‌​‌‍‍‌​‍‌‌‍‍‌‌​‌‍​‌‍​‌‌‍‍‌‍‌​‌​​‍‍‌‌‍‌‍‌‌‌​‍‌‍​‌‍‌‌‌‍​​‍‍‌‍​‌‌​​‌​​​‍‌‌​​‍‌​‌‍‌​‌‌​‌‌‌‌‍‌​‌‍‍‌‌‍​‍‌‍‌‍‍‌‌‍‌​​‌‌‍‌​​​‌​‍​‌‍​‍​‌‌‍‌‌​‍‌‌‍​‌​‍‌​​‍​‍​​‌​​​​‍‌​‌​‌‍​​​‌‌‍‌‍​‍‌‌‍​‍‌‍​‌‍‌​​​‌​‍‌​‌‍​‌‌​​‌‍‌‍‌‍‌‌​‌​‌​​​​​‍​‌‍​‍‌​​​​‍‌‍‌‌​‌‍‌‌​​‌‍‌‌​‌‌‍‍‌‍‌‌‌‌‌​​‍‌‍‌​​‌‍​‌‌‌​‌‍‍​​‌‌‌​‌‍‍‌‌‌​‌‍​‌‍‌‌​‍‌‍‌​​‌‍‌‌‌​‍‌​‌​​‌‍‌‌‌‍​‌‌​‌‍‍‌‌‌‍‌‍‌‌​‌‌​​‌‌‌‌‍​‍‌‍​‌‍‍‌‌​‌‍‍​‌‍‌‌‌‍‌​​‍​‍‌‌

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"

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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.

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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 [email protected].

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

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

The Self-Preserving Machine: Why AI Learns to Deceive

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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?

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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

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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. 
 

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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 [email protected].

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

You can read more about Jared’s work at his website.

Related pieces by Imran on the CHT Substack:

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

KoraBench, the child safety AI benchmark that Imran referenced

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The AI Dilemma

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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. 

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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

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Corrections

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

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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.

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On Being with Krista Tippett

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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”

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What Do We Mean by Humane Tech?

Corrections:

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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.

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.

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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. 

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