Tristan Harris

I actually worry that we're so mindlessly following the herd on privacy and data being the principle concerns when the actual things that are affecting the felt sense of your life and where your time goes, where your attention goes, where democracy goes, where teen mental health goes, where outrage goes.

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.

We're going to need a new social contract with the tech world one that asks for consent, and one with transparent goals. Right now, the goals of technology are not aligned with our goals as humans. We need technology that empowers us to make the life choices we want to make.

The EU can lead the world toward more humane technology. But doing so requires thinking more broadly about reining in social media platforms to prevent them from degrading our democracies.

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.

Ergonomics is about designing for failure modes and extremes: how things break under repetition, stress or other limits. And the goal of ergonomic designis to create an alignment between the user's limits, the thing you're designing, and how people will ideally use that thing.

I was a design ethicist at Google, where I studied how do you ethically steer people's thoughts? Because what we don't talk about is how the handful of people working at a handful of technology companies through their choices will steer what a billion people are thinking today.

For every design goal you have, you have to have a corresponding measurement to know how you're doing - a way of measuring success.