There's nothing in your life or in our collective problems that does not require our ability to put our attention where we care about. At the end of our lives, all we have is our attention and our time.
Tristan HarrisRead
I'm an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities. That's why I spent the last three years as a Design Ethicist at Google caring about how to design things in a way that defends a billion people's minds from getting hijacked.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of ethical design in technology to protect users from manipulation.
Tristan Harris expresses his concern about how technology exploits human psychological vulnerabilities to gain attention and influence. With his experience as a Design Ethicist at Google, he highlights the need for designing digital products in a manner that safeguards users' minds from being exploited, ensuring that technology serves humanity rather than undermining it.
Themes
TechnologyPsychological VulnerabilityDesign EthicsManipulationMind Protection
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about online privacy, this quote can illustrate the importance of ethically designing technologies.
More from Tristan Harris
All quotes →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.
Tristan HarrisRead
You're either on, and you're connected and distracted all the time, or you're off, but then you're wondering, am I missing something important? In other words, you're either distracted or you have fear of missing out.
Tristan HarrisRead
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.
Tristan HarrisRead
If we really wanted to have a reorientation of the tech industry toward what's best for people, then we would ask the second question, which is, what would be the most time well spent for the thing that people are trying to get out of that situation?
Tristan HarrisRead
With our Paleolithic instincts, we're simply unable to resist technology's gifts. But this doesn't just compromise our privacy. It also compromises our ability to take collective action.
Tristan HarrisRead
Similar quotes
On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you'll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity.
Bill GatesRead
I am living in the Google years, no question of that. And there are advantages to it. When you forget something, you can whip out your iPhone and go to Google. The Senior Moment has become the Google moment, and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound, doesn't it? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up.... You can't retrieve you life (unless you're on Wikipedia, in which case you can retrieve an inaccurate version of it).
Nora EphronRead
The telephone will be used to inform people that a telegram has been sent.
Alexander Graham BellRead
Today every invention is received with a cry of triumph which soon turns into a cry of fear.
Bertolt BrechtRead
Government isn't that good at rapid advancement of technology. It tends to be better at funding basic research. To have things take off, you've got to have commercial companies do it.
Elon MuskRead
The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don't really even notice it, so it's part of everyday life.
Bill GatesRead