How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day

I want you to imagine

walking into a room,

a control room with a bunch of people,

a hundred people, hunched
over a desk with little dials,

and that that control room

will shape the thoughts and feelings

of a billion people.

This might sound like science fiction,

but this actually exists

right now today.

I know because I used to be
in one of those control rooms.

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
are how the handful of people

working at a handful
of technology companies

through their choices will steer
what a billion people are thinking today.

Because when you pull out your phone
and they design how this works

or what's on the feed,

it's scheduling little blocks
of time in our minds.

If you see a notification,
it schedules you to have thoughts

that maybe you didn't intend to have.

If you swipe over that notification,

it schedules you into spending
a little bit of time

getting sucked into something
that maybe you didn't intend

to get sucked into.

When we talk about technology,

we tend to talk about it
as this blue sky opportunity.

It could go any direction.

And I want to get serious for a moment
and tell you why it's going

in a very specific direction.

Because it's not evolving randomly.

There's a hidden goal
driving the direction

of all of the technology we make,

and that goal is the race
for our attention.

Because every new site --

TED, elections, politicians,

games, even meditation apps --

have to compete for one thing,

which is our attention,

and there's only so much of it.

And the best way to get people's attention

is to know how someone's mind works.

And there's a whole bunch
of persuasive techniques

that I learned in college at a lab
called the Persuasive Technology Lab

to get people's attention.

A simple example is YouTube.

YouTube wants to maximize
how much time you spend,

and so what do they do?

They autoplay the next video.

And let's say that works really well.

They're getting a little bit more
of people's time.

Well, if you're Netflix, you look at that

and say, well that's shrinking
my market share,

so I'm going to autoplay the next episode.

But then if you're Facebook, you say,
well no, that's shrinking

all of my market share, so now
I have to autoplay

all the videos in the newsfeed
before waiting for you to click play.

So the Internet is not evolving at random.

The reason it feels like it's
sucking us in the way it is

is because of this race for attention.

We know where this is going.

Technology is not neutral,

and it becomes this race to the bottom
of the brainstem of who can go lower

to get it.

Let me give you an example of Snapchat.

If you didn't know,

Snapchat is the number one way

that teenagers in
the United States communicate.

So if you're like me, and you use
text messages to communicate,

Snapchat is that for teenagers,

and there's, like, a hundred million
of them that use it.

And they invented a feature
called Snapstreaks,

which shows the number of days in a row

that two people have
communicated with each other.

In other words, what they just did

is they gave two people
something they don't want to lose,

because if you're a teenager,
and you have 150 days in a row,

you don't want that to go away,

and so think of the little blocks of time

that that schedules in kids' minds.

This isn't theoretical: when kids
go on vacation, it's been shown

they give their passwords
to up to five other friends

to keep their Snapstreaks going,

even when they can't do it.

And they have, like, 30 of these things,

and so they have to get through
taking photos of just pictures or walls

or ceilings just to get through their day.

So it's not even like
they're having real conversations.

We have a temptation to think about this

as, oh, they're just using Snapchat

the way we used
to gossip on the telephone.

It's probably okay.

Well, what this misses
is that in the 1970s

when you were just gossiping
on the telephone,

there wasn't a hundred engineers
on the other side of the screen

who knew exactly
how your psychology worked

and orchestrated you into
a double bind with each other.

Now, if this is making you
feel a little bit outraged,

notice that that thought
just comes over you.

Outrage is a really good way also
of getting your intention,

because we don't choose outrage.

It happens to us.

And if you're the Facebook news feed,

whether you'd want to or not
you actually benefit

when there's outrage,

because outrage doesn't just
schedule a reaction

in emotional time, space, for you.

We want to share that outrage
with other people.

So we want to share and say,

"Can you believe the thing
that they said?"

And so outrage works really well
at getting attention,

such that if Facebook had a choice
between showing you the outrage feed

and a calm news feed,

they would want to show you
the outrage feed,

not because someone
consciously chose that,

but because that worked better
at getting your attention.

And the news feed control room
is not accountable to us.

It's only accountable
to maximizing attention.

It's also accountable, because
of the business model of advertising,

for anybody who can pay the most
to actually walk into the control room

and say, "That group over there,
I want to schedule these thoughts

into their minds."

So you can target,

you can precisely target a lie

directly to the people
who are most susceptible.

And because this is profitable,
it's only going to get worse.

So I'm here today

because the costs are so obvious.

I don't know a more urgent
problem than this,

because this problem is underneath
all other problems.

It's not just taking away our agency

to spend our attention and live
the lives that we want,

it's changing the way
that we have our conversations,

it's changing our democracy,

and it's changing our ability
to have the conversations

and relationships we want with each other,

and it affects everyone,

because a billion people
have one of these in their pocket.

So how do we fix this?

We need to make three radical changes

to technology and to our society.

The first is we need to acknowledge

that we are persuadable.

Once you start understanding
that your mind can be scheduled

into having little thoughts
or little blocks of time

that you didn't choose,

wouldn't we want to use that understanding

and protect against the way
that that happens?

I think we need to see ourselves
fundamentally in a new way.

It's almost like a new period
of human history,

like the Enlightenment,

but almost a kind of
self-aware Enlightenment,

that we can be persuaded,

and there might be something
we want to protect.

The second is we need new models
and accountability systems

so that as the world gets better
and more and more persuasive over time,

because it's only going
to get more persuasive,

that the people in those control rooms
are accountable and transparent

to what we want.

The only form of ethical
persuasion that exists

is when the goals of the persuader

are aligned with the goals
of the persuadee.

And that involves questioning big things,

like the business model of advertising.

Lastly, we need a design renaissance,

because once you have
this view of human nature,

that you can steer the timelines
of a billion people --

Just imagine, there's people
who have some desire

about what they want to do
and what they want to be thinking

and what they want to be feeling

and how they want to be informed,

and we're all just tugged
into these other directions,

and you have a billion people just tugged
into all these different directions.

Well imagine an entire design renaissance

that tried to orchestrate the exact
and most empowering

time-well-spent way for those
timelines to happen.

And that would involve two things:
one would be protecting against

the timelines that we don't
want to be experiencing,

the thoughts that we wouldn't
want to be happening,

so that when that ding happens,
not having the ding

that sends us away;

and the second would be empowering us
to live out the timeline that we want.

So let me give you a concrete example.

Today, let's say your friend
cancels dinner on you,

and you are feeling a little bit lonely.

And so what do you do in that moment?

You open up Facebook.

And in that moment,

the designers in the control room
want to schedule exactly one thing,

which is to maximize how much time
you spend on the screen.

Now instead, imagine if those designers
created a different timeline

that was the easiest way,
using all of their data,

to actually help you get out
with the people that you care about?

Just imagine how, just think,
alleviating all loneliness in society,

if that was the timeline that Facebook
wanted to make possible for people.

Or imagine a different conversation

where, let's say you wanted to post
something super-controversial on Facebook,

which is a really important
thing to be able to do,

to talk about controversial topics.

And right now, when there's
that big comment box,

it's almost asking you,

what key do you want to type?

In other words, it's scheduling
a little timeline of things

you're going to continue
to do on the screen.

And imagine instead that there was
another button there saying,

well what would be most
time well spent for you?

And you click "host a dinner."

And right there underneath the item,

it said, "Who wants
to RSVP for the dinner?"

And so you'd still have a conversation
about something controversial,

but you'd be having it in the most
empowering place on your timeline,

which would be at home that night
with a bunch of a friends over

to talk about it.

So imagine we're running, like,
a find and replace

on all of the timelines that are
currently steering us towards more

and more screen time persuasively

and replacing all of those timelines

with what do we want in our lives.

It doesn't have to be this way.

Instead of handicapping our attention,

imagine if we used all of this data
and all of this power

and this new view of human nature

to give us a superhuman ability to focus

and a superhuman ability to put
our attention to what we cared about

and a superhuman ability to have
the conversations that we need

to have for a democracy.

The most complex challenges in the world

require not just us to use
our attention individually.

They require us to use our attention
and coordinate it together.

Climate change is going to require
that a lot of people

are being able to coordinate
their attention

in the most empowering way together.

And imagine creating a superhuman
ability to do that.

Sometimes the world's most pressing
and important problems

are not these hypothetical future things
that we could create in the future.

Sometimes the most pressing problems

are the ones that are
right underneath our noses,

the things that are already directing
a billion people's thoughts.

And maybe instead of getting excited
about the new augmented reality

and virtual reality and these
cool things that could happen,

which are going to be susceptible
to the same race for attention,

if we could fix the race for attention

on the thing that's already
in a billion people's pockets.

Maybe instead of getting excited
about the most exciting new cool

fancy education apps,

we could fix the way kids' minds
are getting manipulated

into sending empty messages
back and forth.

(Applause)

Maybe instead of worrying about
hypothetical future runaway

artificial intelligences that are
maximizing for one goal,

we could solve the runaway
artificial intelligence

that already exists right now,

which are these news feed

maximizing for one thing.

It's almost like instead of running away
to colonize new planets,

we could fix the one
that we're already on.

(Applause)

Solving this problem

is critical infrastructure
for solving every other problem.

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.

What will be time well spent for ours?

Thank you.

(Applause)

Chris Anderson: Tristan, thank you.
Hey, stay up here a sec.

First of all, thank you.

I know we asked you to do this talk
on pretty short notice,

and you've had quite a stressful week

getting this thing together, so thank you.

Some people listening might say,

well look, what you complain about

is addiction, and all these people
doing this stuff,

for them it's actually interesting.

All these design decisions

have built user content
that is fantastically interesting.

The world's more interesting
than it ever has been.

What's possibly wrong with that?

Tristan Harris: Well, I think
it's really interesting.

It's like, one way to see this

is if you're just YouTube for example,

you want to always show
the more interesting next video.

You want to get better and better
at suggesting that next video,

but even if you could propose
the perfect next video

that everyone would want to watch,

it would just be better and better
at keeping you hooked on the screen.

So what's missing in that equation

is figuring out what
our boundaries would be.

Right? You would want YouTube to know
something about, say, falling asleep.

The CEO of Netflix recently said
that our biggest competitors are Facebook,

YouTube, and sleep. Right?

And so what we need to recognize
is that the human architecture is limited,

and that we have certain boundaries
or dimensions of our lives

that we want to be honored and respected,

and technology could help do that.

(Applause)

CA: I mean, could you make the case

that part of the problem here is that
we've got a naïve model of human nature?

So much of this is justified in terms
of human preference,

where we've got these algorithms
that do an amazing job

of optimizing for human preference,

but which preference?

There's the preferences of things
that we really care about

when we think about them

versus the preferences of what
we just instinctively click on.

If we could implant that more
nuanced view of human nature

in every design, would that
be a step forward?

TH: Absolutely. I mean,
I think right now it's as if

all of our technology is basically
only asking our lizard brain

what's the best way to just impulsively
get you to the next tiniest thing

with your time,

instead of asking you in your life

what we would be most
time well spent for you?

What would be the perfect timeline
that might include something later,

would be time well spent for you
here at TED in your last day here?

CA: So if Facebook and Google
and everyone said to us first up,

"Hey would you like us to optimize
for your reflective brain

or your lizard brain? You choose."

TH: Right. That would be one way. Yes.

CA: When you said persuadability,
that's an interesting word to me

because to me there's two
different types of persuadability.

There's the persuadability
that we're trying right now

of reason and thinking
and making an argument,

but I think you're almost
talking about a different kind

of more visceral type of persuadability,

of being persuaded without
even knowing that you're thinking.

TH: Exactly, yeah. The reason
I care about this problem so much is

I studied at a lab called
the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford

that taught people
exactly these techniques.

There's conferences and workshops
that teach people all these covert ways

of getting people's attention
and orchestrating people's lives.

And it's because most people
don't know that that exists

that this conversation is so important.

CA: Tristan, you and I, we both know
70 people from all these companies.

There are actually many here in the room,

and I don't know about you,
but my experience of them

is that there is no
shortage of good intent.

People want a better world.

They are actually, they really want it.

And I don't think anything you're saying
is that these are evil people,

it's a system where there's
these unintended consequences

that have really got out of control --

TH: -- of this race for attention, yeah.

It's the classic race to the bottom
when you have to get attention,

and it's so tense.

The only way to get more is to go
lower on the brain stem,

to go lower into outrage,
to go lower into emotion,

to go lower into the lizard brain.

CA: Well, thank you so much for helping us
all get a little bit wiser about this.

Tristan Harris, thank you.
TH: Thank you. Thank you very much.

(Applause)