When Tech Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself

When you are two years old, your mother knows more about you than you know yourself. As you get older, you begin to understand things about your mind that even she doesn't know. But then, says Yuval Noah Harari, another competitor joins the race: "You have this corporation or government running after you, and they are way past your mother, and they are at your back." Amazon will soon know when you need lightbulbs right before they burn out. YouTube knows how to keep you starting at the screen long past when it's in your interest to stop. An advertiser in the future might know your sexual preferences before they are clear to you. Recently, I spoke with Harari, the author of three best-selling books, and Tristan Harris, who runs the Center for Humane Technology and who has played a substantial role in making "Time Well Spent" perhaps the most-debated phrase in Silicon Valley in 2018. They are two of the smartest people in the world of tech, and each spoke eloquently about self-knowledge and how humans can make themselves harder to hack. As Harari said, "We are now facing not just a technological crisis but a philosophical crisis." Please read or watch the entire thing. This transcript has been edited for clarity. Nicholas Thompson: Tristan, tell me a little bit about what you do and then Yuval, you tell me too. Tristan Harris: I am a director of the Center for Humane Technology where we focus on re-aligning technology with a clear-eyed model of human nature. And I was before that a design ethicist at Google where I studied the ethics of human persuasion. Yuval Noah Harari: I'm a historian and I try to understand where humanity is coming from and where we are heading. NT: Let's start by hearing about how you guys met because I know that goes back a while. When did the two of you first meet? YNH: Funnily enough, on an expedition to Antarctica, we were invited by the Chilean government to the Congress of the Future to talk about the future of humankind and one part of the Congress was an expedition to the Chilean base in Antarctica to see global warming with our own eyes. And I think we particularly connected with Michael Sandel, who is a really amazing philosopher of moral philosophy. I would have loved to see the whole thing. You write about different things, you talk about different things but there are a lot of similarities. And one of the key themes is the notion that our minds don't work the way that we sometimes think they do. We don't have as much agency over our minds as perhaps we believed until now.