Co-founder for Center for Humane Technology & Earth Species Project. Co-Host of Your Undivided Attention.
San Francisco
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- Following 692
- Followers 38,238
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While we've been fixated on the point technology overwhelms human strength, we've missed the point when technology undermines human weakness.
That's the true 'singularity'.
piped.video/watch?v=z8jbZPL9…
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I used to believe that my job as a designer was optimizing for ease of use.
That was myopic.
It can lead to dire consequences.
Born 15 years ago today: the infinite scroll.
Then-22-year-old Aza Raskin's innovation was spurred by his frustration with Google's multi-page search results.
He now regrets creating the feature and its role in keeping people glued to their phones.
bit.ly/InfiniteScroll06
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Want your CSS rotates and scales to be beautifully antialiased? For webkit, add "box-shadow: 0 0 1px transparent;" and it will be.
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1. Amazon's revenue drops 1% for every 100ms slower their page loads.
2. To influence elections/manipulate belief, the government just needs to lean on a telco to slow down loading times of dissenting sites.
3. The political implications for ending #NetNeutrality is terrifying. nitter.app/AGSchneiderman/status/…
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As the person who created it… shows the massive hole in our design philosophy: Optimizing for ease-of-use does not mean best for the user or humanity.
UX is locally moral but globally amoral. It asks "how do I make this ergonomic" not "is it ergonomic to our values or society"
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Garfield minus Garfield is particularly poignant and existential right now.
garfieldminusgarfield.net/
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The hardest part of design isn't design, and the hardest part of coding isn't coding. The hardest part is influencing people.
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The #1 priority for all of us is to stop making products that prey on human cognitive biases to maximize engagement/stock price.
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Excited to release a collab with singer @zia_cora 🎉! It's a music video for her new single 'Submarines' that I created with the latest research AI.
I'm still 🤯 by the AI's lyricism & power. The song is dark and tinged with hope, just like this tech.
piped.video/uG8vItscFKc
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This is what you get when you type "climate change is" into Google. Three of four results say hoax.
If you can make something trend, you make it true. Algorithmic recommendations become an autocomplete for the human mind.
Google, take responsibility for your tacit endorsements.
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One of my lessons from infinite scroll: that optimizing something for ease-of-use does not mean best for the user or humanity.
#SocialMediaAddiction
The creator of the infinite scrolling feature, Aza Raskin, had a noble intention when he went about designing this feature.
According to Raskin, time worth 200,000 human lifetimes is wasted on a daily basis due to our act of infinite scrolling.
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As the person who created it… shows the massive hole in our design philosophy: Optimizing for ease-of-use does not mean best for the user or humanity.
UX is locally moral but globally amoral. It asks "how do I make this ergonomic" not "is it ergonomic to our values or society"
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Facebook is aware that foreign state actors are using the Facebook platform to undermine US interest and @FrancesHaugen believes their consistent understaffing of counter espionage, information, and terrorism teams is a national security issue.
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As technologists, blame lies in the communication tools we've created. When we can only shout, the best shouter wins.
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We need to move away from just Human-centered Design to Human-protection Design.
From: Have a problem? It’s your responsibility to use it differently.
To: It’s our responsibility to design technology in a way that protects people.
Google Duplex. Facebook. I'm looking at you.
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.@TristanHarris and I joined @JoeRogan on his podcast for a dive deep on AI - discussing the immense potential and significant challenges that this technology presents
Listen to our conversation: open.spotify.com/episode/4Zc…
To join the movement and learn more, text "AI" to 55444
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Something very special...
Over the last few months, we’ve come together as co-creators, drawn in by the magnetism of a project.
Despite myself, I'm very excited. It's an indy/non-profit project that helps people get together in digital space in entirely new fun flexible ways.
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As technologists, we've built the world's largest persuasion smart gun, able to target micro demographics, and let it be rent by anyone.
Focusing on wedge issues like gay rights and immigration, paid for from Russia, all with the intent of helping Trump nytimes.com/2017/09/06/techn…
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Disney's 12 Rules of Animation. Useful for all UI designers. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_bas…
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As a leader, the best gift you can give your team is an immaculately articulated problem, then the trust and freedom to solve it.
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A 100% accurate IE6 clone written entirely in HTML5 mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/ef…
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You'll never look at the CBS logo the same way again. fc05.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2…
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Too many startups are about filling our time, instead of making our time fulfilling. Commoditization of attention is to blame.
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Watch the Richard Feynman lectures on physics. Brilliant and worth the watch, no matter your profession. on.io9.com/GBZHzk
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Why vector app icons aren't the solution pushing-pixels.org/2011/11/0…
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Yes, NASA did just win at time-lapse photography. vimeo.com/45878034
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Move over, AppleScript. Yosemite introduces Javascript for automation scripting! Finally. developer.apple.com/library/…
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Proud to announce:
Today we launched a new org—led by @tristanharris—to combat the digital addiction crisis.
And they way technology manipulates and polarizes us as it crawls down our brainstorm to do whatever it can to mine our attention.
mobile.nytimes.com/2018/02/0…
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Improving the UI of tipping with gameification: instagr.am/p/aX3uv/
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“And we need to grow, and grow aggressively” — CEO of 1Password.
Why?!
Growth at all costs is a San Francisco ideology.
We should replace it with humane ideology: bind scale to responsibility.
The societal cost of all-costs growth is everything.
techcrunch.com/2019/11/14/fo…
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Our companies are valued—on Wall Street and Sand Hill—by retention and engagement numbers. This election shows that we get what we value.
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Design is as much about iterating understanding of the problem as it is the solution. Your first attempt at both will be wrong.
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The last 150 years has seen a profound increase in human free time. Baboon studies give us clues to what that means
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Netflix just released the trailer for the film we've been working on with Chasing Ice's @jefforlowski: "The Social Dilemma".
The documentary is like the Silent Spring or Inconvenient Truth of technology.
Give it a watch!
piped.video/watch?time_conti…
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As a founder, your job isn’t to make a great product. It’s to build a great team that makes great products. You are who you hire.
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📣 COVID19 DESIGN CHALLENGE. Today we're challenging tech to use their global reach to #FlattenTheCurve & save millions of lives.
No one else is positioned to leap ahead and reach 3b ppl before the virus can.
Over the next 72hrs @HumaneTech_ is hosting a design challenge⬇️🧵
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Collusion: Real-time visualization of who tracks you on the web. You'll be surprised. Beautifully scary. http://bit.ly/oCUhgV
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Concrete Mathematics, a book that defined my childhood math aspirations, available as PDF http://bit.ly/dZiwcO
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🪁 EXCITING NEWS! 🪁
Three years in the making, the trailer for our new film, "The Social Dilemma" dropped this morning. It pulls back the curtain on how Silicon Valley has been disrupting civilization – from the mental health of kids to democracy to truth.
On Netflix, Sept 9
We tweet, we like, and we share— but what are the consequences of our growing dependence on social media? Silicon Valley insiders reveal how social media is reprogramming civilization. #TheSocialDilemma Only on Netflix, September 9th. piped.video/watch?v=uaaC57tc…
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Prediction: before we get super-intelligent AI, we will get super-persuasive AI.
And that will effectively be humanity's backdoor/rootkit.
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A beautiful and incredibly clever OpenType font that also makes beautiful graphs. fontfont.com/how-to-use-ff-c…
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ViperCard is an open-source re-imagining and re-creation of 1987 HyperCard. Oh the feels!
vipercard.net/
And also: who else has incredible memories of playing Glider?
vipercard.net/0.2/?s=ZGVtb19…
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We are guaranteed the right to freedom of speech. We are not guaranteed the right to freedom of reach.
We need amplification liability for Internet platforms. Facebook, I'm looking directly at you.
Explored by @CaseyNewton here:
getrevue.co/profile/caseynew…
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"Every time you hear 'ethics' you should just replace it in your head with the actual negative impact of what you're doing." Relevant to tech, relevant to this moment. Ethical Transformation panel at the Vatican
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Filter bubbles are truth bubbles.
The rise of social media directly correlates with the rise of polarization, and the fall of shared truth.
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We’re at the edge of something profound—decoding animal communication in ways we couldn’t have imagined. NatureLM-audio is a leap toward understanding the voices of other species all through a single model. Read the paper here: arxiv.org/abs/2411.07186
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A huge congrats to the @firefox team. I've been using Firefox Quantum the last couple weeks and it has become my main browser again. Super fast and without ulterior motive.
Hello again, old friend.
mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/
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Google just bought Songza! What a crazy ride for a company I started over two weekends in a Chicago Starbucks businessinsider.com/why-goog…
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“It's no longer enough for designers to think of one individual using a product. We have to think the fractal version up to technology/society interaction”.
From an episode of the Netflix doc series Abstract: The Art of Design with @ianspalter
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"I see all the pictures that people like to project about themselves on social media. And I know it’s all a lie. Most people are lying about their lives. Pretending to have it together. Pretending to be more successful and popular than they are."
— GPT3
instagram.com/generative.pho…
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Congress keeps asking the wrong questions of Zuckerberg.
Facebook doesn't sell your data—that would be against their business interest.
They make $40b a year selling the ability to influence and target you.
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JSlim is a static JS analyzer which removes the parts of your favorite JS library you aren't using. bit.ly/osdrH7
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Boarding the plane with an accelerated step and heart beat.
SF > Instanbul > Nairobi > Bangui (Central African Republic) > Bayanga > Dzanga Bai (the Congo).
Heading there with Cornell researchers for an expedition to study elephant communication. 🐘🐘🐘
Childhood dream. ✅
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Cameras, at the hardware level, need to start signing their content and putting proof of authorship in a block chain.
Make it verifiable that a video or picture was taken, not generated or modified.
People often say that porn pushes the limits of any technology, but when it happens in your field it feels very uncomfortable... Face swapping in adult videos with adversarial deep learning: motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a…
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My father's final gift. Six years ago today, he gave me the last birthday present he ever would. http://bit.ly/dRcgbI
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Mobile design patterns for Android. androidniceties.tumblr.com/ /via @at_underscore
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Store a 30-character password in your brain's subconscious memory so that your conscious is unaware. Very clever. extremetech.com/extreme/1330…
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“64% of all extremist group joins are due to our [Facebook's] recommendation tools”
“Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”
Internal presentation to exec team at Facebook. Solutions were nixed or weakened.
wsj.com/articles/facebook-kn…
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When you create a prototype, it's chief purpose is to convince. First it must convinces you, then others, of what is worth making.
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As a maker becoming a founder, you'll fail unless you give up the joy of making, and change it to the joy of supporting others making.
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So You Want To Be a Designer? Top 5 list of what you need to know. New blog post: http://bit.ly/b3un88
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The role of a founder isn't to build a great product. It's to build a great team that builds fantastic products.
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Prediction: In a decade, only the affluent will be able to afford to be disconnected. The iWatch et al will start sexy and end as a shackle.
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That Facebook employees don’t find it morally wrong to take full call history w/o clear disclosure is indicative.
Their defense is pretty much: well, you let me into your house, so why are you mad that I dug through your trash and closets for personal stuff?
A Facebook software engineer just emailed me. It's clear even Facebook employees don't understand why people are surprised the company even needs to collect call history and SMS data (mobile friendly version of tweet)
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Hafez is an RNN that writes poems. Here’s its sonnet on Bipolar Disorder. And Death. homes.cs.washington.edu/~yej…
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How technology hijacks people’s minds: medium.com/@tristanharris/ho… Very happy to see @tristanharris ideas getting out there. Deeply important.
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On iPhone, dialing *3001#12345#*, holding the power button, then holding home, replaces the bars with a more accurate reception meter.
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Color wheels are wrong: How color vision actually works. blog.asmartbear.com/color-wh…
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Chosen is a JS library that makes select boxes much more humane. harvesthq.github.com/chosen/
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Face detection for cats in Javascript. Best Javascript library ever. github.com/harthur/kittydar
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A fantastically well-done landing page. I want to lick this website. bit.ly/pwrsKk
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“The greatest trick technology companies ever played was persuading society to surveil itself.”
We need new duty of care/fiduciary laws to protect us individual humans from the accelerating asymmetry of our god-like technological powers.
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