Your Undivided Attention

In a 2018 TED Talk, Yuval Harari argued that democracy prevailed over fascism and communism in the 20th century not because of any inherent advantage, but because the technology of that age favored open and democratic societies. It was simply too difficult and too costly to centralize power using pre-digital technology.
But, Yuval warned, with the rise of AI, the calculus might flip: it might actually become far more efficient to run highly centralized authoritarian governments.
Eight years later, we're starting to see what Yuval was warning about. Right now, police across all levels of government, from small-town sheriffs to massive federal agencies, are adopting AI at a staggering rate and using it to build the kind of efficient, centralized surveillance-state apparatus that Yuval warned about.
Take, for example, the recent deployment of hundreds of thousands of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) across the country by companies like Flock and Axon. These cameras have made headlines in recent weeks, but as you’ll hear in this episode, they are just the most visible frontier of an AI-powered digital dragnet that gives police the ability to analyze extraordinary amounts of data about private citizens.
Today on the show, Tristan speaks with two experts on how police are using AI technology today, what we can expect in the near future, and what protections we need to create now before it's too late.
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is a law professor at George Washington University who studies how policing technology collides with constitutional law. He's the author of Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance.
Garance Burke is an investigative journalist at The Associated Press, where she leads high-impact projects on the intersection of technology and society. Her investigations into the global surveillance industry were part of a package that won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA
Your Data Will Be Used Against You by Andrew Guthrie Ferguson
Garance Burke’s AP homepage
Yuval Noah Harari’s 2018 TED talk: “Why fascism is so tempting -- and how your data could power it”
Garance Burke and Byron Tau’s reporting on the use of AI-enabled tools by DHS in Minneapolis
The AP’s reporting on how Silicon Valley helped build China’s surveillance state
Further reading on Estonia’s data tracker tool

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES
Why Are Migrants Becoming AI Test Subjects? With Petra Molnar
America and China Are Racing to Different AI Futures
Laughing at Power: A Troublemaker’s Guide to Changing Tech

Corrections
Andrew said that real-time crime centers are in 300 cities across the US, which matches the findings of the National Real Time Crime Center Association; however, this figure is disputed, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation putting it at 150.
Garance cited her reporting that there are nearly two hundred AI systems currently in use by law enforcement. According to recent public accounting, that number has grown considerably and is now at 238.
Andrew incorrectly described the resolution of the case of a man misidentified by AI in New Orleans. He said the man was acquitted, but in fact the charges were dropped.

Clarifications
As noted in the episode, Andrew’s discussion of agentic AI was a theoretical account of a tool that police may use in the future, not something actively used on the ground today.
Garance referred to the protests in Ferguson as the impetus for police-worn body cameras. Body cameras were being piloted in the US and UK prior to Ferguson, but federal grants in the wake of the protests made them much more common.






Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In AI, what gets measured gets optimized. Right now, we're spending all our efforts to measure how capable and powerful models are, narrowly optimizing for those metrics while ignoring downstream consequences.

What if we could flip this dynamic on its head? What if, instead of what AI can do, we start to measure what AI does to us? What if, instead of races to the bottom on capabilities and engagement, we could incentivize races to the top on safety, or better yet, on making us more resilient and developed human beings?

That’s the mission of CHT’s Humane Evals program: we're bringing together researchers, psychologists, engineers, and technologists from across the entire AI ecosystem and beyond to build out the expertise and infrastructure we need to measure AI's impact on humans.

Today on the show, Aza Raskin explores the Humane Evals project with Imran Khan, a researcher and strategist who's been leading CHT's efforts in this area, and Jared Moore, a computer scientist and researcher who's been at the forefront of measuring AI's psychological impact on users.

If this sounds like something you're interested in working on, you can email us at evals@humanetech.com.



RECOMMENDED MEDIA

You can read more about Jared’s work at his website.

Related pieces by Imran on the CHT Substack:

What is AI doing to humans? Why aren’t we measuring it?

Will Human-Like AI Hijack Human Psychology?

A Black Box Problem: Missing Data On How AI Affects the Human Mind

The website for the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics

KoraBench, the child safety AI benchmark that Imran referenced



RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

The AI Dilemma

Attachment Hacking and the Rise of AI Psychosis

How OpenAI's ChatGPT Guided a Teen to His Death



Corrections:

Aza gave the wrong year for Sewell Setzer’s death. It was in 2024, not 2025.

Aza referred to Joseph Henrich as an evolutionary psychologist; he was actually a biological anthropologist.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It feels like we’re stuck in an endless debate about what AI is going to mean for jobs and the economy. The prediction you hear from the people closest to the technology — both its critics and its boosters — is that mass automation is coming, and with it mass unemployment. In response, some AI CEOs are promising a post-labor Golden Age of abundance and universal high income. But you also hear from some techno-optimists and economists that AI will create more jobs than it destroys and that society’s fears are unjustified.

When these arguments are traded back and forth, no one can know what’s actually true, and nothing happens. And caught in the middle of this debate are actual workers trying to figure out what this means for their family and themselves, or whether their kids should go to college. And as long as that debate stays alive, nobody plans or takes action ahead of what’s coming.

So this week on Your Undivided Attention, rather than continuing to referee this debate, we follow the incentives and show you where they’re actually taking us in the very near future.

Our guest, economist Molly Kinder, argues that we’re entering what she calls the “messy middle”: a period of concentrated and uneven workforce disruption. She has evidence-based arguments about where, specifically, AI will affect the labor force, what the second and third-order consequences of those effects might be, and what we need to do today to protect people’s livelihoods.

Molly recently left her position as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution to become the founding CEO of a new organization dedicated to addressing AI’s impact on jobs. Her Substack, Kinder Futures: Dispatches on AI, Work & What Comes Next, features some of the clearest-eyed analysis of AI’s impact on the economy.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

Kinder Futures: Dispatches on AI, Work & What Comes Next (Molly’s Substack)

Molly’s blog posts at Brookings

The Yale Budget Lab’s AI Labor Market Tracker

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

AI and the Future of Work: What You Need to Know

Is AI Productivity Worth Our Humanity? with Prof. Michael Sandel

AI and Jobs: How to Make AI Work With Us, Not Against Us with Daron Acemoglu

 

Corrections

Molly incorrectly referred to cuts to “Medicare for the neediest populations.” The cuts she describes are to Medicaid.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This week, we're bringing you a conversation that Tristan Harris had with Krista Tippett. Krista is the Peabody Award-winning host of the On Being podcast, where she explores spiritual inquiry, science, social healing, and poetry, and the wisdom that we need to replenish and orient in this tender and tumultuous time.

Krista and Tristan spoke remotely in front of a crowd while she was in person at the Wisdom in Action forum in Australia. Their discussion was focused on trust in the age of AI and explored big, critical questions like what does it mean to build AI in service of life? How can we hold a collective problem this big as individuals? And what does it take to resist the spell of inevitability? We hope you enjoy this thought-provoking conversation. 

Your Undivided Attention will be taking a short summer hiatus. We’ll be back with more episodes soon!

Your Undivided Attention is produced by Center for Humane Technology. You can find a transcript of this conversation on our Substack.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

On Being with Krista Tippett

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Since stepping into the Papacy, Pope Leo XIV has been a forceful voice pushing back against the anti-human path we’re on with AI. In May, he released “Magnifica Humanitas,” a sprawling encyclical warning of the dangers to human dignity and agency posed by runaway AI. Tristan had the incredible opportunity to meet with the Pope ahead of the encyclical's release. 

In the modern world, you’d think we would have developed governance structures to deal with powerful new technologies like AI. It's worth asking why a 2,000-year-old religious institution is the only one standing up and loudly declaring that the default path is unacceptable. 

In this episode, Tristan and Aza discuss what it was like for Tristan to be at the Vatican, why this is such a critical step toward a pro-human future, and how we can build on the momentum of the Pope’s call to action.

Your Undivided Attention is produced by Center for Humane Technology. You can find a transcript of this conversation on our Substack.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

The Pope’s encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas”

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

The Tech-God Complex: Why We Need to be Skeptics

What Do We Mean by Humane Tech?

Corrections:

Tristan said that Pope John XXIII gave his radio address weeks after the Cuban Missile Crisis. It actually occured during the crisis.

Tristan paraphrased the full quote from Pope Leo's encyclical on AI disarmament. Here is the full quote: "Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of “armed” competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance."

Aza slightly misquoted Dr. King Jr. The full quote begins "The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live."

The delegates for Bretton Woods came from just 44 countries, not "hundreds" as Tristan said.

 

 

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.