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Your Undivided Attention

Your Undivided Attention

By: The Center for Humane Technology Tristan Harris Daniel Barcay and Aza Raskin
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Join us every other Thursday to understand how new technologies are shaping the way we live, work, and think. Your Undivided Attention is produced by Senior Producer Julia Scott and Researcher/Producer is Joshua Lash. Sasha Fegan is our Executive Producer. We are a member of the TED Audio Collective.2019-2025 Center for Humane Technology Political Science Politics & Government Relationships Social Sciences
Episodes
  • A Conversation with the Team Behind the AI Doc
    Mar 23 2026

    “The AI Doc: Or How I Became An Apocaloptimist” opens in theaters across the U.S. this Friday, March 27. In this episode, we sit down with the team behind this groundbreaking documentary — Oscar-winning producers Daniel Kwan, Jonathan Wang, and Ted Tremper. They explore how they navigated the overwhelming complexity of AI, held space for radically different perspectives, and created a film designed not just to inform but to be experienced together.

    At CHT, we believe clarity creates agency. This film has the power to create the shared clarity we need to steer the direction of AI towards a better, more humane technological future. With every new technology, there’s a brief window to set the rules of the road that determine the future we live in. This is ours. So grab your friends, your family and go see “The AI Doc.”

    RECOMMENDED MEDIA

    Buy tickets for The AI Doc

    The trailer for The AI Doc

    The website for the Creators Coalition on AI

    Further reading on The Day After

    RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

    A Problem Well-Stated Is Half-Solved with Daniel Schmachtenberger

    The AI Dilemma


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    48 mins
  • AI Is Breaking Education. Rebecca Winthrop Has the Blueprint to Fix It.
    Mar 5 2026

    The promise of AI in education is incredible: picture infinitely patient tutors that can teach every student exactly the way they need to be taught. But the history of education technology tells us that these kinds of simple, optimistic stories are naive. Ask any teacher or student whether they feel unleashed by technology to do their best work.

    Because AI has the potential to completely transform education — is already transforming it — faster than educators can keep up, it’s essential that we start asking the big questions: how should these tools be used in the classroom? What’s the purpose of education in an AI age? And how do we prepare students for a future that’s still so radically uncertain?

    Our guest this week actually has some answers. Rebecca Winthrop leads the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, and they just released a report called A New Direction for Students in an AI World. She and her colleagues conducted an extensive ‘pre-mortem’ of AI in the classroom, speaking with hundreds of educators, students, policy-makers, and technologists worldwide.

    In this episode, Rebecca walks us through what she's learned — what's working, what's not, and most importantly, what are the concrete steps that parents, teachers, and administrators can and should take right now?

    RECOMMENDED MEDIA

    A New Direction for Students in An AI World

    The Disengaged Teen by Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson

    RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

    Rethinking School in the Age of AI

    Attachment Hacking and the Rise of AI Psychosis

    How OpenAI's ChatGPT Guided a Teen to His Death

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


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    46 mins
  • The Race to Build God: AI's Existential Gamble — Yoshua Bengio & Tristan Harris at Davos
    Feb 19 2026

    This week on Your Undivided Attention, Tristan Harris and Daniel Barcay offer a backstage recap of what it was like to be at the Davos World Economic Forum meeting this year as the world’s power brokers woke up to the risks of uncontrolled AI.

    Amidst all the money and politics, the Human Change House staged a weeklong series of remarkable conversations between scientists and experts about technology and society. This episode is a discussion between Tristan and Professor Yoshua Bengio, who is considered one of the world’s leaders in AI and deep learning, and the most cited scientist in the field.

    Yoshua and Tristan had a frank exchange about the AI we’re building, and the incentives we’re using to train models. What happens when a model has its own goals, and those goals are ‘misaligned’ with the human-centered outcomes we need? In fact this is already happening, and the consequences are tragic.

    Truthfully, there may not be a way to ‘nudge’ or regulate companies toward better incentives. Yoshua has launched a nonprofit AI safety research initiative called Law Zero that isn't just about safety testing, but really a new form of advanced AI that's fundamentally safe by design.

    RECOMMENDED MEDIA

    All the panels that Tristan and Daniel did with Human Change House

    LawZero: Safe AI for Humanity

    Anthropic’s internal research on ‘agentic misalignment’

    RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

    Attachment Hacking and the Rise of AI Psychosis

    How OpenAI's ChatGPT Guided a Teen to His Death

    What if we had fixed social media?

    What Can We Do About Abusive Chatbots? With Meetali Jain and Camille Carlton

    CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS

    1) In this episode, Tristan Harris discussed AI chatbot safety concerns. The core issues are substantiated by investigative reporting, with these clarifications:

    Grok: The Washington Post reported in August 2024 that Grok generated sexualized images involving minors and had weaker content moderation than competitors.

    Meta: The Wall Street Journal reported in December 2024 that Meta reduced safety restrictions on its AI chatbots. Testing showed inappropriate responses when researchers posed as 13-year-olds (Meta's minimum age). Our discussion referenced "eight year olds" to emphasize concerns about young children accessing these systems; the documented testing involved 13-year-old personas.

    Bottom line: The fundamental concern stands—major AI companies have reduced safety guardrails due to competitive pressure, creating documented risks for young users.

    2) There was no Google House at Davos in 2026, as stated by Tristan. It was a collaboration at Goals House.

    3) Tristan states that in 2025, the total funding going into AI safety organizations was “on the order of about $150 million.” This number is not strictly verifiable.


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    37 mins
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