How to Be Two-Marshmallow Humans (with Aza Raskin)

The Rip Current with Jacob Ward

Back in 2006, a young interface designer came up with the idea that rather than making people click to another page to continue reading, they should just get an endlessly reloading single page that goes on forever. That "infinite scroll" wound up being a centerpiece of the attention economy — it's how you can scroll mindlessly for hours without taking a break — and that young designer, Aza Raskin, became an activist fighting back against the industry he came up in.

Today Raskin is the cofounder, with Tristan Harris, of The Center for Humane Technology, and he and Harris helped create the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, which articulated the dangers of social media to the world. Now he's trying to do the same with A.I., and in this hourlong conversation he reveals the cultish enthusiasm, misplaced incentives, and truly catastrophic risks that the technology has brought into the world. He's a gifted communicator on the subject, and has made a new career inventing brilliant ways of bringing it across to the rest of us — you'll hear that here. (He and Harris also host Your Undivided Attention, a podcast on all of this.) We talk about the cult of endless growth that is Silicon Valley, why A.I. is different from anything that's come before it, and his hopes for creating some restraint in a world that he feels is accelerating out of control without it.