Tristan Harris during our backstage interview at DLD Munich 2025. (Image credit: DLD/Hubert Burda Media)
Tristan Harris is one of the world’s most prominent advocates of technology that serves people and society – not a handful of tech giants and their billionaire owners.
Before co-founding the Center for Humane Technology, a non-profit, Harris worked at Google as a Design Ethicist. In this role, he realized how social networks made deliberate decisions to keep users on their platforms, in effect making them more and more addictive – even if that meant emphasizing radical ideas, disinformation and increasing polarization.
Netflix made Harris the central character of its award-winning documentary The Social Dilemma, which came out in 2020 – the same year Harris first spoke at the DLD Munich conference. You can watch his talk about Truth Decay and the Technology Threat on the DLD News website, which I edit.
Now that the world is obsessed with AI’s seeming superpowers, Harris worries that technology companies will cause irreparable harm by moving too fast. In the rush to roll out this powerful technology – which is still young and error-prone –, Harris sees a “race to recklessness” that could destabilize the foundation of our society if we’re not careful, he told me in an extensive backstage interview recorded at DLD Munich 2025.
You can watch the video directly on Youtube, with all its clickbait mind games and tracking – or in my DLD News article, which will give you a summary of the interview along with the video, embedded through Youtube’s “no cookie” settings. Google found a way to still track users – because the company has long ago gone evil – but at least there are no ads and other distractions.
