By Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, The Center for Humane Technology
Published August 25, 2022 4:00am
At Center for Humane Technology, we often talk about multipolar traps — which arise when individuals have an incentive to act in ways that are beneficial to them in the short term, but detrimental to the group in the long term. Think of social media companies that compete for our attention, so that when TikTok introduces an even-more addictive feature, Facebook and Twitter have to mimic it in order to keep up, sending us all on a race to the bottom of our brainstems.
Intervening at the level of multipolar traps has extraordinary leverage. One such intervention is th...