Ctr for Humane Techn Tristan Harris
ggl c # 99? --> pinterist
quit 10 yrs ago, dtr 6 yrs ago, like other guy hide in pantry.
https://humanetech.com/
As a child, Tristan Harris was a fledgling magician. When his tricks worked, he was fascinated to see that certain types of persuasion exploited the same weaknesses and blindspots across all kinds of people — other kids, adults, even the most highly skeptical and discerning.
This fascination never left him. It led him to study cults, hypnosis, behavioral economics, and eventually persuasive technology at Stanford. As a Design Ethicist at Google, fascination morphed into concern as Tristan observed the large-scale negative impacts of attention-grabbing business models. He created a presentation entitled “A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention”, which went viral within Google, reaching thousands of employees.
He would soon extend the conversation to the public with two TED talks and a 60 Minutes interview. In 2016, the harms Tristan and others were warning of exploded into the public discourse with Russia’s use of social media to manipulate American voters.
Some of those technologists joined Tristan to turn concern into coordinated action, launching the Center for Humane Technology (CHT) in February 2018. Today we are catalyzing a powerful and growing movement of cross-disciplinary leaders in technology, humanity, mindfulness, philosophy, and education.
CHT is an independent nonprofit organization whose mission is to reverse human downgrading by inspiring a new race to the top and realigning technology with humanity.
Our Team
We have built a world-class team of deeply concerned former tech insiders and CEOs who intimately understand the culture, business incentives, design techniques, and organizational structures driving how technology hijacks our minds.
Since 2013, we have articulated the problem within tech companies and to millions of people through mainstream media outlets like 60 Minutes, TED, CNN, and Real Time with Bill Maher. We have convened top industry leaders in private settings and presented directly to Heads of State and political leaders to drive change. We’ve also worked with leading designers and technology executives to find ways to align their products with the well-being of humanity.
Tristan Harris
Co-Founder & Executive Director
Called the “closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience” by The Atlantic magazine, Tristan was the former Design Ethicist at Google. He is a world expert on how technology steers us all, leaving Google to engage the issue publicly. Tristan spent over a decade understanding subtle psychological forces, from his childhood as a magician, to working with the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, to his role as CEO of Apture, which was acquired by Google. He has been featured on 60 Minutes, TED, The Atlantic, the PBS News Hour, and more. He has worked with major technology CEOs and briefed Heads of State and other political leaders.
Aza Raskin
Co-Founder
Aza Raskin helped build the web at Mozilla as head of user experience, was named to Inc and Forbes 30-under-30 and became the Fast Company Master of Design for his work founding Massive Health, a consumer health and big data company. The company was acquired by Jawbone, where he was VP of Innovation. Before that, he founded Songza.com (acquired by Google). For Aza, the problem is especially personal: his father, Jef Raskin, created the Macintosh project at Apple with the vision that technology should help, not harm, humans.
Randima (Randy) Fernando
Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer
Randy Fernando brings a values-driven mix of management, technology, and nonprofit backgrounds. He was Executive Director at Mindful Schools, a nonprofit he helped to grow from a fledgling organization to a $4 million leader in the mindfulness field, impacting nearly a million children. At NVIDIA, Randy led award-winning projects including writing three books on real-time computer graphics, and his work has been used in many top-flight video games.
Dr. Guillaume Chaslot
Advisor
An expert on recommendation algorithms, Guillaume Chaslot worked on the YouTube recommendation engine and measured the effectiveness of brand advertising at Google. Since then, he foundedAlgoTransparency, an initiative dedicated to revealing how the YouTube recommendation engine can harm public discourse. Guillaume was also on the first team that beat professionals at Computer Go with a 9 to 6 stone handicap.
Brooke Clinton
Administrative Manager
With a background in fundraising and community relations, Brooke works to authentically connect people to mission-driven organizations. Her work at CHT is primarily focused on building administrative functions that foster organizational advancement. Brooke has worked for arts and education organizations such as Headlands Center for the Arts, Corcoran Gallery of Art, and The College Preparatory School.
Colleen Haikes
Communications
Colleen Haikes has delivered strategic communications counsel and campaigns for more than 20 years at IBM, ServiceNow, PR agencies, and the nonprofit Studio in a School. At IBM Colleen worked on Smarter Planet for cities and buildings. Colleen now helps guide messaging, content creation, and media relations for the Center for Humane Technology.
David Jay
Head of Mobilization
David has spent 20 years at the intersection of technology and movement building, enabling deeper human connections. David is the founder of Asexuality.org, the world’s first community of people identifying as asexual, and has advised Planned Parenthood, 350.org and other organizations on how to use technology to build meaningful human relationships. He worked for Samsung Next, Mozilla’s Coral Project, and the 2018 midterm elections as a software engineer and product lead, and at various startups as a CTO or technical lead.
Abby Hall
Chief of Staff
Abby Hall has dedicated her career to public service that improves people’s lives. Her work managing public and press events for Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration helped develop relationships among CEOs, community leaders, press, and world leaders. Abby’s specialty is strategic planning, scheduling, event management, team building, and fundraising in values-based connection.
Rebecca Lendl
Head of Strategic Partnerships
Rebecca has dedicated her career in nonprofit management to supporting organizational growth through fundraising, strategic planning, and community-building grounded in shared purpose. Rebecca has worked as a consultant and strategist, as well as on staff with leading cultural institutions in San Francisco and New York including Creative Commons, Headlands Center for the Arts, Creative Time, and MoMA PS1.
Founding Allies
Roger McNamee
Founding Advisor
Co-Founder of Elevation Partners, Silver Lake Partners, and Integral Capital Partners
Renée DiResta
Founding Advisor
Director of Research at New Knowledge, Head of Policy at Data for Democracy
Lynn Fox
Founding Advisor
James Williams
Co-Founder, Time Well Spent
Ex-Google, Philosopher at Oxford Internet Institute
Joe Edelman
Co-Founder, Time Well Spent
Philosopher Sociologist Ex-CTO, CouchSurfing
Max Stossel
Head of Education
Ex-VaynerMedia, Ex-Anomaly, Award-Winning Artist
Key Advisors & Community
Azita Ardakani
Partner
Honeycomb Portfolio
Stephen DeBerry
Founder
Bronze Investments
Tom Gruber
Co-Founder
Siri
Chris Hughes
Co-Founder, Facebook
Author, Fair Shot
Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn
Founder, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction
Dr. Robert Lustig
Professor Emeritus UCSF
Cathy O’Neil
Mathematician, Author of Weapons of Math Destruction
Sandy Parakilas
Ex-Facebook
Hong Qu
Researcher, Harvard
YouTube’s First Designer
Justin Rosenstein
Co-Founder of Asana
Co-Invented FB ‘Like’ Button
Marietje Schaake
European Parliament Representative,
The Netherlands
Dr. Natasha Schüll
Professor, NYU
Author, Addiction by Design
Evan Sharp
Co-Founder & COO
Strat Sherman
Partner
Accompli
K. Krasnow Waterman
Visiting Scientist
MIT
Tim Wu
Professor, Columbia Law School
Author, The Attention Merchants
John Zimmer
Co-Founder & President
Lyft
The National Day of Unplugging
Common Sense Media
Funders
Gerald Schwartz & Heather Reisman Foundation
OmidyarNetwork
Patrick J. McGovern Foundation
Craig Newmark Philanthropies
Knight Foundation
Evolve Foundation
Ford Foundation
William & Flora Hewlett Foundation
J. W. Couch Foundation
Ways You Can Help
https://web.archive.org/web/20180208181214/https://www.omidyar.com/blog/geeksforhumanity-announcing-tech-and-society-solutions-lab
#GeeksForHumanity | Announcing the Tech and Society Solutions Lab
February 8, 2018
At Omidyar Network, we fundamentally believe in the power of technology to deliver enormous benefits for humanity -- but we have also become increasingly concerned with the growing number of unintended consequenceswe have seen emerge.
And so we have founded the Tech and Society Solutions Lab, an emergent effort to test, build, and scale solutions that address these negative effects – and, more importantly, help maximize the tech industry’s contributions to a healthy society. Our work is just beginning, but we’ve already seen that we are just one of many who have expressed concerns about the impacts of rapidly evolving technology on our society. We are joining a chorus of voices from mainstream media to academic leaders, from former tech employees to current executives and entrepreneurs, all of whom are calling for the industry to live up to its core ethos of creating tremendous good for the world.
This week alone, we’ve seen three of our initial efforts make a significant impact on the conversation. Take our investee Tristan Harris, a former Design Ethicist at Google, whose concerns about smartphone addiction led to the founding of Center for Humane Technology. As noted in The New York Times, the Center brings together a remarkable group of former tech employees who are concerned about the impacts of the products their companies – and in some cases, they as individuals – built. We are incredibly excited about their early efforts, which range from a public ad campaign to combat smartphone addition to encouraging tech employees to think more critically about what they are asked to do.
We are also pleased to join the seed round of Loris.ai, a startup that uses a data-driven approach to help companies navigate hard conversations. The effort will build on the success of Crisis Text Line to bring empathy, active listening, and collaborative problem-solving to businesses, helping them better anticipate and navigate difficult situations. We see this as a critical component to building a tech culture that better supports its employees, giving them the tools to relate more directly to the constituents reached by their products. Fostering empathy is one way we can begin to mitigate unintended consequences, and we are excited to see what changes will result from founder Nancy Lublin and her team.
Finally, on Tuesday we participated in Bloomberg’s Data for Good Exchangein San Francisco, where we partnered with tech, media, and civil society leaders to support a grassroots campaign to create a code of ethics for the data science community to adopt principles of responsible data use and sharing. Modeled after the Hippocratic Oath, we are eager to support the pledge in its goal of reaching 100,000 signatures. Under the leadership of Data4Democracy, in partnership with many others, this effort will be instrumental in building a coalition dedicated to promoting responsible behavior, sending an important message to the broader tech community that its employees are concerned and ready to take action to build a productive, more humane industry.
Or: How Not to Regret the Things You Build
Visit ethicalOS.org to learn more
REDWOOD CITY, CA —Omidyar Network, the Silicon Valley impact investment firm, has collaborated with the Institute for the Future (IFTF) on the development of a new toolkit — the Ethical Operating System (Ethical OS) — to help makers of tech, product managers, engineers, and others get out in front of problems before they happen. The three-part guide is already being piloted by nearly 20 tech companies, schools, and startups, including Mozilla, Techstars, and others. This is one of many partnerships Omidyar Network’s newly founded Tech and Society Solutions Lab is pursuing to address the growing concerns about responsibility in tech with long-term solutions, a topic of growing importance.
The Ethical OS (#EthicalOS) toolkit is available for Beta testing and community feedback here: www.ethicalOS.org.
What’s in the toolkit:
1. Tomorrow's Risk, Today: Fourteen scenarios to spark conversation and stretch your imagination about the long-term impacts of tech you're building today.
2. Check Your Tech: A checklist of eight risk zones to help you identify the emerging areas of risk and social harm most critical for your team to start considering now.
3. Future-Proofing Strategies: Seven future-proofing strategies to help you take ethical action today.
Omidyar Network's Tech and Society Solutions Lab draws on Omidyar Network’s long-standing belief in the promise of technology to create opportunity and social good, as well as the concern about unintended consequences that can result from technological innovation. The team aims to help technologists prevent, mitigate, and correct societal downsides of technology—and maximize positive impact.
“We envision a world where technology companies take proactive measures to ensure products are responsibly designed and brought to market. That time is now,” said Paula Goldman, global lead of the Tech and Society Solutions Lab. “Inspired by industry standards to mitigate security risk, the Ethical OS helps developers think not just about innovation but long-term societal impact.”
“As makers of tech become more mindful of the unintended effects that their products and services have upon society, we saw a need for a practical toolkit and easy to apply framework for learning, discussion, and eventually better products with fewer potential downsides,” added Raina Kumra, the founder of Mavin and Juggernaut and entrepreneur-in-residence at the Tech and Society Solutions Lab. “Something as simple as a checklist can be a real game changer.”
"Building a startup takes a lot more than just funding,” said Cody Simms, partner at Techstars. “At Techstars, we are building a worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed. Helping founders anticipate future ethical challenges that their technologies could encounter or incite is critical to their ultimate success. We’re thrilled to be working with Omidyar Network and the Institute for the Future on this initiative and to help our global network of more than 1,500 startups get ahead of problems before they happen.”
“The future is like a game. We have to play it to see how it turns out. But if we wait until the future actually happens, it’s too late to shape it or change our strategies for a better outcome,” said Jane McGonigal from IFTF, a renowned expert in collaborative foresight and human interaction. “But we can play it in advance. Our goal is to engage tens of thousands of tech workers in anticipating the long-term impacts of what they're building today, so they can use that foresight to make better, more ethical choices now.”
“Most people create technology with the hope that it will make the world a better place, but our best intentions must incorporate actionable safeguards to ensure others don’t corrupt our ideas along the way,” added Samuel Woolley, director of IFTF’s Digital Intelligence Lab. “This toolkit helps anyone creating new technology contemplate worst-case scenarios and familiarize themselves with major areas of potential risk. Considering unexpected risks is a must for the entire tech community. Our collective future will be the better for it.”
Feedback on the toolkit and inquiries regarding trainings and workshops related to the toolkit are encouraged by contacting ideas@ethicalos.org. Join the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #EthicalOS.
Other Tech and Society Solutions Lab partnerships and investments include: the Center for Humane Technology, which was co-founded by Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, to align technology with humanity’s best interests; Data for Democracy, a global community of data practitioners and technologists dedicated to increasing tech worker participation in civil society; the TechEquity Collaborative, which is engaging the tech community to build a more equitable and inclusive twenty-first century economy; as well as the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, which brings the traditions of ethical thinking to bear on real-world problems; among others. The hope is that these efforts help technologists build responsibility into core business and product decisions and contribute to a thriving tech industry.
Institute for the Future (IFTF) is celebrating its 50th anniversary as the world’s leading non-profit strategic futures organization. The core of IFTF’s work is identifying emerging discontinuities that will transform global society and the global marketplace. They provide organizations with insights into business strategy, design process, innovation, and social dilemmas. The organizations research spans a broad territory of deeply transformative trends, from health and health care to technology, the workplace, and human identity.