Center for Humane Technology

In The You On AI Encyclopedia

The Center emerged from the recognition that individual critique was insufficient against a systemic problem. Harris, a former Google design ethicist, had been articulating the engagement-optimization critique since 2013. Raskin had been developing parallel insights from his work on infinite scroll and subsequent design projects. By 2018, both had concluded that the technology industry would not reform itself without external pressure — regulatory, cultural, and market — and that building such pressure required an institutional base combining technical credibility with public advocacy.

The organization's flagship podcast, Your Undivided Attention, has hosted extended conversations with researchers, policymakers, and technologists examining the structural dynamics of digital technology. Its 2020 participation in the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma brought the framework to an audience of hundreds of millions, establishing vocabulary — if you're not paying, you're the product — that shaped public understanding of platform economics.

In 2023, the Center pivoted sharply toward AI governance with a presentation titled The AI Dilemma. Raskin and Harris argued that the large language model revolution represented not a departure from the attention-economy pattern but its intensification — the same incentive structures applied to categorically more powerful tools. The framework has since informed policy work at the EU AI Office, the UK AI Safety Institute, and congressional AI caucuses in the United States.

The Center's application of its framework to You On AI's celebration of AI-enabled productivity is direct: the same engagement architecture that captured attention in the social media era now captures judgment in the AI era, and the capture is more dangerous precisely because it wears the mask of productive work. Productive addiction is invisible because the output is real, which is why the counterargument that this time it is different succeeds so thoroughly.

Origin

The Center was incorporated in 2018 as the institutional expression of an argument Harris and Raskin had been developing publicly for several years. Its founding coincided with growing public awareness of the psychological costs of social media, including Cambridge Analytica, the documented rise in adolescent anxiety correlated with smartphone adoption, and increasing regulatory interest in platform liability.

The organization's structural analysis draws on a lineage running through Byung-Chul Han's philosophical diagnosis of the burnout society, Shoshana Zuboff's documentation of surveillance capitalism, and decades of behavioral science establishing the mechanisms by which variable-ratio reinforcement produces compulsion.

Key Ideas

Structural, not individual. The Center's foundational claim is that technology harms are produced by incentive structures, not individual bad actors, and must be addressed structurally.

Humane design specifications. The organization has articulated implementable design standards — reflection prompts, natural stopping points, cognitive health metrics — that translate the critique into engineering practice.

Policy infrastructure. The Center works with governments, industry coalitions, and civil society to build the institutional capacity to govern technologies whose effects exceed existing regulatory frameworks.

Continuity thesis. Social media and AI are treated as the same problem at different scales — the same engagement architecture migrating from leisure to productive work, from attention to judgment.