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The AI Dilemma
The 2023 presentation by Harris and Raskin arguing that large language models represent the same structural risks as social media, at civilizational scale — first contact with AI reframed.
The AI Dilemma is the presentation Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin delivered in March 2023 at an invitation-only summit and subsequently in widely viewed public versions, arguing that large language models represented not a departure from the social-media pattern but its intensification. The presentation's central claims — that social media was humanity's first contact with AI, that the engagement-optimization incentive structure that produced social media's harms is now operating on categorically more powerful tools, and that the response window for governance is narrow — became the Center for Humane Technology's organizing framework for the AI era.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The presentation crystallized a shift in the humane-technology discourse from social-media criticism to AI governance advocacy. Its specific technical claims — about large language models' capabilities, about the speed of capability gains, about the risks of model deployment — were contested. Some were later shown to be imprecise. But the structural argument survived the specific critiques: the same