PERSON
Tristan Harris
American technology ethicist, former Google design ethicist, and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology — Raskin's closest intellectual partner in the humane technology movement.
Tristan Harris is an American technology ethicist whose 2013 internal Google presentation — A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users' Attention — became the founding document of the humane technology movement. After a career at Google as a design ethicist, Harris co-founded the Center for Humane Technology with Aza Raskin in 2018 and has become one of the most visible public critics of the technology industry's engagement-optimization business model. His partnership with Raskin has produced the analytical framework — extraction-oriented design, the race to the bottom of the brain stem, the AI Dilemma — that grounds the critique developed in this volume.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Harris's trajectory parallels Raskin's: a technology insider whose exposure to the industry's internal decision-making produced a moral crisis that led to public advocacy. His Google presentation articulated, a decade before the AI moment, the specific mechanisms by which engagement-optimizing designs systematically degrade user well-being. The presentation was widely circulated internally, produced a period of earnest discussion at