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Called the “closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience,” by The Atlantic, Tristan Harris has spent more than a decade studying the influences that hijack human thinking and action. From his childhood as magician to his work in the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, Harris became concerned about the need for ethical and humane technology. His work on the attention economy started in 2013, when he created a slide deck within Google that went viral, warning about the technology industry’s arms race to capture human attention and the moral responsibility companies have for the ways they restructure society. Harris spent three years as a Google Design Ethicist and was co-founder and CEO of Apture. He is currently co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, whose mission is to reverse ‘human downgrading’ and re-align technology with humanity.
Jacob Ward is technology correspondent for NBC News, where he reports on-air for the TODAY Show, Nightly News with Lester Holt, and MSNBC, and host of the podcast Complicated. Prior to that, Ward was editor-in-chief of Popular Science magazine, science and technology correspondent for Al Jazeera, and host of investigative documentaries for Discovery, National Geographic, and PBS.