The CHT Perspective

Center for Humane Technology exists because we refuse to let powerful technologies develop without accountability. Our mission centers on one critical question: how can technology better serve society?

Operating across media, policy, and tech, CHT acts as the essential bridge between complex technological systems and the people they affect. We expose the hidden incentive structures driving today's most consequential technologies — social media and artificial intelligence — before their misalignment becomes irreversible.

That core question — “How can technology better serve society?” — holds a deep lineage at CHT. In the early 2010s, when Tristan Harris was working as Design Ethicist at Google, he began to notice the detrimental effects of attention-harvesting design — design that was becoming increasingly prevalent on social media sites and digital platforms. Concerned about where these design practices could lead society, he created the presentation, “A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention.” The presentation went viral, and launched the “Time Well Spent” movement.

In 2018, Tristan joined forces with fellow technologists Aza Raskin and Randima Fernando to found the Center for Humane Technology. CHT’s initial work focused on social media, but with the advent of generative AI — and its rapid spread across society in just a handful of years — CHT expanded its focus. Today, our independent nonprofit is staffed by a team of experts able to identify and analyze the incentives driving harmful, misaligned technology — and develop interventions that pave the path to a better future for society.

Our expertise lies in analyzing how incentives drive technology design, and how those designs can either undermine or strengthen human well-being. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet’s business partner, once said, “Show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome.” At CHT, that maxim holds deep truth. By examining the incentives driving modern technology, we are able to accurately diagnose what is happening with our current tech products — and even predict how technology may impact us in the future.

With technologists as our co-founders, CHT is keenly aware of how tech design reflects the incentives of a tech company, and how design goes on to impact our psychology. This “insider” expertise gives CHT a cutting edge perspective on the critical drivers in this space.

CHT works to demystify this complex system of incentives, so that stakeholders, policymakers, and the public at large can understand how, and why, tech is affecting them in adverse ways. CHT’s legacy work includes dissecting how addictive design features on social media — including red notifications, algorithmic curation, intermittent reinforcement, and infinite scroll — all work to manipulate human psychology, and keep you on the platform for as long as possible.

These design features reveal the hidden incentives at a tech company — and business models built on constant user engagement. Now AI is following the same dangerous playbook. Companies are racing to deploy AI systems optimized for engagement and market dominance — not human wellbeing. The stakes have never been higher.

CHT is not against technology. We are against the misaligned incentives that distort the promises of technology in our society. By creating clarity around these hidden incentives, CHT offers individuals, families, and society at large the first step toward sparking change.

AI and Social Media harms aren't future risks — they're present realities moving at unprecedented speed. While the exponential growth of AI offers great promise to society, its reckless rollout with disregard for collateral damage threatens to undermine the potential benefits. Every moment of inaction allows misaligned incentives to embed AI deeper into our lives, our communities, and our critical infrastructure, making it exponentially harder to change later.

The question isn't whether technology will reshape society — it's what incentives will drive that transformation.

Our work on social media has catalyzed measurable changes in public awareness, tech regulation, product design, and policy discourse. This approach helped shift the poor incentives driving poor social media outcomes, and we can do the same thing for artificial intelligence. By shifting the incentives driving AI development, we can change how AI impacts us all.