- Self - Facebook, Former Operations Manager: We've created a system that biases towards false information. Not because we want to, but because false information makes the companies more money than the truth. The truth is boring.
- Justin Rosenstein - Facebook, Former Engineer: We live in a world in which a tree is worth more, financially, dead than alive, in a world in which a whale is worth more dead than alive. For so long as our economy works in that way and corporations go unregulated, they're going to continue to destroy trees, to kill whales, to mine the earth, and to continue to pull oil out of the ground, even though we know it is destroying the planet and we know that it's going to leave a worse world for future generations. This is short-term thinking based on this religion of profit at all costs, as if somehow, magically, each corporation acting in its selfish interest is going to produce the best result. This has been affecting the environment for a long time. What's frightening, and what hopefully is the last straw that will make us wake up as a civilization to how flawed this theory has been in the first place, is to see that now we're the tree, we're the whale. Our attention can be mined. We are more profitable to a corporation if we're spending time staring at a screen, staring at an ad, than if we're spending that time living our life in a rich way. And so, we're seeing the results of that. We're seeing corporations using powerful artificial intelligence to outsmart us and figure out how to pull our attention toward the things they want us to look at, rather than the things that are most consistent with our goals and our values and our lives.
- Tristan Harris - Google, Former Design Ethicist: How do you wake up from the Matrix when you don't know you're in the Matrix?
- Tristan Harris - Google, Former Design Ethicist: If you're not paying for the product, then you are the product.
- Self - Founding Father of Virtual Reality: We've created a world in which online connection has become primary, especially for younger generations. And yet, in that world, any time two people connect, the only way it's financed is through a sneaky third person who's paying to manipulate those two people. So, we've created an entire global generation of people who are raised within a context where the very meaning of communication, the very meaning of culture, is manipulation. We've put deceit and sneakiness at the absolute center of everything we do.
- Self - Founding Father of Virtual Reality: If we go down the current status quo for, let's say, another 20 years, we probably destroy our civilization through willful ignorance. We probably fail to meet the challenge of climate change. We degrade the world's democracies so that they fall into some sort of bizarre autocratic dysfunction. We probably ruin the global economy. We probably don't survive. I really do view it as existential.
- Self - Data Scientist: We are allowing the technologists to frame this as a problem that they're equipped to solve. That's a lie. People talk about AI as it will know truth. AI's not gonna solve these problems. AI cannot solve the problem of fake news. Google doesn't have the option of saying: 'Oh, is this conspiracy? Is this truth?' Because they don't know what truth is. They don't have a proxy for truth that's better than a click.