Source: From Sam Harris
Sam Harris and Tristan Harris dissect how competitive pressure in AI development systematically incentivizes corners to be cut on safety and alignment—the classic race-to-the-bottom dynamic where the most cautious actor loses market share to less scrupulous competitors. The stakes are concrete: surveillance capitalism moving from phones into neural interfaces, labor displacement without social infrastructure to absorb it, and decision-making systems trained on biased data that already fail predictably on marginalized populations. The window for intervention narrows as frontier AI systems approach or exceed human capabilities in their domains, collapsing the leverage points for human oversight and course-correction.