Our 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. Tristan noted that these design choices were deteriorating our ability to focus, weakening our relationships, and impacting our mental health. Concerned about where this 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. Since its founding, CHT’s work has remained focused on the incentives that drive consequential technologies. When our organization was first formed, social media was the most consequential technology of our time — and CHT’s work centered on the widespread harms resulting from the race for attention. 

In the 2020s, generative AI arrived with an equal, if not greater, consequentiality in society. Given the incentive structures driving AI, and their similarity to social media, CHT’s analysis has naturally expanded to meet this urgent new chapter with AI. Here, CHT offers the same diagnosis — now with the latest wave of technology.

Today, our independent nonprofit is staffed by a team of experts able to identify and analyze the incentives driving these consequential technologies — and develop interventions that pave the path to a better future for society. We work to catalyze a world where technology supports and strengthens the very things that make us human.

At CHT, we are proud to drive meaningful change across all levels of society. Our work increases public awareness around critical tech issues, spurs policy that incentivizes better tech design, and empowers individuals and communities to discover their agency in today’s evolving tech landscape.

Learn more about our impact: