After reporting from U.S. Africa Command’s largest annual joint military exercise–where autonomous drones, AI-enabled military systems, and robotic weapons were on display–VICE News Editor-in-Chief Shane Smith wanted to talk to someone who has spent years grappling with what can happen when powerful technologies begin advancing at unprecedented speed.
Aza Raskin, a technologist with training in mathematics and dark matter physics, has spent much of his life at the forefront of innovation. The son of an early Apple computer scientist, he grew up at the center of the tech world, contributing to cutting-edge research projects and founding multiple technology companies. But years spent building new technologies ultimately led him to focus on their broader social consequences. Concerned about the potential harms of technology like AI and social media, he co-founded the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit dedicated to ensuring that society’s most powerful technologies actually serve humanity.
Shane and Aza’s conversation explores some of the biggest questions surrounding artificial intelligence today: how AI could reshape warfare, politics, labor, and everyday life; whether governments are moving fast enough to regulate emerging technologies; and what happens when the incentives driving innovation outpace our ability to govern it. Use these sources to understand the ideas, evidence, and debates shaping the future of AI.
Shane Smith:
I found an article in GQ that says you helped create the infinite scroll, which has become foundational for modern social media. Do you feel any personal responsibility for what those systems became?
Aza Raskin:
I feel responsibility for not having understood the way incentives were going to eat my intentions.
Infinite scroll wasn’t some amazing invention. It’s a pretty simple idea and it would have been invented anyway. But I think there’s a responsibility as a technologist to understand that when you invent a new technology, you uncover a new class of responsibility.
When you invent something like infinite scroll, you should think about how it might be misused, either by bad actors or bad incentives, and try to create norms, rules, or laws that go along with it. I regret only telling half the story because I wasn’t thinking about it.
Shane Smith:
Give us a little bit of how you got to that realization.
Aza Raskin:
I grew up in a family that thought deeply about how technology should strengthen human beings rather than weaken them. My father used the word “humane” to mean technology that is responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties.
When I created infinite scroll in 2006, I genuinely thought I was building a better interface. If a user gets to the bottom of a page and hasn’t found what they’re looking for, why make them click a button? Just load more. It was a very simple thought.
But then I was forced to watch my good intentions get eaten by incentives. As social media emerged, the goal became maximizing eyeballs, engagement, and time spent on site. Something I thought would save people a few seconds became a system that now wastes something on the order of a hundred thousand human lifetimes every week. And it does it by exploiting an asymmetry in human psychology.
When you’re drinking a glass of wine and you reach the bottom, that’s a stopping cue. Your brain wakes up and asks: do I actually want more? But if the glass silently refills itself, you’ll drink dramatically more because that moment of reflection never arrives. Infinite scroll removes the stopping cue. That’s the lesson I learned: intentions get eaten by incentives.
The two also discussed the societal impacts of AI on humanity.
Aza Raskin:
Social media was really just a baby AI. It couldn’t even generate its own content. It was simply deciding which human content to amplify. And that tiny misalignment, optimizing for engagement instead of human flourishing, was enough to contribute to hyper-partisanship, polarization, democratic backsliding, and a generation experiencing unprecedented levels of anxiety and depression.Now we’ve moved beyond baby AI to something much more powerful. And the question is: have we solved that incentive problem? The answer is very clearly no.
There’s a useful analogy here. The writer Luke Drago talks about the resource curse. A country discovers oil. Suddenly its GDP depends on oil. Its power depends on oil. It no longer derives as much power from its people. So where does it invest? In schools and hospitals? Or in extracting more oil? Obviously, it invests in oil.
That’s how you end up with structural disempowerment and mass poverty. Now we’re moving from the resource curse into the intelligence curse. AI is going to provide double-digit GDP growth, new weapons, new military strategy, healthcare advances, technological advances. Increasingly, all of that will come from AI rather than from humans.
So are governments incentivized to invest in you, your future, and your children’s future? Or in data centers and solar panels? Obviously, it’s the latter.
Shane Smith:
And that’s how you end up in a future where fewer and fewer people have more and more money.Aza Raskin:
That’s right. And remember, the reason people have power is because corporations depend on us for labor and governments depend on us for taxes. When labor and taxes are coming from AI and not humans, we lose all political and economic relevance forever.Then we have to trust that the AI companies, the ones that took our jobs, are going to keep paying our bills forever. That does not seem like a safe world.
Shane Smith:
Have you talked to members of Congress and senators directly? And if so, do they actually understand where all of this is heading?Aza Raskin:
Often they’re vaguely aware. They’ll have used ChatGPT or Claude. But they don’t think deeply about where the game theory is taking us. They get caught in the idea that we have to beat China, or that this will be good for their side. The deeper question is where these incentives lead society as a whole.
They discuss:
Autonomous weapons and the future of war
Why AI has become a global arms race
The race between the U.S. and China
Whether governments understand what’s coming
AI’s impact on jobs and the economy
Social media, Infinite Scroll, and digital addiction
The future of regulation and governance
Earth Species Project and using AI to understand animal communication
Dark matter, intelligence, and human perception
Is AI humanity’s greatest tool, or our greatest challenge?
