In AI, what gets measured gets optimized. Right now, we're spending all our efforts to measure how capable and powerful models are, narrowly optimizing for those metrics while ignoring downstream consequences.

What if we could flip this dynamic on its head? What if, instead of what AI can do, we start to measure what AI does to us? What if, instead of races to the bottom on capabilities and engagement, we could incentivize races to the top on safety, or better yet, on making us more resilient and developed human beings?

That’s the mission of CHT’s Humane Evals program: we're bringing together researchers, psychologists, engineers, and technologists from across the entire AI ecosystem and beyond to build out the expertise and infrastructure we need to measure AI's impact on humans.

Today on the show, Aza Raskin explores the Humane Evals project with Imran Khan, a researcher and strategist who's been leading CHT's efforts in this area, and Jared Moore, a computer scientist and researcher who's been at the forefront of measuring AI's psychological impact on users.

If this sounds like something you're interested in working on, you can email us at evals@humanetech.com.

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You can read more about Jared’s work at his website.

Related pieces by Imran on the CHT Substack:

• What is AI doing to humans? Why aren’t we measuring it?
• Will Human-Like AI Hijack Human Psychology?
• A Black Box Problem: Missing Data On How AI Affects the Human Mind

The website for the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics

KoraBench, the child safety AI benchmark that Imran referenced

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Attachment Hacking and the Rise of AI Psychosis

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Corrections:

Aza gave the wrong year for Sewell Setzer’s death. It was in 2024, not 2025.

Aza referred to Joseph Henrich as an evolutionary psychologist; he was actually a biological anthropologist.

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It feels like we’re stuck in an endless debate about what AI is going to mean for jobs and the economy. The prediction you hear from the people closest to the technology — both its critics and its boosters — is that mass automation is coming, and with it mass unemployment. In response, some AI CEOs are promising a post-labor Golden Age of abundance and universal high income. But you also hear from some techno-optimists and economists that AI will create more jobs than it destroys and that society’s fears are unjustified.

When these arguments are traded back and forth, no one can know what’s actually true, and nothing happens. And caught in the middle of this debate are actual workers trying to figure out what this means for their family and themselves, or whether their kids should go to college. And as long as that debate stays alive, nobody plans or takes action ahead of what’s coming.

So this week on Your Undivided Attention, rather than continuing to referee this debate, we follow the incentives and show you where they’re actually taking us in the very near future.

Our guest, economist Molly Kinder, argues that we’re entering what she calls the “messy middle”: a period of concentrated and uneven workforce disruption. She has evidence-based arguments about where, specifically, AI will affect the labor force, what the second and third-order consequences of those effects might be, and what we need to do today to protect people’s livelihoods.

Molly recently left her position as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution to become the founding CEO of a new organization dedicated to addressing AI’s impact on jobs. Her Substack, Kinder Futures: Dispatches on AI, Work & What Comes Next, features some of the clearest-eyed analysis of AI’s impact on the economy.

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Kinder Futures: Dispatches on AI, Work & What Comes Next (Molly’s Substack)

Molly’s blog posts at Brookings

The Yale Budget Lab’s AI Labor Market Tracker

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AI and Jobs: How to Make AI Work With Us, Not Against Us with Daron Acemoglu

Corrections

Molly incorrectly referred to cuts to “Medicare for the neediest populations.” The cuts she describes are to Medicaid.

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This week, we're bringing you a conversation that Tristan Harris had with Krista Tippett. Krista is the Peabody Award-winning host of the On Being podcast, where she explores spiritual inquiry, science, social healing, and poetry, and the wisdom that we need to replenish and orient in this tender and tumultuous time.

Krista and Tristan spoke remotely in front of a crowd while she was in person at the Wisdom in Action forum in Australia. Their discussion was focused on trust in the age of AI and explored big, critical questions like what does it mean to build AI in service of life? How can we hold a collective problem this big as individuals? And what does it take to resist the spell of inevitability? We hope you enjoy this thought-provoking conversation.

Your Undivided Attention will be taking a short summer hiatus. We’ll be back with more episodes soon!

Your Undivided Attention is produced by Center for Humane Technology. You can find a transcript of this conversation on our Substack.

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