Intentional Tech: Designing AI for Human Flourishing | Alex Komoroske, Cofounder and CEO of Common Tools

The smallest technical decisions become humanity's biggest pivots:

The same-origin policy—a well-intentioned browser security rule from the 1990s—accidentally created Facebook, Google, and every data monopoly since. It locks your data in silos—and you stayed where your stuff already is. This dynamic created aggregators.

Alex Komoroske—who led Chrome's web platform team at Google and ran corporate strategy at Stripe—saw this pattern play out firsthand. And he's obsessed with the tiny decisions that will shape AI's next 30 years:

- Whether AI keeps memory centrally or user-controlled?

- Is AI free/ad-supported or user-paid?

- Should AI be engagement-maximizing or intention-aligned?

- How should we handle prompt injection in MCP and agentic systems?

- Should AI be built with AOL-style aggregation or web-style openness?

This is a much-watch if you care about the future of AI and humanity.

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Timestamps:

1. Introduction: 00:01:45

2. Why chatbots are a feature not a paradigm: 00:04:25

3. Toward AI that’s aligned with our intentions: 00:06:50

4. The four pillars of “intentional technology”: 00:11:54

5. The type of structures in which intentional technology can thrive: 00:14:16

6. Why ChatGPT is the AOL of the AI era: 00:18:26

7. Why AI needs to break out of the silos of the early internet: 00:25:55

8. Alex’s personal journey into systems-thinking: 00:41:53

9. How LLMs can encode what we know but can’t explain: 00:48:15

10. Can LLMs solve the coordination problem inside organizations: 00:54:35

11. The under-discussed risk of prompt injection: 01:01:39

    
    

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• Alex Komoroske: @komorama

• Common Tools: https://common.tools/

• The public Google document with Alex’s raw ideas and thoughts: Bits and Bobs

• A couple of Alex’s favorite books: Why Information Grows by Cesar Hidalgo and The Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker