Randima Fernando

The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. -- E.O. Wilson

Born in Sri Lanka to a father who taught him to program and a mother who taught him Buddhism, Randima Fernando spent seven years building graphics software at NVIDIA, seven more bringing mindfulness to a million students. Then, in 2018, he co-founded the Center for Humane Technology with Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, to help re-align "god-like technologies" of our age with humanity's best interests.

CHT's pioneering work clarifying the unintended consequences of social media platforms was featured in the 2020 Emmy-winning Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. The film reached 100 million people in 190 countries -- carrying a debate that had largely stayed among engineers and ethicists out into everyday households. More recently, as AI threatens to concentrate power in a handful of hands, hollow out the meaning people find in work, erode human relationships, and fracture society's shared grip on what's real, they've turned their focus to AI Dilemma -- reaching policymakers, technologists, and millions of people worldwide to help forge a "narrow path" of responsible AI, deployed with wisdom, foresight, and discernment.

Randy was born into a family where inner practice and outer craft mattered equally. His grandfather was a dharma teacher who instructed him during summers in Sri Lanka; his father sat him in front of a computer at age eight. His love for programming, especially "lighting up pixels on the screen," brought him to Cornell University to study computer science and graphics. The threads of technology and dharma would continue to weave together in his life, in unexpected ways.

As a product manager of developer tools at NVIDIA, he authored three top-ranked books to drive the adoption of the company's newest graphics chips -- chips that for the first time could be programmed directly, instead of doing one fixed job. That same hardware would later become the engine of the artificial intelligence revolution now underway.

Sensing that humanity needed to reconnect with an inner technology of its own, Randy walked away from NVIDIA in 2009 -- a company that would later become the world's largest for-profit company -- and shifted to the nonprofit sector where incentives could actually align with social impact. He joined Mindful Schools, a not-for-profit that was a pioneer in high-quality online secular mindfulness at schools. As its Executive Director, he helped scale their impact a hundredfold, helping train over a million students and 50,000 teachers in mindfulness across 50 U.S. states and 100 countries. Their work was featured in TIME magazine's 2014 cover story, "The Mindful Revolution."

A meeting with Tristan Harris in 2015 paved the way for his journey of co-founding the Center for Humane Technology in 2018. Connecting the dots across technology, psychology, culture, and systemic incentives, he named the toll directly: "In the end, when you add it all up, you end up in a society that is more divided, less able to make sense of the world, less able to see each other and have meaningful conversations, more distracted, more divided," Randy points out.

But he urges us to resist simply blaming individuals: "The conversation is much more about misaligned systems and incentives than bad people." He points to a core Buddhist principle of dependent co-arising -- that everything is inextricably shaped by conditions around it, and similarly technology, also is never "neutral," but decidedly shaped by the incentives that built it. "I think the best thing to hold in mind is technology has always been a great accelerator -- humanity's greatest accelerator. And AI is the pinnacle of that acceleration... If we already have a predominantly extractive system, AI is turning that extraction on overdrive." CHT's team has since testified before the U.S. Congress, carrying that same argument directly into the policy rooms shaping what comes next.

In his spare time, Randy enjoys playing tennis and table tennis, painting, playing the piano and guitar, and keeping up with the meditation practice that his mother taught. He also served as a board member of Spirit Rock Meditation Center from 2019 to 2025.

Join us in conversation with this dharma teacher's grandson who coded for NVIDIA and now applies dependent co-arising to Silicon Valley.

In Conversation With

Birju Pandya Investment strategist working at the intersection of finance, systems change, and inner transformation

Srinija Srinivasan Yahoo 5th employee and Editor-in-Chief for 15 years, jazz fiend and former vice chair of Stanford's Board of Trustees