The Loop by Jacob Ward

This eye-opening narrative journey into the rapidly changing world of artificial intelligence reveals the dangerous ways AI is exploiting the unconscious habits of our minds, and the real threat it poses to humanity—with a new foreword for the paperback edition.

"The best book I have ever read about AI." -Roger McNamee, New York Times bestselling author of Zucked

Artificial intelligence is about to amplify the most primitive version of who we are, and spit it back at us for entertainment and profit. That's the warning from award-winning technology journalist Jacob Ward, whose decade-long journey through the cutting edge of AI and behavioral science reveals that we're on the verge of becoming caught in The Loop: a shrinking cycle of narrowed choices and lost skills that will turn us away from expertise, human connection, and creativity if we don't act fast. From biometric surveillance states that track the movements and relationships of over a billion people, to the algorithms that determine what movies get made, to the risky multiple-choice simplicity of automated battlefield systems, this book reveals that the most obvious patterns in our behavior—patterns that AI is most likely to vacuum up—are not the ones we want to perpetuate. As the tech industry begins writing flawed human habits into AI, The Loop is a call to look at ourselves more clearly, so we can put only the best parts of ourselves into the systems we create.

Jacob Ward is technology correspondent for NBC News, and has covered science and technology for CNN, Al Jazeera, and PBS. The former editor-in-chief of Popular Science magazine, Ward writes for The New Yorker, Wired, and the New York Times Magazine, and is the host of several documentaries, including the landmark PBS series “Hacking Your Mind.” Ward is a Berggruen Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a Stanford d.School lecturer. He lives in Oakland, California.