Jacob Ward on The Loop, AI, and a World Without Real Choices

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What happens to free will in a world where AI tells us what to watch, buy, believe, and even who to love? In this new episode of Singularity.FM, I sit down with Jacob Ward — veteran technology journalist and author of The Loop: How AI Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back — to ask a deceptively simple question: what is a choice, and what happens when we quietly hand that power to machines?

Jake argues that AI is doing to our decision-making what Google Maps did to our sense of direction: turning a hard-won human capacity into a service layer we outsource by default. Drawing on decades of reporting from Silicon Valley, behavioral science labs, addiction research, and the front lines of “decision technology,” he shows how our brains are shortcut engines that love to offload hard thinking — and how AI, optimized for engagement and profit, exploits that instinct to narrow our options, dull our skills, and automate even our moral judgments.

We dig into the psychology that makes us so hackable, the business models that reward “decision outsourcing,” and the cult-like belief that adding AI to anything automatically makes it better. But we also talk about what we can still do — culturally, politically, and personally — to defend human autonomy, preserve difficult choices, and protect the “friction” that makes life meaningful rather than merely efficient.

In this conversation with Jacob Ward, we explore:

• Who Jacob Ward is and how a tech reporter became obsessed with the psychology of choice and AI
• The core thesis of The Loop: how AI and decision-shaping tech are shrinking the space in which real human choice lives
• What a “choice” actually is, why it’s rare, and how much of our lives run on unconscious autopilot
• The brain as a shortcut machine: why we naturally try to offload heavy cognitive work — and how apps, platforms, and algorithms weaponize that
• Story as both poison and cure: how narrative explains our addictions, identities, and blind spots
• The chilling dinner with addiction scientists hired to make consumer apps as addictive as possible
• Why we outsource hard moral decisions (hiring, lending, welfare, bail, custody) to opaque algorithms we don’t understand
• Google Maps, Spotify, Netflix & co: from convenience to skill-loss and dependency
• ChatGPT and the new AI wave: why Jake thought he was early, and why the cult of AI “solutionism” worries him more than the tech itself
• “AI will fix everything” as the ultimate cop-out: from politics and climate to governance and war
• Great ideas we shouldn’t pursue: the missing virtue of restraint in tech culture
• Stoicism, free will, and “loving fate” versus outsourcing it to machines
• Cultural resistance: kids calling AI “clankers,” the return of film cameras, and the hunger for authentic creativity
• Legal and regulatory pushback: psychological harm, AI distortion, and why insurers are already nervous
• How we can still fight back: defending autonomy, re-valuing effort and difficulty, and protecting the best parts of being human

If you care about AI, ethics, free will, and the future of human agency, this conversation with Jacob Ward is a bracing reality check — and a reminder that protecting our ability to choose may be the most important design problem of the 21st century.

As always, you can listen to or download the audio file above or scroll down and watch the video interview in full. To show your support, you can write a review on iTunes, make a direct donation, or become a patron on Patreon.

Who is Jacob Ward?

Jacob Ward is an award-winning journalist and one of the leading communicators at the intersection of technology, psychology, and society. He is currently reporter-in-residence at The Omidyar Network, where he writes about innovation, social systems, and the emerging ethics of AI. Previously he served as NBC News’ technology correspondent, Al Jazeera’s science and tech correspondent, and editor-in-chief of Popular Science. Ward is also a lecturer at Stanford’s d.school and a former Berggruen Fellow at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

He is the author of The Loop: How AI Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back, a book that explains how decision-shaping technologies exploit human psychology and predicted the AI-driven behavioral crisis we are now living through. Ward hosts the PBS series Hacking Your Mind and has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Wired. His podcast, The Rip Current, and his large social following continue to bring his insights on human behavior and technological power to a broad global audience.