The Loop

By Jacob Ward,

Book cover of The Loop: How Technology is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back

Book description

"The best book I have ever read about AI." -Roger McNamee, New York Times bestselling author of Zucked
Artificial intelligence is going to change the world as we know it. But the real danger isn't some robot that's going to enslave us: It's our own brain. Our brains are constantly…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Loop as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I have always been fascinated by feedback loops, so even though the positive feedbacks discussed in this book have a very negative impact on society, they stir my technical curiosity.

More importantly, Ward highlights a very real problem with AI technology and its deployment: the potential for automated recommendations and other nudges to move us, as a population, toward conformity and predictability. 

Ward actually writes about 3 nested loops: 1) our evolved human tendencies, 2) the exploitation of those tendencies by human-based enterprises, such as capitalism and marketing, and 3) exploitation of those same tendencies by AI tools.

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