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 behavioural 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 behaviour-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.