{"podcast":{"title":"Singularity.FM","slug":"singularity-fm-1654370","podcast_index_feed_id":1654370,"rss_url":"https://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:127932303/sounds.rss","website_url":"https://www.singularityweblog.com/","image_url":"https://i1.sndcdn.com/avatars-000269783121-khvz44-original.jpg","author":"Nikola Danaylov","episode_count":336,"summary":"Singularity.FM is the first and best known singul…","last_synced_at":"2026-07-03T08:20:09.454300+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/singularity-fm-1654370"},"episode":{"title":"Jacob Ward on The Loop, AI, and a World Without Real Choices","slug":"jacob-ward-on-the-loop-ai-and-a-world-without-real-choices","published_at":"2025-11-29T15:42:20+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/singularity-fm-1654370/jacob-ward-on-the-loop-ai-and-a-world-without-real-choices","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/singularity-fm-1654370","url":"https://soundcloud.com/singularity1on1/jacob-ward","audio_url":"https://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/2221063967-singularity1on1-jacob-ward.mp3","summary":"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 natural…","meta_description":"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 dow…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":4589,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/singularity-fm-1654370/episodes/jacob-ward-on-the-loop-ai-and-a-world-without-real-choices/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/singularity-fm-1654370/jacob-ward-on-the-loop-ai-and-a-world-without-real-choices.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}