{"id":243089,"date":"2026-08-23T09:02:26","date_gmt":"2026-08-23T14:02:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/jacob-ward-on-the-loop-ai-and-a-world-without-real-choices"},"modified":"2026-08-23T09:02:26","modified_gmt":"2026-08-23T14:02:26","slug":"jacob-ward-on-the-loop-ai-and-a-world-without-real-choices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/jacob-ward-on-the-loop-ai-and-a-world-without-real-choices","title":{"rendered":"Jacob Ward on The Loop, AI, and a World Without Real Choices"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

I recorded this conversation ten months ago. It has aged into something closer to a warning label.<\/p>\n

Jacob Ward wrote The Loop before ChatGPT made his argument obvious. His claim: AI is doing to our decision-making what Google Maps did to our sense of direction. You never notice the skill leaving. You notice, one day, that you cannot get home without the phone.<\/p>\n

So I asked him what I thought was a simple question. What is a choice?<\/p>\n

Jake\u2019s answer took the rest of the hour, and it starts somewhere uncomfortable. He describes a dinner with addiction scientists, people who study compulsion for a living, hired by consumer app companies. Not to cure anything. To calibrate.<\/p>\n

From there we got into the decisions we have already handed over without a vote: hiring, lending, bail, custody, welfare. Hard moral calls outsourced to systems nobody in the room can inspect, because the human version was exhausting and the machine version is fast and cheap.<\/p>\n

He is not a doomer, which is why the conversation lands. He thinks the fight for #FreeWill is still winnable, and he pointed to two pieces of evidence I did not expect: teenagers calling AI \u201cclankers,\u201d and the return of film cameras.<\/p>\n

Continue reading \u201cJacob Ward on The Loop, AI, and a World Without Real Choices\u201d | ><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recorded this conversation ten months ago. It has aged into something closer to a warning label. Jacob Ward wrote The Loop before ChatGPT made his argument obvious. His claim: AI is doing to our decision-making what Google Maps did to our sense of direction. You never notice the skill leaving. You notice, one day, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":737,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,30,1512,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-ethics","category-mobile-phones","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243089","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/737"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243089"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243089\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}