Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
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My guest this week is Jacob Ward.
Jacob Ward is a veteran journalist covering the intersection of technology, human behavior, and social change. Heโs currently reporter-in-residence at The Omidyar Network, writing about cutting-edge innovation and pioneering forms of restraint, and a strategic advisor on the deployment of A.I. for companies large and small. From 2018 to 2024 he was technology correspondent for NBC News, reporting for Nightly News, The TODAY Show, and MSNBC. He is the former editor-in-chief of Popular Science magazine, and was Al Jazeeraโs science and technology correspondent from 2013 to 2018. Ward is a lecturer at the Stanford d.school, and was a 2018-2019 Berggruen Fellow at Stanford Universityโs Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, where he began writing The Loop: How AI is Creating a World without Choices and How to Fight Back, out now from Hachette Book Group. The book explores how artificial intelligence and other decision-shaping technologies will amplify good and bad human instincts, and predicted the AI psychosis in which society is currently mired. Ward has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and many other publications. In addition to hosting documentaries for Nat Geo and Discovery, heโs the host and co-writer of the landmark four-hour PBS television series, โHacking Your Mind,โ about human decision-making, behavioral economics, and political manipulation. His weekly podcast The Rip Current covers the big, hidden forces at work in our lives, and he speaks to an audience of more than 250,000 viewers on TikTok, on podcast appearances, and on This Week in Tech, where heโs a regular co-host.
Buy The Loop: How AI is Creating a World without Choices and How to Fight Back here.
Where to begin with this conversation? First Iโll say, itโs an absolute pleasure to speak with polymaths. I try to do it as much as I can on the show, and Jake is an exemplar, able to dance across topics with depth and nuance. As such, youโll notice that we move from questions about the futures of AI in society to contemporary politics to that conversation between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
What I especially love is how his ongoing research into behavioral and cognitive science has informed his approach to AI, a topic that has become inescapable, and such, is often crowded with noise and takes that are aggressively mid at best. But Jake has been consistently early and right about this stuffโeven โcallingโ the Trump election in the PBS docu-series Hacking Your Mind. Meanwhile, he published The Loop: How AI is Creating a World without Choices and How to Fight Back, mere months before Midjourney and ChatGPT took off in 2022, effectively sketching the key threats that would make themselves undeniable over the following years. These are the early jump-off points in our conversation, but it swerves delightfully from there, and I couldnโt be happier with how it turned out. So Iโll get out of the way and let you enjoy this rich conversation with Jacob Ward.
Another episode you might like:
Reneฬe DiResta: The Evolution of Propaganda & its 'Invisible Rulers': Influencers, Algorithms, & Crowds | #30
Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
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CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work Iโm doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures. Past conversations include Taylor Lorenz, Lisa Messeri, Legacy Russell, William E. Rees, Renรฉe DiResta, and more. Here is another recent episode with on how we cope with polycrisis:
