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

Fischhoff had discovered that we humans are not the insightful historians we think we are, concluding that “the feeling that we understand what the past was all about may prevent us from learning anything from it.”

Whether we’re subjected to a mysterious selection system or handed recommendations by a system we don’t understand, our unconscious tendencies and the mysterious processes of technology and business are consistently coming together to change our behavior, put us in the loop, and make us into people we never consciously intended to be.

The Loop is a downward tailspin of shrinking choices, supercharged by capitalist efficiency, in which human agency is under threat from irresistible systems packaged for our unconscious acceptance.

When I land in a new city and need to drive from the airport into town, Google Maps offers me a handful of options—here’s one highway, here’s another, here’s the no-tolls route. And I dutifully choose from among them. It used to be that I’d push back against this process and seek out whatever bakeries and landmarks and vistas I could find by drivin

In a sense, tribalism and religion and the rest of it use a separate processing system. As Hamid, Atran, and their coauthors wrote, “Sacred value choices involved less activation of brain regions previously associated with cognitive control and cost-benefit calculations.”

The second loop is the way that modern forces—consumer technology, capitalism, marketing, politics—have sampled the innermost loop of behavior and reflected those patterns back at us, resulting in everything from our addiction to cigarettes and gambling to systemic racism in real estate and machine learning.

The economist Albert O. Hirschman describes three options available to modern citizens faced with a system that does not serve them in his 1970 book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Don’t like something? Hirschman argued you have three choices: walk away, argue for improvements, or stick with it. Exit, as he describes it, is an economic mechanism, a highl

As Slovic described it in a 2006 paper with psychologist Ellen Peters, “People judge a risk not only by what they think about it but also by how they feel about it. If their feelings toward an activity are favorable, they tend to judge the risks as low and the benefits as high; if their feelings toward the activity are unfavorable, they tend to mak

And it shows that someone experiencing poverty is intensely distracted at all times. They are literally impaired by it. He went on to write a book about this work with psychologist Eldar Shafir, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much.

And yet the marketing, the libertarian politics, and the continued social acceptability of technologically driven industries like the one that has produced decision-guidance technology depends on the assumption that tech makes our lives better. That assumption drives the adoption of AI, as it drove the adoption of smartphones and the Internet befor