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

The innermost loop is human behavior as we inherited it, the natural tendencies and autopilot functions that evolution gave us.

Mullainathan went on to determine that poverty similarly reprograms the human mind. He and his colleagues spent five years investigating how poverty and hunger can affect our mental abilities as well as our bodies. And they found that just as being hungry makes people preoccupied with food, being poor will make them preoccupied with money.

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 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.

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

In a single paper, “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” they laid out a dozen systematic biases and a trio of heuristics—calling them representativeness, availability, and anchoring—that form a trinity of human weirdness.

Our unconscious tendencies are the control surfaces by which technology will shape our lives.

It’s our greatest success as a society to have devised systems for settling our differences, measuring the immeasurable, sorting through controversy. It’s not easy, and the work isn’t finished. Mediation, negotiation, deciding which of two bad choices is less harmful—that’s the very hardest stuff of modern society. In some cases, we’ve barely begun

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