I CALLED
IT EARLY.
"The best book I have ever read about A.I."
— Roger McNamee, New York Times Bestselling Author
In The Loop I forecast how commercial A.I. would plunge society into a spiral of mania, eroded skills, and lost choices. I sat at dinner tables where addiction scientists sold their expertise to hook users. I interviewed A.I. CEOs who compare the reality-rewriting harm their products cause to a bad muffin in a batch. I watched firsthand as companies and institutions began experimenting on the impoverished and powerless.
Hachette published it in 2022 — a year before ChatGPT arrived.
Readers and reviewers say they don't just learn about A.I. from The Loop. They feel something shift.
what the loop argueD
WHY IT STILL MATTERS
Artificial intelligence doesn't just make decisions for us. It quietly narrows the range of choices available in the first place — before we even know it's happening — while fooling us into believing we have more choices than we did.
All of this narrowing, meanwhile, feels good, thanks to evolution, which rewarded (and cursed) us with an irresistible tendency to take any cognitive shortcut we can. And don’t forget the market loves a narrowed range of behavior, a narrowed critical capacity, and a narrowed workforce. That’s why the companies that have figured this out — casinos, video game makers, social media giants, and now the AI industry — are the most profitable (and among the most predatory) businesses in history.
This is The Loop. The A.I. models analyze our most ancient tendencies and feed them back to us as products and services. Our ability to make our own decisions withers like an unused muscle. And a very small number of people get rich.
The Loop traces all of this through healthcare, criminal justice, hiring, education, and social media — and makes the case that fighting back is not only crucial, but very possible.
The book was published in January 2022 — before ChatGPT, before the AI mania, before most people had heard of large language models, tokens, or agents. Everything it warned about has since arrived.
The new foreword brings the argument forward to the present moment: what The Loop predicted, what it got right, and what the current AI gold rush means for the choices we have left.
"A fascinating survey of the known spectrum of human biases... rebuts
the Silicon Valley-esque assumption that AI will always do good."
— Cathy O'Neil, The New York Times
The loop DESCRIBED THE MECHANISM.
THE RIP CURRENT COVERS IT AS IT HAPPENS.
Daily reporting on tech accountability, surveillance, and corporate power — for people who want to understand what's actually happening, not just what the press release says.