If we use AI to write our favorite music for us, will we lose the ability to write music ourselves? If an AI coach keeps divorced parents from arguing by text, can they get along without it? If the only novels and screenplays that get a green light are the ones that AI believes match up with past hits, will we wind up reading and watching the same thing over and over? In this talk by NBC’s Jacob Ward, you’ll learn about The Loop: the endless, multi-generational feedback cycle of pattern-recognition that threatens to collapse the complexity of human behavior into a predictable set of patterns across politics, entertainment, relationships, and art itself. Why is The Loop so powerful? Why do companies keep empowering it? And what can we, as private citizens, do to resist its pull?

Forget the incremental stuff. Get ready for the big technological changes that will change our world. Billion-dollar spacecraft are being replaced by student-designed cubes that cost less than a luxury car. Robots are poised to take over driving and manufacturing, sure, but also design, cuisine, even romance. Military-funded research programs won’t just read your mind, they'll write new information into it. And when AI lines up alongside the technological ability to rewrite our genetic code, the combination could give us power over life and death itself. Jacob Ward, former editor-in-chief of Popular Science, has spent a career forecasting the future, and in this talk he describes the world’s most dramatic and disruptive technological breakthroughs, and what they’ll mean to you. 

For most of us, our own mind is a black box: an all-powerful and utterly mysterious device that runs our lives for us. And not only do we humans just barely understand how it works, science is now revealing that it makes most of our decisions for us using rules and shortcuts of which you and I aren’t even aware. Meanwhile, every area of human activity, from criminal justice to corporate hiring to military strategy, is turning to “black box” artificial intelligence systems for cost savings, efficiency, and moral clarity. Jacob Ward reveals the relationship between the unconscious habits of our minds, and the way that AI is poised to amplify them, alter them, maybe even reprogram them.

Did you know your brain absorbs emotions from other people and then broadcasts them on your face without your awareness? Did you know that the first person to mention a salary figure in a job negotiation always gets her way? Did you know that we humans consistently remember ourselves as having predicted the future correctly, even when we didn't? Former editor-in-chief of Popular Science Jacob Ward, now science correspondent for Al Jazeera television and host of the landmark public television series Hacking Your Mind, delivers a high-energy crash course in the revolutionary findings of a pioneering group of decision scientists around the world. Jake unpacks the lessons those findings have taught us about the nature of bias, persuasion, and happiness itself, and reveals the cutting-edge research that could help us turn our glitchy cognitive habits into bulletproof methods for building better companies, creating smarter products, and navigating the modern world. 

Did you know that in a dogfight above a battlefield, the shorter pilot almost always wins? That’s because the G forces of the plane act more strongly on someone with a longer distance between heart and brain. It’s the human being that limits the performance of the aircraft, and that’s why the US Air Force plans to automate fighter jets from now on. Did you know that in car crashes the human driver is at fault nearly 90% of the time? That’s why car companies are willing to take over your car insurance payments to get you into a robot car. And did you know that defensive maneuvers like shooting down an incoming missile generally have to happen so fast that a human can’t even be involved? That’s why from cyberwarfare to missile defense, human beings are being replaced by robots. But when we remove human limitations from a system, we also remove human morals and human sensitivities. Jacob Ward discusses the tension between what we can build, and what we should build.