More than telling readers anything new about the dangers of technology...The Loop provides evidence that tech criticism itself is calcifying into a mainstream genre ... More often than not...Ward’s examples don’t fit into his neat conception of AI as a force for evil ... The Loop has the right anecdotes to wrestle with the ethical ambiguity of AI, but instead it tries to prove that AI is, almost without exception, bad. Ward seems to have drawn the wrong lessons from the techlash authors who came before him: Rather than following their methods of considering from all angles and questioning the status quo, he rides the new status quo they helped establish ... The Loop, like many books that set out to prove that technology is unequivocally bad, has little new to offer. Instead, it continues to clang the bell of anti-tech rabble-rousing, a sound we’ve all heard before and don’t need to hear again.
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