Jacob Ward has covered science and technology for nearly 20 years, most recently as technology correspondent for NBC News. Beginning in 2018, he filed reports on the intersection of technology, human behavior, and social change for Nightly News, The TODAY Show, and MSNBC. He is the former editor-in- chief of Popular Science magazine, and was Al Jazeera’s science and technology correspondent from 2013 to 2018. Ward is a lecturer at the Stanford d.school, and was a 2018-2019 Berggruen Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, where he began writing The Loop: How AI is Creating a World without Choices and How to Fight Back, out now from Hachette Book Group. The book explores how artificial intelligence and other decision-shaping technologies will amplify good and bad human instincts. Ward has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and many other publications. In addition to hosting documentaries for Nat Geo and Discovery, he’s the host of the landmark four-hour PBS television series, “Hacking Your Mind,” about human decision-making and manipulation. He’s at work on a new book about the great ideas humanity should not pursue.
