Doxing and Community Cohesion: Does AI Separate Us?

What are the corrosive impacts of AI? Are there ways to offset some of the more negative trends in our communities and make technologies instruments of joy rather than menaces?

What causes acted-out anger against mayors, council members, school boards, jurists and journalists? What is at the root of this community fragmentation?

In this first episode of the ICF's series on doxxing, we begin a conversation with Jacob Ward, author of The Loop. Mr. Ward is best-known to Americans for his stint as the on-air correspondent for NBC News, covering the intersection of technology, human behavior, and social change for the Nightly News and The TODAY Show. Mr. Ward and Lou discuss the degree to which AI, social anxiety and the isolation of the digital world have exploited peoples' behavior and eroded a community's more "wholesome" activities. Is this leading to doxing – while also potentially becoming a tool for positive change? It's an entirely new way to look at our future.

Jacob Ward is a prolific technology journalist. He was most recently an on-air correspondent for NBC News, covering 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.