AI, under the dangerous control of tech oligarchs, is creating a world with shrinking human choice, creativity, and connection. Technology journalist Jacob Ward, author of The Loop: How Technology is Creating a World without Choices and How to Fight Back, describes why restraint and resistance are necessary to fight back against the AI juggernaut. Highlights include:

• How tech journalism emphasizes novelty and business profits and amplifies tech companies' hype as journalists seek to maintain access to powerful tech leaders;
• How profit-driven AI exploits a human bias toward fast, easy thinking and decision-making that leads us to outsource our choices and judgment to automated systems;
• Why AI large language models (LLMs) are like cover bands providing the 'greatest hits' of humanity's past achievement - an 'artificial hive mind' that is biased toward middle-of-the-road, derivative, and unoriginal ideas;
• How impersonal, unaccountable, 'black box' AI decision-making creates Kafka-esque systems in government services, jobs, and loans - disproportionately harming the least powerful in society;
• Why AI large language models are 2 to 3 times more biased than the average person across various cultural and demographic dimensions;
• How AI will increase addiction and social isolation, replacing real-world relationships with flattering, always available chatbot 'friends';
• Why our collective sense-making and democratic decision-making will be further threatened by AI - creating even more tightly sealed, individually customized information bubbles that conform to our feelings, not the truth;
• How many tech oligarchs pushing AI are also involved in genetic engineering projects with the aim of breeding 'optimized' babies;
• Why tech companies' legal liability and U.S. states' AI regulations are hopeful avenues of AI pushback;
• Why we need to rediscover the value of restraint and realize that not all innovation is beneficial for humanity and the planet.

See episode website for show notes, links, and transcript:

https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast/jacob-ward

OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance

OVERSHOOT tackles today's interlocked social and ecological crises driven by humanity's excessive population and consumption. The podcast explores needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on Earth. With expert guests from wide-ranging disciplines, we examine the forces underlying overshoot: from patriarchal pronatalism that is fueling overpopulation, to growth-biased economic systems that lead to consumerism and social injustice, to the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all beings.

Hosted by Nandita Bajaj and Alan Ware. Brought to you by Population Balance.

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Learn more at https://www.populationbalance.org

Copyright 2016-2026 Population Balance

The myth of human exceptionalism casts humans as separate from and superior to the rest of life. Primatologist Christine Webb, author of The Arrogant Ape, dismantles this belief, showing how science and culture sustain human exceptionalism - and why replacing it with awe and empathy for the natural world is essential to life's future on Earth. Highlights include:

• How an early experience with Bear the baboon led Christine to a deep insight about nonhuman animals' complex theory of mind - the ability to know what others know;

• How human exceptionalism is deeply rooted in Western thought from Aristotle through medieval Christianity to the Enlightenment and modern science;

• How human exceptionalism influences both the research questions asked and the methods used in primate research and science in general - such as using symbolic language tests on captive animals that privilege human cognition, and self-recognition mirror tests that privilege visually dominant animals like humans and disadvantage animals like dogs that 'see' with their sense of smell;

• Why animals should be studied in their natural habitats, taking seriously each species' worldview, and developing relationships with individual animals grounded in mutual accommodation and trust which allows them to show who they really are;

• How many Indigenous societies have long understood animals as individuals with agency and autonomy who structure their own societies - a relational understanding Western science has only recently begun to recognize;

• Why empathy, the attempt to understand the "minded life of another being", must be "un-tabooed" in Western science;

• How human population pressure, in addition to driving animal depopulation and extinction, also reduces the complexity of animals' social relationships and cultural diversity;

• Why "human exemptionalism", the belief that technology will save humanity from environmental limits, is a delusional form of human exceptionalism;

• How her book ultimately calls us to resist the inherited role of the "arrogant ape" through everyday awe practices, such as "slow-looking" practices in nature that shift our perspective toward deeper understanding and appreciation of the more-than-human world.

See episode website for show notes, links, and transcript:

https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast/christine-webb

OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance

OVERSHOOT tackles today's interlocked social and ecological crises driven by humanity's excessive population and consumption. The podcast explores needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on Earth. With expert guests from wide-ranging disciplines, we examine the forces underlying overshoot: from patriarchal pronatalism that is fueling overpopulation, to growth-biased economic systems that lead to consumerism and social injustice, to the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all beings.

Hosted by Nandita Bajaj and Alan Ware. Brought to you by Population Balance.

Subscribe to our newsletter here: https://www.populationbalance.org/subscribe

Support our work with a one-time or monthly donation: https://www.populationbalance.org/donate

Learn more at https://www.populationbalance.org

Copyright 2016-2026 Population Balance

Silicon Valley billionaires, such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman, promise salvation through space colonization, immortality, superintelligent AI, and endless growth. Adam Becker, astrophysicist and author of More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, debunks these profoundly immoral and biophysically impossible delusions, and explains why resisting them through collective action is essential. Highlights include:

• How tech billionaires confuse science fiction for reality and why their fantasies of space colonization are biophysically impossible;
• Why Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) remains an ill-defined concept that is based in the false assumption that humans' evolved brains work like computing machines;
• Why large language models (LLMs), the dominant form of AI, are neither creative nor accurate enough to achieve the dreamed-for leap in machine intelligence;
• What the end of Moore's Law tells us about diminishing returns to technological complexity and the expectation of endless technological growth;
• Why longtermism is a dangerous ideology of technological salvation and endless growth, prioritizing hypothetical future populations while excusing present-day social injustice and ecological destruction;
• How the fear of death underlies techno-utopian off-planet and transhumanist fantasies;
• Why resisting their oligarchic visions requires calling out the ridiculousness of their ideas and organizing collectively to push back both politically and economically.

See episode website for show notes, links, and transcript:

https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast/adam-becker

OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance

OVERSHOOT tackles today's interlocked social and ecological crises driven by humanity's excessive population and consumption. The podcast explores needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on Earth. With expert guests from wide-ranging disciplines, we examine the forces underlying overshoot: from patriarchal pronatalism that is fueling overpopulation, to growth-biased economic systems that lead to consumerism and social injustice, to the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all beings.

Hosted by Nandita Bajaj and Alan Ware. Brought to you by Population Balance.

Subscribe to our newsletter here: https://www.populationbalance.org/subscribe

Support our work with a one-time or monthly donation: https://www.populationbalance.org/donate

Learn more at https://www.populationbalance.org

Copyright 2016-2026 Population Balance