A heavy cost of everything being connected in the digital landscape is that humans will start to lose their identity. This is the conclusion offered by technology entrepreneur, psychologist and author Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, who thinks that, for the past decade “we’ve been worrying about the rise of AI [artificial intelligence] and the automation of jobs, while inadvertently automating ourselves by living robotic lives. Today, we’re busy training AI by clicking here, dragging there and ignoring the real world. This makes us a predictable and boring species.”

The idea of trading in humanity’s uniqueness for a digitally enabled existence in which content creation, social media and data become part of an extended homogenised machine forms the central theme of Chamorro-Premuzic’s latest book I, Human: AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique. Within, he argues that we are destined to chase our own tails down a rabbit hole, as our interactions...