The future won’t be defined by how intelligent we are, but by how human we choose to be.
I finished reading “When Intelligence Becomes Cheap: Reclaiming Creativity, Connection, and Dignity in the Age of AI,” by Oliver Clay, and it’s one of those books that quietly follows you around afterward. I picked it up expecting another AI/future-of-work type book, but it turned out to be much more personal than that. It’s really about what happens to us when the thing we’ve always relied on to feel valuable our ability to think, solve problems, create, and know things is no longer uniquely human. There was one part where the author talks about holding his newborn grandson and realising that this child will grow up in a world where talking to machines will feel as normal as talking to people. That moment grounded the whole book for me.
What I liked most is that the author doesn’t pretend to have everything figured out. The book feels reflective in a real way, like someone trying to think honestly through something enormous and unsettling. Some chapters are philosophical, others are built around small everyday moments, but the underlying idea is consistent: if intelligence becomes cheap and everywhere, then maybe the qualities we’ve overlooked kindness, empathy, judgment, love, dignity become the things that matter most. I’ve read a lot of writing about AI over the last couple of years, and most of it either feels breathlessly optimistic or apocalyptically dramatic. This didn’t feel like either. It felt like someone trying to understand what remains uniquely human when so much else can be replicated. I found myself underlining passages and then just sitting there thinking about them afterward, which honestly doesn’t happen to me very often anymore.
I’d recommend it to anyone who’s interested in AI but is more concerned with the human side of the conversation than the technical side. It’s not really a book about machines. It’s a book about us.