My relationship with technology began with the first generation of home computers. I first used a Sinclair ZX80 in 1980 and, two years later, learned to code on a Dragon 32. What began as childhood fascination became a career: I spent more than thirty years working in the technology industry, including sixteen years at IBM, seeing first-hand how technology can improve organisations, increase efficiency and change the way people work.

I was also an early adopter of ChatGPT and have used generative AI extensively in both my professional and everyday life for several years. I find what AI can already do fascinating and unsettling in almost equal measure.

It is easy to think of AI as a chatbot that can answer a question, create an image or suggest what to have for dinner. But that is the tip of the iceberg. We are moving towards systems capable of acting with increasing autonomy and exceeding human intellectual capability by orders of magnitude across almost every domain.

That possibility raises a question I find more interesting than whether AI will simply be good or bad: what happens to us if it succeeds?

If artificial intelligence can eventually do much of what gives human beings economic, professional and societal value today — and perhaps do it vastly better — what happens to work, status, agency, purpose and our need for one another?

This extraordinary point in history, and the tension between the utopian and dystopian futures it could produce, is what led me to write Keep the Fire Alight.