I am walking between carriages in search of a cup of tea on a train travelling over 100 miles an hour from Liverpool to London when I see half the people in my carriage in deep conversations with a machine: ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini to name a few. I am meant to be on sabbatical, the rare stretch of academic life reserved for slow thinking. Around me, almost nobody is thinking slowly.

This is not limited to a train carriage. Half of the adults surveyed in one US study reported using an AI chatbot, one example of how fast people are entering a relationship with their AI tools, which now receive more of our questions, problems and drafts than our friends and colleagues do.

I am one of them; I research advanced technologies for a living. I sceptically entered this relationship to satisfy my curiosity, and my very first request of ChatGPT was to proofread an email. The second was to plan a four-day holiday, and the third was to compare home loans. I sent that AI-proofread email, took that short holiday, and refinanced our mortgage with a better rate – all based on its advice. The relationship started growing and I started giving it more complicated tasks: summarise an article, collate recent findings on a specific topic and........

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