Optimised: The Silent Surrender to Intelligent Machines

By Paul Fergus

Every technology that ever promised to free us has quietly reshaped us instead. Fire, farming, writing, the factory, the platform: each arrived as a tool and left as a condition, extracting something from the people who experienced it and making the new arrangement feel like nature. We didn't choose these systems as much as wake up already inside them. Now a second intelligence is doing the same thing to the one territory we believed was ours alone, thought itself.

The author traces the long history of how systems remake the humans who use them, and argues that Artificial Intelligence isn't a break with that history but its sharpest expression. It displaced our muscles years ago, now it's displacing our judgement, our attention, our sense of what we are for. The book asks the question the performance metrics never will: what does it mean to be optimised, and who are we becoming once the optimisation is done for us?

Clear-eyed, unsettling, and grounded in a working life spent building the very systems it examines, this is a book about the surrender we are making one quiet convenience at a time, and what might still be worth holding back.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 3032392578
• ISBN13: 9783032392572
• Release Date: December 2026
• Publisher: Springer