He is concerned about the atomisation of society as experience becomes individualised, and about how we are unwittingly handing over vast amounts of power to faceless corporations with very little debate from politicians and other leaders about what we actually want from technology.

In the opening chapter on smartphones for example, whilst marvelling that the entire cartographic knowledge of the world and even our place in it is now available to us on a flat screen that we can hold in our hands, we are for the most part blissfully unaware of all of the interconnected technologies - the NAVSTAR satellite GPS systems, the vast data centres that process the information, the networking and wireless infrastructure that transmit the signals - that allow this functionality to exist.

More importantly, Greenfield notes, so quickly has using a smartphone map ceased to be a wonder and become just part of every day live that "we have become reliant on the network to accomplish our ordinary goals".

AI learns fast and it will not be long before "autonomous algorithmic systems acquire an effectively human level of cognitive ability".

The Guardian described it as “A tremendously intelligent and stylish book on the ‘colonization of everyday life by information processing[3]'”, while Jennifer Howard in The Times Literary Supplement said it “provides a grounded guide, a cautionary tale in which each chapter walks readers through another layer of a dazzling and treacherous landscape”.