Uncomfortable Question
In ARTIFICIAL EVERYTHING, you make the argument that our tendency to trade human connection and experiences for digital convenience is slowly erasing what makes us functional human beings. Why was this an important book for you to write?
I kept observing the same pattern everywhere: as we remove effort and friction from life, we also remove the very conditions that build human capability.
This book came from that discomfort. Not from theory, but from watching children, professionals, and entire systems slowly become more dependent while appearing more efficient.
I didn’t write it to critique technology. I wrote it to ask a more uncomfortable question: what are we becoming when nothing requires us anymore?
Did you learn anything in your research that surprised you?
What surprised me wasn’t a single finding, but the consistency of the pattern.
Across completely different areas — childhood, work, relationships — the same mechanism repeats: remove friction → capacity doesn’t develop → dependence increases.
What’s striking is how invisible this is in real time. Everything feels easier, better, more efficient… until you realise something fundamental is no longer there.
Were there parts of your own life where you noticed a shift away from human connection before you started writing?
Yes, and that’s part of what made the book unavoidable for me.
You start noticing how quickly even highly capable people reach for AI before thinking, or how communication becomes easier but less real, or how silence and boredom have almost disappeared.
It’s not dramatic. It’s gradual, and that’s exactly why it’s powerful.
What is one thing you hope readers take away from ARTIFICIAL EVERYTHING?
Awareness.
Not rejection of technology, but recognition that convenience is not neutral. It shapes what we become.
If readers finish the book and simply pause before taking the easiest option, and ask, “What am I not developing here?” Then the book has done its job.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
In ARTIFICIAL EVERYTHING, Dr. Carine Jennings examines a pattern that has quietly reshaped childhood, work, social life, and human capability itself.
Across domains, friction has been systematically removed, replaced by screens, algorithms, automation, and artificial substitutes. What was once built through struggle, effort, and necessity is now outsourced, optimized, or eliminated.
This is not a book about technology as innovation. It is a book about technology as substitution.
Drawing on sustained observation rather than academic theory, Jennings traces how convenience alters development:
Children grow without unstructured play.
Professionals outsource thinking to AI.
Social connection becomes performance.
Conflict is avoided rather than resolved.
Productivity increases. Capability declines.
The result is a new human type; highly functional in mediated environments, increasingly fragile without them.
ARTIFICIAL EVERYTHING is not anti-technology and not nostalgic. It does not argue for going backward. It asks a harder question: what do we lose when every human challenge is replaced with an artificial solution?
Written as cultural diagnosis rather than prescription, this book names what is eroding, why it matters, and why the consequences may only become visible when it is too late to reverse them.
For readers interested in cultural critique, human development, leadership, education, and the long-term cost of convenience, this book offers clarity where reassurance is easier.
Posted on March 23, 2026, in Interviews and tagged ai, ARTIFICIAL EVERYTHING, artificial intelligence, author, book, book recommendations, book review, book reviews, book shelf, bookblogger, books, books to read, Carine Jennings Ph.D, ebook, goodreads, indie author, kindle, kobo, literature, nonfiction, nook, novel, read, reader, reading, story, technology, writer, writing. Bookmark the permalink. Leave a comment.
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