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Reflection and the Struggle to Remain Human

The Morning Standard

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January 11, 2026

The author examines how technology quietly captures our attention-and increasingly reflects our humanity back at us

- SREEJITH VELLU MADHOM

Reflection and the Struggle to Remain Human

In two slim yet intellectually ambitious works-The Age of Noise: Attention as the New Currency and The Mirror of Machines: Reflections on AI, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity-Dr Sumeet Bhasin turns his gaze on the twin pressures reshaping modern consciousness. One book interrogates how our attention is harvested, fragmented, and monetised; the other examines the unsettling emergence of artificial minds that increasingly mirror our own. Read together, they form a coherent and deeply considered meditation on what it means to remain human at a moment when technology claims both our time and our self-understanding.

In The Age of Noise, Dr Bhasin is not interested in cataloguing the usual suspects smartphones, social media, endless notifications as isolated villains. Instead, he situates distraction within a larger economy of attention, one that has learned to weaponise human psychology with extraordinary sophistication.

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