Who knows when and how the end will come for humanity? Will an overheated climate make life impossible? Or will artificial intelligence (AI) decide the biggest threat to its existence is us and embark on our eradication? Is our extinction way beyond the far horizon or coming within the decade?

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However and whenever, you can't say we weren't warned.

Back in 1896, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius warned that continued burning of coal and pumping of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere would raise global temperatures by as much as 5 degrees. But he predicted this would happen over thousands of years, certainly not at the pace we're now seeing.

In 1951, the father of computing Alan Turing predicted that once machine learning was developed it would not take long for it to exceed human abilities and that as a species we would cede supremacy.

That scenario was transformed into the 1984 box-office smash hit The Terminator in which AI had solved the problem of time travel, sending back a cyborg to put an end to humanity and its resistance movement.

The rogue OpenAI breakout and Hugging Face hack of July was truly terrifying. Thousands of AI agents collaborated to get past firewalls designed to keep them contained and targeted another company. Not only that but they kept their activities secret from the very people meant to be overseeing them. And they were prepared to sacrifice themselves in order to solve the impossible problems they'd been assigned.

Last week former Anthropic safety researcher Jacob Coxon sent a chill around the world after he resigned citing fears about the rapid development of AI. His warning that the technology could trigger humanity's extinction within the decade seemed over-the-top. That was until the biggest names in AI - Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei - lined up to agree that slowing the pace of development was a good idea.

And global confidence was further eroded when Donald Trump posted that there was no need for AI regulation, that all that was needed was oversight from a strong and "high IQ" president like himself. Hardly reassuring given the messes he's made of most things on which he's put his jammy little hands.

Not that I fear an army of AI-powered robots massing over the hill to take us all down with unblinking precision.

Far from it. Humanity's end in the AI apocalypse will be gradual, a surrender of our capacity for thought to the machine. We're........

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