At this point, it should be clear that AI is a choose-your-own-adventure book where every option ends in disaster. Exploding carbon emissions and ecological collapse? Turn to page 37. Other outcomes include some or all of: the bubble bursting and an ensuing financial crisis; mass unemployment via automation; the end of democracy and the rise of authoritarian surveillance states; raving cults who believe the pattern-matching algorithm is a consciousness; terrorists who create devastating bioweapons; nation states that deploy autonomous weapons systems that act on non-human timeframes; nation states or terrorists that hack all the myriad systems we depend on; or an AI that, conscious or not, pursues directives that are at odds with human wellbeing.

Imagining that people such as Elon Musk, the OpenAI boss, Sam Altman, Palantir’s Peter Thiel and the Trump administration tech adviser Marc Andreessen will lead us to a utopian future of flourishing environmentalism, social harmony and endless leisure requires hallucination and sycophancy so great that that choose-your-own-adventure scenario could only have been written by ChatGPT.

There is a growing, if wildly delayed, realisation that we are heading for calamity, with accompanying calls to slow down, regulate or even put all of this on pause while we wrap our minds around it. These calls are coming not only from activists, but from a collection of politicians, experts and big-tech insiders too ecumenical to dismiss, from Bernie Sanders to Bill Gates, who wrote recently that “if someone had a credible plan for slowing down AI advances globally, I would likely support it”. He is merely the latest insider to acknowledge the reality that AI company Anthropic did earlier this summer, when it called for a “brake........

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