In 1914, on the eve of the First World War, HG Wells published a novel about the possibilities of an even greater conflagration. The World Set Free imagines, 30 years before the Manhattan Project, the creation of atomic weapons that allow “a man [to] carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city”. Global war breaks out, leading to an atomic apocalypse. It takes the “establishment of a world government” to bring about peace.

What concerned Wells was not simply the perils of a new technology, it was also the dangers of democracy. Wells’ world government was not created through democratic will but imposed as a benign dictatorship. “The governed will show their consent by silence,” England’s King Egbert menacingly remarks. For Wells, the “common man” was “a violent fool in social and public affairs”. Only an educated, scientifically minded elite could “save democracy from itself”.

A century on, another technology provokes a similar kind of awe and fear – artificial intelligence. From the boardrooms of Silicon Valley to the backrooms of Davos, political leaders, tech moguls and academics exult in the immense benefits that AI will bring, but fear that it may also herald humanity’s demise as superintelligent machines come to rule the world. And, as a century ago, at the heart of the debate are questions of democracy and social control.

In 2015, the journalist Steven Levy interviewed Elon Musk and Sam Altman, two founders of OpenAI, the tech company that burst into public consciousness two years ago with the release of........

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