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We remember the empty hysteria induced by warnings over the millennium bug. We have borne the burden of exaggerated predictions of climate apocalypse from scientists in the grip of confirmation bias. All too recently we endured lurid over-estimations from academics of what the final Covid variants might bring. So it is tempting to dismiss all future warnings of technological Götterdämmerung as the overwrought fever dreams of nerds who have read too much Isaac Asimov. Is artificial intelligence really going to take over the world and kill us all? Are we going to be frozen to death by our smart meters and then incinerated by our microwaves?

Two big stories are driving interest in artificial intelligence this week. The first is the resignation of Jacob Coxon, a researcher at Anthropic (maker of Claude) who used to work for OpenAI. He said in a statement on X: https://twitter.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476196791709843?s=20 Coxon went on to say that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade”, and that employees at Anthropic are aggressively driving forward because they believe they are in the only company capable of managing the technology safely and ethically. At OpenAI, “many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes.”  Scary stuff.

The older and more plutocratic among you may remember the unlamented business-class airline seat of the 1980s and 1990s. Every few years, major airlines would proudly announce the wondrous extra legroom available in their long-haul business class and the increase in the recline angle of the seat. And each time the experience got worse. You see, the person sitting in front of you now invaded ever more of your airspace when they reclined their own seat. You then had no choice but to follow suit to regain the lost territory. The resulting Nash equilibrium meant everyone on board was forced to spend the entire journey leaning backwards at 45°. Getting to the lavatory required playing an involuntary game of Twister with the person sitting by the aisle.

In the centre of Durham last week, at the far end of the old indoor market, my son and I hit pay dirt. Down past the fishmonger and the cleaning supplies, past the dead-eyed teens suffering through their summer jobs, right against the market’s back wall: Jim’s Vintage Toys. Die-cast Dinkys, Napoleonic soldiers with tufted hats, stormtroopers, old-school Ferraris. Within 20 seconds my ten-year-old had a car in each sticky hand and had dropped, sniper-style to the floor into that universal boy play-position almost never seen in girls: bum up, shoulders twisted, cheek flat to the floor. Another few seconds and he was unreachable, sunk deep into an imaginary race.

In my belated quest to develop a faint sense of what AI is doing, I have just read Sebastian Mallaby’s book The Infinity Machine, about the greatest British AI wizard, Demis Hassabis, boss of DeepMind. The numerous passages I did not understand are my fault, not Mallaby’s. The book is admirably lucid. All I can record, which may slightly help others dipping their toes in the shallow end, is two contradictory impressions. The first is of foreboding. When thinking about AI, we are talking as much about its human creators as about the machines themselves. These creators are almost all men (there are only four women in the book’s entire index), and a certain type of man at that. They resemble clever boys – especially American clever boys, even when they are not actually American.

When Steve Reed, the now ex-communities secretary, unveiled his social cohesion ‘action plan’ earlier this year, he promised to publish an ‘evidence review’ on ‘the impacts of misinformation’. Commissioned by the government’s chief scientific adviser, it would focus on ‘how to measure the problem, assess harms and counter and mitigate these harms’. That report has now been published and the headline finding is that ‘anti-LGBTQ+ narratives’ – such as claiming that state schools and other public authorities have been captured by gender ideology, and questioning whether biological males should be allowed to compete in women’s sports – are examples of misleading and false information that cause harm, alongside climate denial and deepfake images.