The many ponderous pundits, armchair analysts, talking heads and paid-up members of the commentariat who have spent the last few days critiquing the government's latest intergenerational report have completely missed its most important underlying assumption.

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An obvious question, which must surely be on the lips of anybody who has been following the news cycle over the last few months, is on what basis do the authors of the report believe the world whose future it purports to chart will be here in 40 years from now?

While the optimism underlying this assumption is refreshing, it lands in the middle of a debate about whether or not artificial intelligence will have wiped out the human race or, Matrix-style, turned all of us into flesh and blood D-cell batteries to meet its exorbitant demands for energy, before the end of the decade.

Just consider some of the doomsday scenarios that have dominated the headlines this month alone.

"Kill all humans" by 2030: On September 9, 2026, Evan Hubinger, the alignment science lead at Anthropic, publicly stated: "We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is 10 per cent within the next decade".

The internet "swarm" takeover: On September 12, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that within six to 12 months, an AI "swarm" could be capable of taking over the entire internet using a persistent botnet.

Runaway industrialisation: On September 14, OpenAI researcher Dan Selsam warned that super-intelligent AI could trigger runaway, unstoppable industrialisation that would render the planet inhospitable to human life.

Bioweapons development: In early September, Anthropic said it had found five cases of bad actors using its models in ways that could support the development of biological weapons.

Wow. Hanrahan had nothing on this mob.

One obvious consolation is that the track records of everybody who has ever shouted that "the end is nigh," with the possible exception of Noah, don't stack up too well. I find great comfort in Niels Bohr's observation that "Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future."

This latest round of doom and gloom has prompted me, a child of the 1960s, to reflect on the many and varied apocalyptic scenarios that have been conjured up during my 65 years of, as yet, uninterrupted existence.

When I was just two years old, the fear was that the world would end with a bang, not a whimper, in a nuclear holocaust. While I slept in my crib the Cuban Missile Crisis came and went without incident. The backyard fallout centres were either dismantled or recycled as wine cellars.

The year 1962 was also the year marine biologist Rachel Carson published Silent........

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