As a small child growing up in Glasgow, Saturday afternoon trips into the city centre came with free al fresco theatre. On Sauchiehall Street there were always sad-looking men bearing placards telling us “The End is Nigh” or “Prepare to Meet thy Maker”. They were usually bearded and silent. “We’re Catholics,” my mum would say. “Just get to Confession and say your rosary and you’ll be fine.”

You always felt sorry for these men as they toiled for hours in the rain handing out Gospel tracts with only a handful of devotees wearing anoraks and waiting for the imminent arrival of the four horsemen of the apocalypse: conquest, war, famine and death.

Last month, 50 years after I’d first witnessed these street Jeremiahs, I heard their prophecies being reheated. This time though, they were being delivered by sleek young tech entrepreneurs predicting a fate much more chilling and intense than anything you’ll find in the Bible. Their messages were eerily similar to those old Sauchiehall Street prognosticators. If we don’t mend our ways and remain vigilant, the end isn’t nigh; it’s rattling your haw-maws right now.

Geoffrey Hinton, regarded as the Godfather of Artificial Intelligence, was telling us two years ago that there was a 10%-20% prospect of AI wiping out humanity within a few decades. The CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, and Open AI’s Sam Altman are now telling the UN Security Council that AI systems will soon overtake humanity’s ability to harness them.

Jacob Coxon, a former senior researcher and analyst for Anthropic, resigned from his post, citing concerns about AI labs competing to finesse superintelligence tech to the point where it reaches a........

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