I’ve become strangely fascinated with the amount of people in my life who at some point in the last two decades started thinking about artificial intelligence and then decided that the only two options are the extinction of humanity or blissful abundance along the lines described by Marx, where we do a little work in the morning and spend the rest of the day as we please.

Normally we treat doomsday cults as exotic lunacies. This was especially true for my generation in America where the Branch Davidian cult ended up in a standoff with federal authorities that culminated in spectacular violence. Or the Heaven’s Gate cult, whose members committed suicide in March 1997, hoping to hop a ride on the Hale-Bopp comet.

A few manage to gain respect. Famously in the 1960s and 1970s, the People’s Temple, led by Jim Jones, attracted........

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