To imagine the future as being almost entirely bleak has somehow crept into the collective this year.

Last week I was having coffee with an old friend. He was telling me about what his kids wanted to study when they went to university, when he suddenly broke off, stared into the middle distance and said, “I wish I never had children.”

He’d been a father for 20 years and I’d never heard him say that.

He loves his kids beyond measure, but right at that moment, he looked desolate.

It could have been anything AI-related at this point in time. Was it that AI was going to take all the jobs his kids would have done, rendering their lives impoverished and without purpose or meaning? Or was it environmental, with all the water and energy AI consumes that is going to create further stress on the climate and make the planet uninhabitable? Or was it the news that week that AI could “kill all humans” within the next 10 years?

It was the latter. We talked listlessly about the killing all humans thing for a bit, then moved on. But the shadow had fallen and I started wondering: is the polycrisis that we are facing so overwhelming that we don’t even have the capacity to........

© The Guardian