Reports from Silicon Valley this month on the odds of artificial intelligence (AI) obliterating humanity by 2030 are enough to make one crack open the piggy bank and go wild. Why invest in a pension when there is a more than 10 per cent chance of all humans being killed by the time the next Fifa World Cup rolls around?

That specific forecast was made by a “whistleblower” researcher in tech firm Anthropic. Far from downplaying the prophecy, the company’s boss Dario Amodei later warned an AI swarm could be capable of “taking over the entire internet” within a year. And in a rare show of unity among money-grabbing mega-egos Elon Musk and Sam Altman – who are responsible for chatbots Grok and ChatGPT – backed calls to “slow the pace” of AI development.

What’s going on? And how should ordinary citizens like you and I respond to this outbreak in AI doomer vibes? Scary as the prospect is of robots lasering us to death through our devices, what’s more immediately terrifying is the idea of someone like Musk positioning himself as the responsible face of AI development. Or indeed Altman, aptly described by Oliver Callan on his RTÉ Radio show as “another one who is dead behind the eyes”.

To make sense of it all, Unthinkable turned to Carissa Véliz, who had the foresight to write a book recently on the very subject – Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI (Swift........

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