Just over a decade ago, I spent some months listening to people speak – in San Francisco, in London, in Oxford – about the alarming possibilities that would be unleashed by artificial intelligence. At that time, AI was still basically an abstract notion: a thing that was imminent, and would surely be transformative, but which did not yet have a meaningful presence in the culture, other than as a vague spectre conjured by science fiction.

I was especially interested in a small but vocal group of people who had positioned themselves as the Cassandras of Silicon Valley. These people, many of whom worked in the field of AI, were convinced that, unless very specific safeguards were put in place, there was a strong likelihood that humanity would be wiped out by artificial intelligence.

Their figurehead was Nick Bostrom, a Swedish philosopher long associated with the Transhumanist movement, and who in those days ran a research institute at Oxford called the Future of Humanity Institute.

Bostrom believed that AI would eventually reach a level of “superintelligence” that far outstripped its human creators, and that it would continue improving itself in a runaway feedback loop. If its goals were not properly aligned with “human values” – whatever we might judge those to be – an artificial superintelligence could end up causing catastrophic harm to humanity, simply because human welfare was not built into the AI’s originally encoded aims.

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