That Was The Week That Was — 13th September 2026

The experience of watching your garden grow gives you some idea of how future AI systems will feel when observing human life — James Lovelock, Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence AI was much in the public consciousness this week following the Anthropic's researchers revelations how AI has a 10% chance of destroying humanity by the end of the decade. It wasn;t helped when Geoffrey Hinton commented on BBC's Newsnight that yes, that's probably about right. A week before I had read James Lovelock's 2019 book Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence, which is a much more optimistic take on a possible future with these ever-increasingly intelligent machines. I say optimistic, and that's probably the wrong word as Lovelock believes humanities dominance is coming to to end and it's all part of an evolutionary trajectory where machines will be the top of the intelligent hierarchy, looking at us the same way we now look at plants. Yet he argues they will need us to support the…