The UK government, with its reversals on climate policy and commitment to oil drilling and air pollution, usually seems to be pro-apocalypse. But lately, senior British politicians have been on a save-the-world tour. Prime minister Rishi Sunak, his ministers, and diplomats have been briefing their international counterparts about the existential dangers of runaway artificial superintelligence, which, they warn, could engineer bioweapons, empower autocrats, undermine democracy, and threaten the financial system. “I do not believe we can hold back the tide,” deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden told the United Nations in late September.
Dowden’s doomerism is supposed to drum up support for the UK government’s