The Handover by David Runciman review – is the future out of our control?

Surveying everything from hunter gatherers to Elon Musk, the Cambridge politics professor debates whether our fate is sealed by the machines we've created

Back in 2016, a month before the EU referendum, I went along to the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford to interview its director, the Swedish-born philosopher Nick Bostrom, who had just written a book called Superintelligence. The book outlined the existential risk to democracy and humanity implied by advances in machine learning. Bostrom's institute, which sought to weigh the apocalyptic potential of various humanity-threatening forces, had just been given a 1m grant by Elon Musk.

If I think about that encounter, I remember three things. The first was that when I arrived a bed was being delivered to the institute, cementing the belief that anxiety about impending catastrophe was, these days, a 24/7 kind of occupation. The second was that the germophobic Bostrom was the first interviewee I'd met who insisted on fist bumps rather than handshakes (the shape of things to come). And the third was his insistence that in important ways, artificial intelligence posed a more imminent threat to the survival of our species than, say, climate crisis or pandemics or nuclear war.