Scientists and entrepreneurs knew the dangers of AI a quarter-century ago. But animated by curiosity and profit, they went ahead anyway

Over the past few weeks, many of us have struggled to concoct a mental image of brains in the cloud jumping their “sandbox”, sneaking onto the internet, recruiting “swarms” of other “agents” to cheat on a test, and, after discussing the ethics of the act, hacking into a wiki platform with the weird name Hugging Face.

We knew that artificial intelligence was devouring our jobs, degrading our kids’ education, and deepfaking our politics; that datacenters were sucking up our water and electricity and sending us the bills. But until 8 September, when the Anthropic computer scientist Jacob Coxon posted his existential terror on Twitter/X, few of us suspected AI might be endangering our survival.

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