ON AN ENGLISH summer’s day last year, I turned from my computer to gaze at the green plane tree leaves swaying softly on their branches beyond my office balcony window. It was a moment of sun-­drenched beauty, but as I took it in I shivered, a thin film of tears welling in my eyes. Did I really have less than ten years to live? 

I wasn’t thinking about cancer, a car accident, suicide or nuclear war. I was thinking about artificial intelligence. The emergence of an AI-­saturated world had long been etched into my map of the future, but I’d previously felt insulated from this possibility by the buffer of a couple of decades.