Together, we can all take a stand. If we don’t, our children and grandchildren will not be visiting public libraries to seek out battered old paperbacks containing human-produced magic. They will be listening to AIs reading them AI-created stories through their neuralink brain chips.

Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.
—Marshall McLuhan

When I was a child, I didn’t know any writers. Neither did my parents. I didn’t grow up in that kind of world. Before I was a teenager, I’m not sure I knew anyone who had been to a university, even; not that I was paying much attention anyway. I didn’t think those places were for the likes of us.

I was a reader though, thanks to my mum and dad. My mum used to read to me every night when I was young, and both my parents encouraged my love of books, which they shared. We didn’t live in the kind (or the size) of house that had a lot of bookshelves in it, but the public library solved that problem. Like most bookworms, I worked my way through it, discovering whole worlds I had never imagined were out there, both real and fantastical, and sometimes both at once.

This was in the suburbs of Greater London back in the seventies and eighties, which now seems like a very long time ago indeed. No personal computers, no mobile phones, no CCTV cameras, no 5G towers, obviously no Internet. Back then, our analogue tech was confined to buildings, and when you went out you were out. People looked at each other in cafes, and talked on buses. Books and the telly were where you got your stories from. Often the telly had got them from the books first.

Maybe the book was the only technology I ever really fell in love with. It is a technology, of course; so are words. Language—languages, since we have so many of them, though fewer than we once did—are one of the key markers of our humanity. We speak, we tell stories, we write the stories down and thus we are able to share them with people we will never meet and who will never meet us, but who will know us in some way by our words. Humans are storytelling animals if we are anything at all. All of our religions begin with stories, and all of our nations and cultures. Our personal biographies are stories we construct. We tell stories by naming everything else that lives. We tell stories about progress and decline, good and evil, kings and peasants, fairies and ghosts, detectives and serial killers. We sing stories to music, and record them and play them back again and again. We fight over stories, and we send our sons out to die for them.

I never imagined when I was a child that I would or could ever be ‘a writer.’ From where I was reading, in the small front bedroom of our 1930s semi, writers were mythical beings, like wizards or emperors. You knew they were out there somewhere, but you never met them. Still, I dreamed of one day having a book out with my name on. Perhaps if I became really famous, it might even have one of those instantly recognisable little Penguin logos on it, like so many of the paperbacks I read as a child, though this was too much really to hope for.

Well, here I am, four decades on, author of a book with a Penguin logo on—and, indeed, several books bearing the colophon of Faber & Faber, the other publisher which I dreamed (this time as a teenage author of terrible poems) might one day accept me into its hallowed halls. Here I am, and here we all are, but everything has changed, and is about to change further and faster and forever. Stories will keep being told, of course. It’s just that their authors might no longer be human.

I am talking, of course, about the rise of Artificial Intelligence. I have written before—here and in my recent book—about some of the implications of this rise as I see them, and I won’t rehash them now. But if you want a very recent software update, as it were, you could do worse than to refer to the writings of Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic AI. Anthropic is a Silicon Valley corporation dedicated to building intelligent machines, and Amodei has written two interconnected essays about them which are worth reading if you want to understand what is happening, and who is driving it.

The first, written in 2024, is entitled Machines of Loving Grace, and it is a paean to the wonderful, transformed world that AI could bring us. It is long and detailed, and if you swapped out the talk about computers with talk about pistons and steam, it could have been written by H.G. Wells in about 1890. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, you can skip to the conclusion, which informs us that ‘the defeat of most diseases, the growth in biological and cognitive freedom, the lifting of billions of people out of poverty to share in the new technologies [and] a renaissance of liberal democracy and human rights’ are all within our reach. If we can just trust AI systems to do most of our work for us, these things can be achieved—hold your breath—‘within the next 5 to10 years’.

Here in 2026, though, Dario is sounding a more sombre note. He still believes everything he wrote two years ago (or says he does), but two years is a long, long time in the world of AI. So, last month, he wrote a new essay—The Adolescence of Technology—this time taking a detailed look at AI’s possible downsides. His aim is to ‘map out the risks that we are about to face and try to begin making a battle plan to defeat them.’ That’s right: a battle plan. Why, you might ask, do we need to plan for battle against our potential saviours? And why is one of the people who is building them telling us to sharpen our swords? Are we facing a war against the machines already? Have we gone from H. G. Wells to Yevgeny Zamyatin in two short years?

Again, Amodei’s essay is long, but the conclusion is very different. He believes his company may only be a year away from a situation where its AIs are able to build new AIs themselves, autonomously, with no human instruction or intervention. These self-replicating AIs will be ‘smarter than all Nobel prize winners’, and will not be especially motivated to obey the humans around them. This is not a futurist fantasy: his company is already halfway through their construction, and working hard to complete it.

What will the results be? Amodei puts it like this:

Suppose a literal ‘country of geniuses’ were to materialize somewhere in the world in 2027. Imagine, say, 50 million people, all of whom are much more capable than any Nobel Prize winner, statesman, or technologist. The analogy is not perfect, because these geniuses could have an extremely wide range of motivations and behavior, from completely pliant and obedient, to strange and alien in their motivations. But sticking with the analogy for now, suppose you were the national security advisor of a major state, responsible for assessing and responding to the situation. Imagine, further, that because AI systems can operate hundreds of times faster than humans, this ‘country’ is operating with a time advantage relative to all other countries: for every cognitive action we can take, this country can take ten.

Any half-decent national security adviser, suggests Amodei, would advise his boss that they are facing ‘the single most serious national security threat we’ve faced in a century, possibly ever.’

Let’s pause here, and remind ourselves that the man issuing this warning about world-ending machines is currently engaged in building them.

Faced with this kind of thing, it can seem almost irrelevant to worry about the future of storytelling. Who cares about novels if the entire world is about to be consumed by killer machines armed with Nobel Prizes? But this would be to miss something important: Amodei is telling a story. It is the same story that Silicon Valley tells about everything. It is the story of Progress, carried forward by interconnected, and increasingly biologically-embedded, digital technologies. It is the story of how we use our big brains to create bigger brains, which then solve all of our problems. Ultimately, we will become happy immortals living in a world of plenty. There will be no poverty or grief. There will be no death. The Earth will be healed. All we need to do is to trust the machines.

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