SCIENCE

Confronting AI, nature's sentience and our own end

- Anjana Ahuja

This felt like the year that AI really arrived. But the unchecked rush to go faster and further could extinguish humanity, according to the chillingly plausible If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, by computer scientists Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, which argues against creating superintelligent AI able to cognitively outpace Homo sapiens. Not exactly cheery Christmas reading, but you'll finally grasp tech bro lingo about tokens, weights and maximising preferences.

Human extinction is not a new idea, muses historian Sadiah Qureshi in Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction.

Colonial expansion and the persecution of Indigenous peoples implicitly relied on Darwinian theories about some species being fated to outcompete others. Extinction, she points out, is a concept entwined with politics and social justice.

The idea of the landscape, as well as people, having rights is explored by Robert Macfarlane in the immersive and important Is a River Alive?. By telling the stories of three rivers under threat, he floats a thesis that is both ancient and radical: that rivers deserve the recognition and legal protections of living beings. The book "was written with the rivers who flow through its pages", he declares, using pronouns that wash away any doubt as to his passion for the cause.