Elon Musk v OpenAI: tech giants are inciting existential fears to evade scrutiny Kenan Malik

In 1914, on the eve of the First World War, HG Wells published a novel about the possibilities of an even greater conflagration. The World Set Free imagines, 30 years before the Manhattan Project, the creation of atomic weapons that allow "a man [to] carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city". It takes the "establishment of a world government" to bring about peace. What concerned Wells was not simply the perils of a new technology, it was also the dangers of democracy. Wells' world government was not created through democratic will but imposed as a benign dictatorship.