The Handover by David Runciman review – is the future out of our control?

Back in 2016, a month before the EU referendum, I went along to the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford to interview its director, the Swedish-born philosopher Nick Bostrom, who had just written a book called Superintelligence. The book outlined the existential risk to democracy and humanity implied by advances in machine learning. Bostrom's institute, which sought to weigh the apocalyptic potential of various humanity-threatening forces, had just been given a £1m grant by Elon Musk. If I think about that encounter, I remember three things. The first was that when I arrived a bed was being delivered to the institute, cementing the belief that anxiety about impending catastrophe was, these days, a 24/7 kind of occupation.