We have made it – almost – through another year without being churned into paste by a super-intelligent AI, conscripted into a Martian work camp by an insane billionaire or forced offline by a Carrington event. Even in the absence of civilisation-altering events it's been a busy year. But the advantage of a slow week (I hope that isn't tempting fate) is that you can reflect on the past 12 months and realise that, sometimes, there's only a few stories that really matter. The Guardian has confirmed it was hit by a ransomware attack in December and that the personal data of UK staff members has been accessed in the incident. "We believe this was a criminal ransomware attack, and not the specific targeting of the Guardian as a media organisation," said Guardian Media Group's chief executive, Anna Bateson and the Guardian's editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner.

Demis Hassabis says he is not in the "pessimistic" camp about artificial intelligence. But that did not stop the CEO of Google DeepMind signing a statement in May warning that the threat of extinction from AI should be treated as a societal risk comparable to pandemics or nuclear weapons. That uneasy gap between hope and horror, and the desire to bridge it, is a key reason why Rishi Sunak convened next week's global AI safety summit in Bletchley Park, a symbolic choice as the base of the visionary codebreakers – including computing pioneer Alan Turing – who deciphered German communications during the second world war. "I am not in the pessimistic camp about AI obviously, otherwise I wouldn't be working on it," Hassabis tells the Guardian in an interview at Google DeepMind's base in King's Cross, London. "But I'm not in the'there's nothing to see here and nothing to worry about' [camp]. This can go well but we've got to be active about shaping that."

What if AI doesn't fundamentally reshape civilisation? This week, I spoke to Geoffrey Hinton, the English psychologist-turned-computer scientist whose work on neural networks in the 1980s set the stage for the explosion in AI capabilities over the last decade. Hinton wanted to speak to deliver a message to the world: he is afraid of the technology he helped create. You need to imagine something more intelligent than us by the same difference that we're more intelligent than a frog. And it's going to learn from the web, it's going to have read every single book that's ever been written on how to manipulate people, and also seen it in practice." He now thinks the crunch time will come in the next five to 20 years, he says. And I still wouldn't rule out 100 years – it's just that my confidence that this wasn't coming for quite a while has been shaken by the realisation that biological intelligence and digital intelligence are very different, and digital intelligence is probably much better."

The first thing Geoffrey Hinton says when we start talking, and the last thing he repeats before I turn off my recorder, is that he left Google, his employer of the past decade, on good terms. "I have no objection to what Google has done or is doing, but obviously the media would love to spin me as'a disgruntled Google employee'. It's an important clarification to make, because it's easy to conclude the opposite. After all, when most people calmly describe their former employer as being one of a small group of companies charting a course that is alarmingly likely to wipe out humanity itself, they do so with a sense of opprobrium. But to listen to Hinton, we're about to sleepwalk towards an existential threat to civilisation without anyone involved acting maliciously at all. Known as one of three "godfathers of AI", in 2018 Hinton won the ACM Turing award – the Nobel prize of computer scientists for his work on "deep learning". A cognitive psychologist and computer scientist by training, he wasn't motivated by a desire to radically improve technology: instead, it was to understand more about ourselves. "For the last 50 years, I've been trying to make computer models that can learn stuff a bit like the way the brain learns it, in order to understand better how the brain is learning things," he tells me when we meet in his sister's house in north London, where he is staying (he usually resides in Canada). Looming slightly over me – he prefers to talk standing up, he says – the tone is uncannily reminiscent of a university tutorial, as the 75-year-old former professor explains his research history, and how it has inescapably led him to the conclusion that we may be doomed. In trying to model how the human brain works, Hinton found himself one of the leaders in the field of "neural networking", an approach to building computer systems that can learn from data and experience. Until recently, neural nets were a curiosity, requiring vast computer power to perform simple tasks worse than other approaches. But in the last decade, as the availability of processing power and vast datasets has exploded, the approach Hinton pioneered has ended up at the centre of a technological revolution. "In trying to think about how the brain could implement the algorithm behind all these models, I decided that maybe it can't – and maybe these big models are actually much better than the brain," he says. A "biological intelligence" such as ours, he says, has advantages. It runs at low power, "just 30 watts, even when you're thinking", and "every brain is a bit different". That means we learn by mimicking others. But that approach is "very inefficient" in terms of information transfer. Digital intelligences, by contrast, have an enormous advantage: it's trivial to share information between multiple copies. "You pay an enormous cost in terms of energy, but when one of them learns something, all of them know it, and you can easily store more copies.

One of the world's foremost architects of artificial intelligence warned Wednesday that unexpectedly rapid advances in AI – including its ability to learn simple reasoning – suggest it could someday take over the world and push humanity toward extinction. Geoffrey Hinton, the renowned researcher and "Godfather of AI," quit his high-profile job at Google recently so he could speak freely about the serious risks that he now believes may accompany the artificial intelligence technology he helped ushered in, including user-friendly applications like ChatGPT. Hinton, 75, gave his first public remarks about his concerns at the MIT Technology Review's AI conference. His comments appeared to rattle the audience of some of the nation's top tech creators and AI developers. Asked by the panel's moderator what was the "worst case scenario that you think is conceivable," Hinton replied without hesitation.

The man often touted as the godfather of artificial intelligence will be responding to requests for help from Bernie Sanders, Elon Musk and the White House, he says, just days after quitting Google to warn the world about the risk of digital intelligence. Dr Geoffrey Hinton, 75, won computer science's highest honour, the Turing award, in 2018 for his work on "deep learning", along with Meta's Yann Lecun and the University of Montreal's Yoshua Bengio. The technology, which now underpins the AI revolution, came about as a result of Hinton's efforts to understand the human brain – efforts which convinced him that digital brains might be about to supersede biological ones. But the London-born psychologist and computer scientist might not offer the advice the powerful want to hear. "The US government inevitably has a lot of concerns around national security. And I tend to disagree with them," he told the Guardian.

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Customer acquisition and retention remain the essential drivers of insurance revenue and profit. However, knowing how to create experiences to acquire and keep customers happy remains challenging. What Fintechs did in consumer banking, InsureTechs are doing to transform insurance customer experiences through smart mobile apps, integrating the phone's camera as an input channel, and collecting data to target personalized offerings. Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies show a lot of promise in transforming customer acquisition and retention, yet it is all too easy to assume that better technologies can, in themselves, transform customer experience. What's missing in these discussions is the human factor in the use of AI technologies: how AI tools can effect change in customer experience and operational excellence by focusing on the interactions of people, process and content.

As part of Lufthansa's ongoing global #SayYesToTheWorld brand campaign, it has become the first airline to launch a Watson Ads campaign, joining other brands such as Lego, Behr Paint, State Farm, Best Western, and TruGreen Lufthansa's AI-powered ad helps consumers plan their next international adventure in Europe, showcasing a specific location and helping a consumer explore the city by providing local travel facts, and tailored image galleries or videos. The campaign, which will run from 10/1 - 11/25, will help Lufthansa to discover new insights about consumers and their travel planning needs, which can inform future marketing efforts. The AI-powered ad is available to US consumers on weather.com, Featured cities include: Athens, Barcelona, Berlin, Budapest, Copenhagen, Florence, Frankfurt, Krakow, Milan, Munich, Oslo, Paris, Prague, Rome, and Stockholm. The campaign focuses on exploring a world of new possibilities and saying yes to the unknown. The interactive ads, powered by IBM Watson, provides consumers with the opportunity to interact with Lufthansa for general airline questions and for travel content across 15 European destinations.

China is moving towards merging AI with humans, and the United States Defense Intelligence Agency sees this as a major concern for the future of warfare. Lt. General Ashley begins his talk at 32:20 in the above video by the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service Speaking at the Association of the United States Army annual meeting on October 8, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Director Lieutenant General Robert P. Ashley, Jr. said that one of the biggest decisions that the United States military will have to make is how to deal with the "integration of humans and machines" that China is pursuing. "China is progressively pursuing a 2025 strategy where they want to be the main driver of AI, not only for their economic but for their industrial transformation," said Ashley. "Whoever leads in AI will rule the world." "The character of war is constantly changing, and we see AI as we see some of these disruptive technologies that continue to change the character of war -- the complexity and the speed of human interaction. Our task is to understand how they operate," said the DIA director.