Eliezer Yudkowsky, a 44-year-old academic wearing a grey polo shirt, rocks slowly on his office chair and explains with real patience – taking things slowly for a novice like me – that every single person we know and love will soon be dead. They will be murdered by rebellious self-aware machines. "The difficulty is, people do not realise," Yudkowsky says mildly, maybe sounding just a bit frustrated, as if irritated by a neighbour's leaf blower or let down by the last pages of a novel. "We have a shred of a chance that humanity survives." I have set out to meet and talk to a small but growing band of luddites, doomsayers, disruptors and other AI-era sceptics who see only the bad in the way our spyware-steeped, infinitely doomscrolling world is tending. I want to find out why these techno-pessimists think the way they do. I want to know how they would render change. Out of all of those I speak to, Yudkowsky is the most pessimistic, the least convinced that civilisation has a hope.

This article is adapted from Oversharing, a newsletter about the sharing economy. Self-driving cars have met their match in the form of the humble traffic cone. If you're on TikTok, you may have seen what I'm talking about: a viral video of San Francisco activists disabling autonomous Cruise and Waymo vehicles by placing bright orange traffic cones on their hoods. This content requires consent that you have not granted on Slate. To view this content please visit www.tiktok.com

A group of San Francisco organizers are encouraging people to put traffic cones on the hoods of driverless vehicles as a form of protest against the cars' expansion on city streets. A video of the group's actions with step-by-step instructions on how to disable a robo-taxi with a cone has gone viral on Twitter and sparked intense debates about the pros and cons of autonomous vehicles and the value of protesting in this way. Safe Street Rebel, a group of organizers that advocate for pedestrian safety and reducing the number of cars on roads, are behind this stunt. They hope that it will raise the public's awareness of the potential dangers driverless taxis pose before a pivotal vote by the California public utilities commission set to take place on 13 July. The vote would allow Cruise, a company controlled by the automaker General Motors, and Waymo, a Google spinoff, to charge people for rides as a part of the state's driverless autonomous vehicles passenger service deployment program, according to the meeting agenda.