Intellectually, I have become deeply convinced that the importance of AI is, if anything, underhyped. The sorry attempts to pretend we don’t stand at the precipice of a technological, economic, social and cultural revolution are little more than cope. In theory, I have little patience for the denialism about the impact of artificial intelligence which now pervades much of the public discourse.

But if there is one thing I have learned in my writing career so far, it is that it eventually becomes untenable to bury your head in the sand. For an astonishingly long period of time, you can pretend that democracy in countries like the United States is safe from far-right demagogues or that wokeness is a coherent political philosophy or that financial bubbles are just a figment of pessimists’ imagination; but at some point the edifice comes crashing down. And the sooner we all muster the courage to grapple with the inevitable, the higher our chances of being prepared when the clock strikes midnight.