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Sometimes in journalism, the act of day in, day out reporting of events.

It is so easy to get distracted to miss the wood for the trees.

To get lost in the latest tweet, the latest here today, gone tomorrow fiasco, the most recent bit of noise.

We can be very bad, by contrast, at seeing, at talking about, reporting on the trends which historians will one day say were the defining

elements of our age. AI, the coming wave of artificial intelligence married with robotics,

is our printing press, our steam engine, our atomic bomb, our generation's singular contribution to humanity's development.

In fact, it could be if you believe some theorists the last thing humanity ever does.

A couple of weeks ago, I attended AI4, the world's biggest AI conference in Las Vegas.

One of the godfathers of AI tech, Sir Geoffrey Hinton, was the keynote speaker.

Here what he had to say about the precipice our race might now stand upon.

We've somehow got to be stronger than men.

We've got to be don't want them, and they've got to be submissive. That's not going to work. They're going to be much smarter than us. Think about that.

We may be about to invent technology, AGI, artificial, general intelligence, which is cleverer

than us, which at a stroke denudes the one advantage our race has had from the beginning,

that we can outwit everything else around us in this world, even when they're stronger than us.

It's why the guerrillas are in the zoo, and you're listening to this.

We hear endless trite conversations in normal media about AI.

AI doctors and nurses, the site of robot dogs. It all feels a bit distant and a bit small somehow.

But this story could not be bigger, politically, economically, philosophically,

changing what it is to be human, changing our relationship with the

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