In 1968, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich opened his book The Population Bomb with a sentence that still makes me wince: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over." In the 1970s, he predicted, "hundreds of millions of people will starve to death", no matter what crash programmes we launched.
Instead came the Green Revolution, and between 1960 and 2005 the yields of major cereal crops more than doubled while real food prices fell by over 50%. Yet when a New York Times documentary series asked him about the book in 2015, Ehrlich, who died in March at 93, replied: "My language would be even more apocalyptic today."
I can't help but feel we are watching the same film again, except that this time the bomb is AI. And here's the kicker: the people who understand it best are far less frightened of it than the rest of us.
