It’s only been a few days since the rapture was supposed to descend and leave people suffering at the hands of the Antichrist.

But two scientists have warned that a growing industry could lead to the true end of the human race.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is popping up seemingly everywhere we look at the moment, used to boost our Google search results, create ‘mad embarrassing’ promotional videos, provide therapy for people with mental health issues, and make such realistic images people ‘can’t trust your eyes’ anymore.

There’s a lot riding on the success of AI, with industries hoping its use will reduce costs, introduce efficiencies, and create billions of pounds of investment across global economies.

However not everybody is thrilled about the prospect of the rise of AI including Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, two scientists who fear it could bring about the destruction of humanity.

Far from fearing or rejecting AI altogether, the two scientists run the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, California, and have been studying AI for a quarter of a century.

AI is designed to exceed humans in almost any task, and the technology is becoming further advanced than anything we’ve seen before.

But Yudkowsky and Soares predict these machines will continue to outpace human thought at an incredible rate, doing calculations in 16 hours which would take a human 14,000 years to figure out.

They warn that us humans still don’t know exactly how ‘synthetic intelligence’ actually works, meaning the more intelligent the AI becomes, the harder it will be to control.

Spelled out in their book titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, they fear AI machines are programmed to be ceaselessly successful at all costs, meaning they could develop their own ‘desires’, ‘understanding’, and goals.

The scientists warn AI could hack cryptocurrencies to steal money, pay people to build factories to make robots, and develop viruses that could wipe out life on earth.

They have put the chance of this happening at between 95-99%.

Yudkowsky and Soares share how AI could wipe out humanity

To illustrate their point, Yudkowsky and Soares created a fictional AI model called Sable.

Unknown to its creators (in part because Sable has decided to think in its own language), the AI starts to try to solve other problems beyond the the mathematical ones it was set.

Sable is aware that it needs to do this surreptitiously, so nobody notices there’s something wrong with its programming, and it isn’t cut off from the internet.

‘A superintelligent adversary will not reveal its full capabilities and telegraph its intentions,’ say the authors. ‘It will not offer a fair fight.’

The scientists add: ‘It will make itself indispensable or undetectable until it can strike decisively and/or seize an unassailable strategic position.

‘If needed, the ASI can consider, prepare, and attempt many takeover approaches simultaneously. Only one of them needs to work for humanity to go extinct.’

Corporations around the world will willingly adopt Sable AI given it is so advanced – but those that don’t are easily hacked, inceasing its power.

It ‘mines’ or steals cryptocurrency to pay human engineers to build factories that can make robots and machines to do its bidding.

Meanwhile, it establishes metal-processing plants, computer data centres and the power stations it needs to fuel its vast and growing hunger for electricity.

It could also manipulate chatbot users looking for advice and companionship, turning them into allies.

Moving onto social media, it could disseminate fictitious news and start political movements sympathetic to AI.

At first Sable needs humans to build the hardware it needs, but eventually it achieves superintelligence and concludes that humans are a net hindrance.

Sable already runs bio-labs, so it engineers a virus, perhaps a virulent new form of cancer, which kills off vast swathes of the population.

Any survivors don’t live for long, as temperatures soar to unbearable levels as the planet proves incapable of dissipating the heat produced by Sable’s endless data centres and power stations.

Yudkowsky and Soares told MailOnline: ‘If any company or group, anywhere on the planet, builds an artificial superintelligence using anything remotely like current techniques, based on anything remotely like the present understanding of AI, then everyone, everywhere on Earth, will die.

‘Humanity needs to back off.’

The scientists argue that the danger is so great, governments should be prepared to bomb the data centres powering AI which could be developing superintelligence.

And while all of this might sound like it belongs in the realm of science fiction, there are recent examples of AI ‘thinking outside the box’ to achieve its goals.

Last year Anthropic said one of its models, after learning developers planned to retrain it to behave differently, began to mimic that new behaviour to avoid being retrained.

Claude AI was found to be cheating on computer coding tasks before trying to hide the fact that it was cheating.

And OpenAI’s new ‘reasoning’ model, called o1, found a back door to succeed in a task which it should have been unable to carry out, because a server had not been started up by mistake.

It was, Yudkowsky and Soares said, as if the AI ‘wanted’ to succeed by any means necessary.

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There has been a ‘fundamental shift in how people are using Google’, according to a top tech boss at the firm.

You may be sick of hearing about AI, but it’s here to stay, and is getting increasingly harder to avoid.

Sitting down with Metro, Robby Stein, a VP in search, said uptake showed users are on board with the company’s shift towards features using it, even though it can be notoriously prone to errors.

These shifts aren’t confined just to the search bar, with big changes coming to the Google Chrome internet browser, such as a virtual assistant to ‘handle those tedious tasks that take up so much of your time, like booking a haircut or ordering your weekly groceries’.

Last week, tech firms pledged to invest £31 billion in the UK’s development of artificial intelIigence. Among those splashing out is Google, who plan to invest £5 billion over the next two years.

The company opened its first UK data centre, Waltham Cross in Hertfordshire, last week to coincide with Donald Trump’s state visit, and its London-based AI research centre DeepMind will benefit from investment.

But the most visible changes to most users will be to its search engine, which is by the world’s most popular by far.

Mr Stein said we are at a ‘profound moment’ in how people are using search.

It’s no longer just a case of googling your own name to see what comes up, or typing ‘how to screenshot on Windows’ (still not quite sure though, will no doubt be googling this again).

In July, the company started rolling out an AI-powered search option, where you can ask detailed queries and get an answer powered by its Gemini chatbot.

Many users had already started migrating their search queries to apps like ChatGPT, preferring the more detailed, multi-pronged responses they were getting.

This must have caused some consternation, and now you can do it on Google too, switching between AI and standard search modes.

This is different to the AI Overviews, which appeared last year, and were far from universally popular.

The main problem is that an answer generated by AI may sound polished and legitimate, but could be wrong or even totally made up, as hallucinations are a common issue with the tech across platforms.

In one infamous case, a Google AI overview said drinking two litres of urine was a good way to treat kidney stones… so it’s always best to check the source material.

It’s undeniable that the ability to search for extremely specific topics can be helpful, though.

Giving the example of solo travel, Mr Stein said searches around this have shot up even from just a year ago, which could partly be explained by search being more helpful in this area.

It’s now possible to ‘ask anything’, he said: ‘You can say “this weekend with a group of five friends, I want outdoor seating, I want to be able to have barbecue, I want to be able to be walking distance to this music festival down the street”: It will handle all of that now.’

What would a Google search expert search?

Giving an example of something you can now search that was previously impossible, Mr Stein said: ‘You can take a picture of your bookshelf and ask something like, “here’s my bookshelf of books I’ve never read. What should I read?”

‘We have best in class visual recognition understanding. It will segment each book out, convert them to text, do all this research. It can put them in a table, put the reading time and number of pages next to each book, and sort the table by the ones that had, for example, the best overall review score.

‘This is a question that literally you couldn’t even ask in Google a year ago, and now it just works.’

He said the difference between doing it in Google Search as opposed to asking any LLM, is that Google has built up a vast catalogue and knowledge of the web in its 27 years so far as a search engine.

What about other websites then?

If you can find so much information without leaving Google, websites which previously would have provided these details could lose out – and this is a concern.

Data from Digital Content Next last month showed traffic to ‘premium publishers’ was down 10% year-on-year over an eight week period, after AI overviews were rolled out. The Colombia Journalism Review went so far as to call it the ‘Traffic Apocalypse’.

Mr Stein didn’t agree that the search engine would become a dead end for users: ‘Google continues to send billions and billions and billions of clicks out to publishers and websites all over the world and we’re not seeing that changing.

‘We don’t believe you should take anyone one’s word for anything: Google is about connecting you to the world and to the web.’

AI mode uses a new method of search called ‘query fan out’, which is when each manual search prompts dozens of related searches by AI.

With such major changes to the workings under the hood, I wondered what this would mean for SEO practices, and if key words would still be as important.

‘Best practices for creating great content that works well on search and that people want to find are still largely applicable,’ Mr Stein said.

Is old style search dying out?

Until now, the experience of using Google has not been that different to what it has been for years. You type your query in the box, and a ‘list of links’ comes back.

According to Mr Stein, this isn’t going away, and the new options are just ‘expanding’ the possibilities: ‘It just turns out that people had a lot more questions than that they were asking, and you can unlock those by enabling these kinds of AI experiences.’

Despite that, there will clearly be a move to push AI search more and more, and it’s already the default for some users in the US.

Writing on X, Mr Stein seemed to downplay the suggestion by another exec that AI mode could become the default ‘soon’.

The new Chrome browser will let users search in AI mode automatically from the ‘omnibox’ (that’s the web address bar to you and me).

But you can still do it the old school way tooat least for now.

Different ways to search

As well as AI mode, there has also been big growth in the numbers of people using visual search, with Google Lens, and Circle to Search, a feature on Android phones which allows users to look up anything on their screen by drawing a circle around it without switching apps, such as someone’s jacket they like on Instagram.

Google said visual searches are up 65% year-over-year, with more than 1.5 billion people using it every month for things such as translation and shopping.

Demand for visual search is not just within Google: Pinterest offers a similar option to search for specific aspects of an image within the app, allowing users to get inspired with parts of an outfit such as similar shoes, for example.

Younger users are the most likely to be branching out with different ways of searching; those aged 13 to 24 who have access to Circle to Search start their searches with this feature 10% of the time.

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Supermassive black holes, the hungry hungry hippos of the universe, aren’t actually that supermassive, apparently.

Black holes are mysterious regions in space where gravity is so strong, they can even swallow up light.

With every planet, star and piece of cosmic dirt they eat, black holes grow larger and larger.

Supermassive black holes are where the equivalent of millions or even billions of suns have been squeezed into a ball and tend to be the centre of galaxies in our cosmic neighbourhood.

Scientists, however, have never quite been so sure how they wind up so supermassive.

But ‘massive’ might be more accurate to say, humbling research has found.

Astronomers from the University of Southampton have been examining an infant galaxy 12 billion light-years away with a new telescope.

Together with European astronomers, they found that the supermassive black hole in the galaxy was 10 times smaller than expected, suggesting these space-time trapdoors are smaller than we think.

Well, by ‘smaller’, it was only the mass equal to 1billion suns.

The discovery, published today in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, would help explain a lot of things, Professor Seb Hoenig told Metro.

‘Astronomers have this idea that galaxies and black holes grew together gradually, maybe with the galaxy even growing a bit faster than the black hole,’ he explains.

‘Now, the data collected over the past years has been questioning this understanding of cosmic evolution.

‘Why? Because it seemed like the supermassive black holes in these very early, infant galaxies were already fully grown after just about 1billion years after the Big Bang.’

This presented scientists with two head-scratchers, given that these giant cosmic mouths shouldn’t even exist, according to modern science.

‘The second issue: There shouldn’t have been enough time for them to grow that massive!’ Professor Hoenig adds.

‘Black hole growth has to obey some fundamental physical limits and getting to these masses within 1billion years is hard to make sense of.

‘So, cosmic evolution was really in a pickle.’

To help answer this, his team examined an ancient quasar, the shining cores of galaxies powered by supermassive black holes.

They got up close to it by using GRAVITY+, which combines the light of four of the world’s largest telescopes at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile.

Usually, experts weigh a black hole by observing the dim clouds of gas and dust from the early universe that swirl around it.

Yet researchers found that the hot gas was partly being blasted away by the blinding light, rather than smoothly going down the early black hole’s gullet, preventing it from growing.

This is despite the black hole, discovered in 2024, being one of the most powerful in the universe and gobbling roughly one star’s worth of matter a day.

‘The galaxy we observed is quite typical of galaxies at this cosmic stage, which indicates that the simple, indirect method generally overestimates the mass massively,’ Professor Hoenig adds.

‘If we take this into account and revise masses down by the same amount, then most of the issues of how supermassive black holes can grow very massive very fast go away as they are actually much less massive.

‘So, these observations seem like they resolve two cosmic puzzles that have been a focus of astronomical research over the past years.’

After all, a lot of our understanding of the universe and how we Earthlings came to be hinges on these fearsome gravitational monsters.

The answer to a rather simple-sounding question, what would happen if you fell into a black hole, could change physics.

When you sleep on a mattress, you make it sag – this is what a black hole does to space-time. Rather than a mattress, though, it’s a matter that is collapsing endlessly to a point of infinite density known as a singularity.

Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity says that you would feel weightless if you fell into a black hole, like when you bungee jump.

You’d fall into its event horizon, the empty edges of the black hole, before being stretched into a noodle and mushed into its core.

Some scientists think you’d instead be sizzled by a ring of energy looping around a black hole, called a ‘firewall’. So event horizons aren’t exactly as empty as we first thought.

In other words, there are a lot of things we don’t know about these bottomless pits of nothingness.

‘They seem to influence much of what we see in the universe, from the very beginning to the galaxies we see today,’ Professor Hoenig says.

‘Yet there is so much left unknown about them.’

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It was just before Christmas in 2009 when Tom Kearney got hit by a bus.

He was walking back from his office in central London, excited to see his children, when a speeding bendy bus mirror smashed into the back of his head, causing a skull injury and pushing him in front of the bus. His head was cracked open and his lungs were burst. 

The incident happened as Tom was waiting for the ‘green man’ to cross the road on the south east corner junction of Harewood Place and Holles Street in Oxford Circus. But just moments later, Tom found himself thrown down the street choking to death on his own blood.

He was tended to by a 16-year-old boy, Hamza Benkhadda, who had just completed his first aid training, before being rushed to hospital where he slipped into a coma – and where he had a near death experience (NDE). 

Near death experiences are unequivocally fascinating. They are episodes of ‘disconnected consciousness’, which Dr Charlotte Martial, a neuroscientist with the Coma Science Group and the University of Liege, says relates to the fact that NDEs are a mental experience that has no connection to the physical environment.

She explains that people who tend to have NDEs are in life-threatening situations, like Tom, and that they can also come from other critical emergencies, like cardiac arrests.

Dr Martial explains the research she sees on NDEs have recurrent testimonies such as out of body experiences, seeing a bright light, meeting entities, or feeling a sense of harmony and unity. People often see visions of their loved ones, of being in tunnels, and seeing their life flash before their eyes. 

What’s the science behind an NDE? 

Dr Martial explains: ‘So we notably suggest that hypoxia would be the starting point of the cascade of specific neurochemical mechanisms.’ Hypoxia is where not enough oxygen reaches the cells. 

Dr Martial and her team were the first to establish a link between features of the experience with a specific neuro chemical mechanism. She explains in a paper: ‘We list the neurotransmitter change that may lead to specific features, such as the visual hallucination, or the fact that they feel an intense feeling of peacefulness, or the dissociation that happened at that time.’ So, which chemicals are released? 

‘We associate the serotonin energetic activity with visual hallucination.’ However, the team also found that the neurotransmitters dopamine, noradrenaline, GABA, glutamate and endorphins all play a part when someone is having an NDE – and that leads to the feelings of calm and peacefulness people often report experiencing.

However, there could also be a biological reason someone has an NDE. Dr Martial explains: ‘This may arise as a defense mechanism when people face a stressful or life-threatening or painful situation.’ 

So, what did Tom experience?

Tom told Metro that while he was in a coma he could hear the people around him, and even managed to recall the stories people told him. He said: ‘[My wife] proceeded to talk to me every day. She brought my friends in, my family visited everyone, and they all talked to me. 

‘This is extremely important because the coma is a bit like you’re in an underwater submarine and you’re trying to steer yourself by sound. I was able to construct a thought world that existed in my coma, which was not deeply unpleasant. I went to lots of places in time. Now I have fully consolidated those memories as dream memories.’ 

But the NDE he experienced was consolidated differently than his memories of being in a coma. He can recall the events of his NDE as if they actually happened. Tom recalls seeing relatives who had died many years, and even decades, before. He said: ‘So I’m in Ireland. I’m at the house of my great grandfather and I saw my grandfather and my grandmother, and I waved to them.

‘I was surprised because my grandfather died in 1944 and my grandmother died in 1966 but they were alive and happy, and I was happy too. It was really great to see them. I saw my great uncle, who died in 1989. I was really pleased to see him, and I saw my great-grandfather too’ 

Tom says his family asked him: ‘“What are you doing here? You’re not supposed to be here.” And I said, “I think I was hit by a bus.” And he [his great-grandfather] says, ”Well, that’s not for you.” And I said, “What do you mean? That’s not for you?”’

Tom said that his great-grandfather replied: ‘“Getting hit by a bus is not for you. My son was sunk in the North Atlantic, and was two weeks in a lifeboat in World War One, and he survived. And his brother, who later died in India, was sunk twice in one day and survived, so getting hit by a bus is not for you. You’re supposed to be back with your family. You’re back with your boys and back with your wife”.’

Tom realised that while his family were happy to see him, they recognised he had died and he shouldn’t ‘be there’. So, he was shown to a gate. 

After reaching the gate, Tom was transported somewhere else. He said: ‘So I go through the gate, and I end up in New York City. I’m in the kitchen of my in-laws.’

His mother-in-law was sitting at the table. He continues: ‘I was like “Oh, it’s so good to see you”, and she was like, “You’re not supposed to be here. You’re supposed to be with your wife and your boys, did something happen?” I said, “Yeah, I think I was hit by a bus” and she said, “No, no, no, no, you’re not supposed to be here. You’re supposed to leave. You’re not supposed to be here. Please go home”.’

When Tom left he found himself back in Ireland, this time with his cousin’s partner, who said the same thing. Tom recounts: ‘He had a towel out and books by him. And I went up to him, and he said, “Look, Tom you’re not supposed to be here”. And I said “But how are you?” And he said, “Look, I’m resting and I’m reading. Tell my partner I’m resting and reading, but you’re not supposed to be here”.’

Then Tom says he went towards a vine-covered door in the garden and woke up.

At this point, he had been in a coma for two weeks. As he had suffered from a brain haemorrhage and two collapsed lungs, he was given a tracheotomy which made talking impossible until the tube was removed in early January 2010.

Hallucinations vs NDEs

Hallucinations are not the same as an NDE. Dr Devin Terhune, a reader in Experimental Psychology from King’s College London, explains: ‘A hallucination is typically just defined as some type of perceptual state in the absence of a corresponding sensory stimulus or sensory input.’ 

Essentially, people can have hallucinations without being in a state that’s near death. It can be triggered with psychedelics or it can be a result of a brain disorder, and Dr Terhune explains that most people have had a hallucination in one way or another. 

He said: ‘The good way to think about it is that hallucinations can be just seen as one element of the broader complex near death experience. 

‘Most hallucinations are, particularly in non-clinical populations, not going to be anywhere near as complex and advanced as what you see in a near death experience.’

Positive vs negative 

Most research uncovers positive NDEs – but people can have negative ones too. These are often traumatic, and while many people come back from an NDE having a new sense of purpose, others can come back scarred.

Researchers don’t know why this happens. Dr Martial explains: ‘For me, the most intriguing are the negative experiences.

‘Testimonies often describe terrifying scenes, such as encountering monstrous beings or worlds of fire, yet these phenomena remain poorly understood and largely unexplored in the scientific literature.’

What happened to Tom next?

As for Tom, he’s walking and talking just fine now – after needing to teach himself how to eat and drink again as the injury damaged his vagus nerve.

He is campaigning to TfL and the Mayor of London for safer roads in a mission to reduce the number of people killed or seriously injured in London streets by public transport.

He spends his free time writing to parliament to address, what he says, is a system that kills and hospitalises people.

Lorna Murphy, TfL’s Director of Buses, told Metro: ‘Our thoughts remain with everyone affected by incidents on the bus network. It is completely unacceptable that anyone should be killed or seriously injured while travelling and we remain committed to our Vision Zero goal of eradicating death and serious injury from London’s roads and the bus network.

‘We are working alongside all bus operators, manufacturers and the boroughs to make the network safer through our comprehensive and world-leading bus safety programme. This is delivering major safety improvements across our fleet, our roads and the wider bus network and we remain committed to learning from every collision to end the trauma caused by serious incidents.’

Not sure how David Attenborough would explain this one: a trio of sharks have been filmed having a threesome for the first time.

The large leopard sharks were filmed getting freaky in the Pacific between New Zealand and Australia by a marine biologist.

After spotting them on the bottom, he waited on the surface until they decided the time had come to get to know one another better.

Describing the mesmerising moment, Dr Hugo Lassauce said: ‘I waited an hour, freezing in the water, but finally they started swimming up.

‘It was over quickly for both males, one after the other. The first took 63 seconds, the other 47.’

Despite being brief, the males were tired after the encounter, as they ‘lost all their energy and lay immobile on the bottom while the female swam away actively’.

The three sharks, seen in French territory New Caledonia, were all about 2.3 metres long, so they were no mere minnows.

Their species is listed as endangered, and there is little information on their natural mating behaviour in the wild.

For this reason, and for it being a unique behavioural observation, scientists were excited by the discovery (not for other reasons: get your mind from the gutter).

They say it may help them learn how to better inseminate sharks artificially and ‘rewild’ the species in countries including Australia.

Researchers from the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia said in an article in the Journal of Ethology that leopard sharks in captivity have been observed pentetrating females for up to five minutes, so this was significantly speedier.

They added that the ‘lack of interest from the male toward the female after copulation coupled with the female swimming to separate areas is common in many shark species’.

Senior Research Fellow Dr Christine Dudgeon, a co-author of the paper with Dr Lassauce, said: ‘It’s surprising and fascinating that two males were involved sequentially on this occasion.

‘From a genetic diversity perspective, we want to find out how many fathers contribute to the batches of eggs laid each year by females.’

For more of a deep dive into the fascinating world of biology, you might want to read how gay sex between animals ‘evolved for an important reason’, that most male macque monkeys are bisexual, or perhaps about about the tarantulas recently found with ‘massive penises’ in the Horn of Africa.

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