We greet the news that AI could extinguish us with a glazed indifference. What is the way out of this nihilism?

‘Flourishing is having a direct relationship with the natural world – not the world through a screen, or the natural world itself destroyed and degraded to create more capacity for screen-based existence.’ Photograph: Martyn Williams/Alamy

Imagining the future as almost entirely bleak has somehow crept into the collective consciousness this year.

Last week I was having coffee with an old friend. He was telling me about what his kids wanted to study when they went to university, when he suddenly broke off, stared into the middle distance and said, “I wish I’d never had children.”