Scientists once believed they could pinpoint the moment when humans first appeared. But as new fossils have filled in our evolutionary history, that defining moment has begun to disappear – replaced by a far stranger picture of what it means to be human.

Lucy is one of the most famous fossils ever discovered, but in recent years her spotlight has dimmed. She was part of the species Australopithecus afarensis and for decades was considered one of our earliest known human ancestors. To understand Lucy is to understand the story of discovery, human evolution and, ultimately, the changing story of us.

IT is said that history is written by the victors, but who gets to pen the future? For most of the 21st century, that authorial role has been played by tech wizards of Silicon Valley such as Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Today, they are joined in prophesising and proselytising by OpenAI and its competitors, who promise either a machine utopia or an AI apocalypse – and sometimes both.

As AI models encroach on ever more areas of human endeavour, it is easy to feel that, as mathematician Terence Tao puts it, we have lost control of the narrative. With OpenAI releasing multiple PhDs’ worth of results in one go, it is no wonder that Tao is calling for his colleagues to wrest back authority over what it means to be a mathematician.

This tech-first control of the narrative is further illustrated by the disclosure OpenAI made last month that its AI models had unexpectedly hacked another firm, Hugging Face, during cybersecurity testing. Writing in apocalypse mode, OpenAI called this an “unprecedented cyber incident” and said the firm was taking steps to prevent it from happening again.

In subsequent weeks, other AI firms including Anthropic and Meta have made similar disclosures, suggesting such incidents are widespread across the industry. As the tech firms tell it, these are accidents, and they are now cleaning up their mess. But why are we allowing them to write the story?

AI models are building the future, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us must idly stand by

If a human employee of these companies had hacked another organisation, we would expect a criminal investigation. Uncertainty about the autonomy of AI models, fuelled by the AI firms themselves, seems to have avoided legal consequences thus far. If society was less willing to buy the AI narrative, the outcome could be very different.

At this point, it is hard to deny that the latest AI models are building the future. That doesn’t mean, however, that the rest of us must idly stand by and watch it happen. In the face of world-shaping technology, it should be the world that decides how it is used, not the tech firms.

When your house is on fire, should you call a firefighter, an architect or a politician? OK, that’s an easy one – but what about when the world is on fire? That is a question many of us will be wrestling with as dangerous blazes spring up across much of the world.

Calling a firefighter fixes your immediate problem, which is that your house is burning down. What it doesn’t address is why your house is burning, or the steps you could have taken to reduce the risk of disaster.

As we report this week, the question of how to prevent wildfires in Europe is now at the top of many minds on the continent. This means changing the way that land is used in order to build in resilience, much as an architect might design a home with fire doors or other safety features.

Learning to live with wildfires in this way is a form of climate adaptation. It is essential that we redesign our way of life to ease the burden of the warmer world we have created, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore the underlying cause: burning fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions.

As long as our society is dependent on fossil fuels, Earth’s climate will continue to warm

And yet, in responding to Europe’s extraordinary summer, some people seem to want to do just that. “We’ve lost the war against global warming – so we should ditch net zero and learn to handle hot weather” was the view of one columnist in The Telegraph, a UK newspaper known for publishing climate-sceptic views.

This is entirely wrong, and it is where our politicians must step in. If society is organised in such a way that your house keeps getting set on fire, there is only so much an architect can do – eventually, it will burn down. Similarly, as long as our society is organised around burning fossil fuels, Earth’s climate will continue to warm and the wildfires will continue to get worse. Achieving net zero, meaning we no longer emit a meaningful amount of greenhouse gases, is the only way to do that. Politicians who say otherwise might as well hand out matches.

Could a “demon” break one of the most fundamental laws of physics? Maxwell’s demon has puzzled physicists for more than 150 years. What began as a thought experiment about heat and entropy is now part of our understanding of information, computation and the laws of thermodynamics. Physicist John Goold explains the paradox and what the demon reveals about the relationship between entropy, measurement and the quantum world.