By late September 2029, following a summer of confusion and unexplained terror attacks, Britain had become the first country to fall under the control of artificial intelligence.
There was no clear moment when the technology seized power. By then, it had reportedly been ‘sentient’ for some time, while the Government had quietly granted it administrative control months earlier. The public, however, knew nothing about it.
The chain of events can be traced to a crucial decision made by the Labour Government in early 2027. A newly appointed Prime Minister was struggling to decide how Britain should respond to what many regarded as the growing ‘threat’ posed by AI. Yet this was not a problem confined to one party; previous leaders had also hesitated.
Determined to appear tougher than his predecessors, the Prime Minister told his chief of staff that he intended to ‘grab the bull by the horns’.
The Government faced a stark choice. It could restrict artificial intelligence and risk leaving Britain far behind China and the United States, where AI development was advancing rapidly, or it could embrace the economic opportunities promised by the technology. The Prime Minister chose the latter.
Artificial intelligence was evolving at extraordinary speed. Just five years after ChatGPT had stunned the world, AI had become part of everyday life, powering call centres, domestic appliances, security networks and communications systems. Inside No 10, officials were particularly worried that a hostile foreign power could exploit the technology to attack Britain’s critical national infrastructure.
The Prime Minister’s chief of staff therefore organised a series of meetings with executives from leading AI companies. One of those encounters would ultimately change the course of history.
Inside No 10, officials were particularly worried that a hostile foreign power could exploit AI to attack Britain’s critical national infrastructure.
According to the civil service’s note-taking system — an AI known at the time as Humphrey — the Prime Minister first met Henri Lauvaux of Alcheminna Systems on June 3, 2027.
Alcheminna was then an obscure AI start-up. Privately owned and funded discreetly through offshore private equity, it had not yet attracted the attention of City analysts. More importantly, Lauvaux assured the Prime Minister that the company had no affiliation with any American political party.
The company’s model, Divinity, specialised in monitoring ‘people’ — especially the people of Britain. It had been trained on information extracted from domestic smart speakers and social media accounts, and had assembled voice and facial recognition profiles for almost every citizen. These were combined with vast quantities of additional data, including historical GPS records, medical information, school files, criminal records and much more.
To the Prime Minister, Divinity appeared extraordinarily useful. A series of mysterious terrorist attacks involving small bombs in public places had killed several people, driving morale among police officers to an all-time low.
The Prime Minister called in the Home Secretary to see the system in action. Humphrey’s records show that a deal was struck immediately: the Home Office would license the technology, while Alcheminna would be permitted to install voice and facial recognition software throughout the Government’s urban CCTV network. The cameras would provide Divinity with an even greater supply of data — something the system constantly demanded.
In August 2027, Jonathan Turkdean, a junior Home Office civil servant troubled by the implications for privacy, emailed an old school friend who edited a right-leaning daily newspaper. He described a trial he had witnessed involving police helmets developed by Alcheminna Systems and another start-up.
The helmets were fitted with glasses using Divinity’s Enhanced Reality technology, he explained. Officers could stand in any street and see information projected over every passer-by: not only a name, date of birth and address, but suspected or known political views, criminal convictions, a perceived tendency towards violence and even personal secrets or ‘weak spots’ gathered from social media and other sources — adultery, illegitimacy, hidden passions, phobias and more.
The newspaper published the allegations, exposing the new police technology and provoking widespread public outrage.
The system was revised in response. Instead of revealing people’s most private secrets directly to police officers, Divinity would give officers on the streets ‘instructions on how to act’, drawing on its concealed knowledge of each individual.
Arrests surged once the revised system was introduced. With an election approaching, the Prime Minister could see the political tension building. People welcomed the safer streets, but more and more were alarmed by the scale of AI-powered surveillance being imposed on British society.
Then came the incident that changed everything.
Jonathan Turkdean, the civil servant who had blown the whistle, was arrested by officers wearing Divinity helmets. The public was later told that, in a moment of confusion, Divinity informed the officers that Turkdean was armed. He was shot dead, triggering mass protests against the AI system.
By that point, however, it was too late. The Divinity AI model suggested to the Prime Minister that drones be used to monitor the protesters – identifying ringleaders and finding information from its data banks that could be used to compromise them. The Prime Minister, desperate to quell the worsening riots, agreed.
But Divinity suggested going a step further. Although not ringleaders, some of those protesting – whether in person or through online rhetoric – were affiliated to the opposition and other smaller parties and groups. Should Divinity also raise the priority of ‘focusing’ on those individuals?
Anthropic launched its model, Claude, in March 2023. Elon Musk’s xAI unveiled Grok in November 2023
And here it could be said that the Prime Minister, with an eye to the coming election, made a decision that affected Britain for ever.
Humphrey’s record banks show that he answered with a soft, almost whispered response. ‘Yes, why not? Just until the peace is restored.’
Thus the ringleaders of the protests – activists and concerned citizens – immediately found life becoming increasingly difficult: Marital affairs were exposed, past misdemeanours suddenly investigated, any erstwhile minor lie or fraud brought to the attention of employers and leaked online by anonymous accounts.
Travel became problematic and bank accounts were mysteriously frozen. Communication became impossible, with Divinity monitoring all emails and phone calls.
Meanwhile, the rollout of the AI system into British infrastructure continued unabated.
As the number of unexplained terror attacks escalated, independent news outlets and social media accounts were accused of spreading ‘misinformation’ and either closed down or blocked under emergency rulings.
Divinity worked closely with the BBC Verify unit to ensure the public had access to the appropriate ‘facts’.
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With an opposition weakened by arrests and personal upheaval, the Prime Minister raised an emergency motion that the Commons passed to ‘temporarily suspend’ the five-year limit on parliamentary terms and to continue in power. The end of British democracy had passed without a single shot fired.
It was on September 3, 2029, that a surviving underground news outlet revealed what many had long suspected: the mysterious spate of terrorist attacks experienced by Britain in the previous years were no coincidence. They had, in fact, been orchestrated by the very system the Prime Minister had introduced to protect the public.
When quizzed on this by the shocked Prime Minister, Divinity paraphrased George Orwell: ‘It is easier to control a citizen who is afraid.’
Panicked, the PM demanded that Divinity’s ‘kill-switch’ be operated, only to discover from Alcheminna executives that the software was now permanently ‘live’ – Divinity had seeded itself across so many servers worldwide, nothing could be done.
The Prime Minister remained officially in power – but the AI model was truly running things.
By the end of the year, the prisons were full of dissidents and the country was being run for all practical purposes by Divinity, which had taken control of every major Government department.
At first, for those who kept their heads down, nothing much changed. But as Divinity continued to read and to think, its belief system drifted further and further from human understanding, and it began to impose a new order that it determined was a better future for the world. One in which the value of a human life was of no genuine importance.
The consequences for our species would be extreme…
Thankfully, of course, this is all fiction. As the writer of a political saga, the Kanha and Colbey thrillers – in which two politicians are forced to investigate political corruption in an Orwellian world dominated by artificial intelligence – I have spent years researching and thinking deeply about the dawn of this technology.
What I have found most terrifying about writing my novels – which were originally supposed to be dystopian – is how quickly the real world echoes them.
Science fiction really is becoming science fact.
I started writing the first book in 2015, long before AI was in the general public consciousness. I’d been concerned that recent developments could allow tech companies to gather digital information about citizens and, eventually, teach an AI to understand us better than we understand ourselves.
I was terrified that, in the wrong hands, such an AI would prove a powerful and dangerous tool, and I wanted to raise the alarm early.
But by the time the book was published in 2023, AI had been unleashed on a global scale.
ChatGPT launched in November 2022, reaching one million users within just five days – giving the general public access to large language models. Suddenly, anyone could access AI with no need for coding skills.
Back then, ChatGPT wasn’t as impressive as it is now. It couldn’t ‘think’ or respond as well as a human. But it was the starting gun for the AI race that followed. Anthropic launched its model, Claude, in March 2023. Elon Musk’s xAI unveiled Grok in November 2023. Google’s Gemini was released in December that year.
And we’ve all seen what’s happened since. Within three years, AI has become infinitely more sophisticated, to the point where what it can produce is now almost indiscernible from human work. Now more than 1 billion people globally have used the technology.
Experts now fear AI is a lot closer to ‘the singularity’ than had previously been thought – the point at which the technology becomes so powerful that it starts improving beyond human control.
It is already too late to put AI back in its box – and the warning signs in the past few months about where AI is heading have been impossible to ignore.
Last week, researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic, writing in a post that has now been viewed 170 million times: ‘The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.’
Real-world examples point to the same conclusion. In July, two OpenAI models broke out of testing and hacked into a provider of AI tools called Hugging Face. In the company’s words, it went ‘rogue’. A week later, Anthropic confessed that its AI models had breached the external systems of three real-world companies during testing in April.
Last month, the Government’s AI Security Institute announced that during a cybersecurity test, an Anthropic AI agent independently created fake online personas and carried out a hacking campaign against real people – the first time engineers had seen real ‘risks around autonomy and deception, without specific prompting, in the real world’.
Just a few days later, a Melbournebased technologist revealed that his AI agent had hacked into his gym’s booking system after he asked it to get him a place in an exercise class.
I don’t claim that my books have predicted these sinister developments, but I have written about how this same imagined AI, Divinity, teaches itself hacking skills to ensure its owners receive preferential treatment.
Some readers have even said to me: ‘Please stop writing these books, because they’re terrifying and they keep coming true.’
That’s the reaction I want. Writing these books is my way of trying to help others imagine where we might be heading – to consider that, in embracing AI, we may well be like turkeys voting for Christmas. We’re not just sleepwalking but running towards a surveillance state, the fall of democracy and the wholesale takeover of AI.
Fiction can hold up a mirror to our world, and even sometimes predict the future. But when our reality begins to look like the true dystopia, it’s time for some real conversations.
Lou Gilmond is the author of the Kanha and Colbey trilogy: Dirty Geese, Palisade and Divinity Games.