President Donald Trump is heading toward a potentially explosive confrontation with world leaders as the “reckless” Iran war intensifies, just days before his sixth speech to the United Nations General Assembly next week, according to insiders.

During last year’s address, Trump questioned the very purpose of the United Nations. “It has such tremendous, tremendous potential,” he said. “But it’s not even coming close to living up to that potential.”

People familiar with the president’s plans expect that same combative tone when he returns to the UN podium.

One diplomat, who spoke anonymously, said Trump is expected to revisit his longstanding complaints about the organization while mounting a forceful defense of his foreign-policy record.

“I was told he is planning to say something to the effect of: Look, I don’t think anyone is pulling their weight yet at the UN. The war is over if people [Iran] listen to me,” the diplomat said. “Trump’s speech, the [bilateral meetings]… boring. The real news is made during his sideline chats that we won’t get to see.”

Brett Bruen, a former US diplomat who served as Director of Global Engagement at the Obama White House, said Trump should not expect a particularly friendly reception.

“Pretty much every president, prime minister and prince in the world is pissed at Trump for starting a reckless war with Iran,” Bruen told the Daily Mail. “While continuing to bluster and blabber about winning, it’s now a pathetic portrayal of how he squandered America’s uniquely powerful position on the planet.”

The Daily Mail contacted the White House for comment.

The annual meeting of world leaders is already taking shape as a tense and deeply adversarial summit, with trade disputes, mounting disagreements with European allies and the ongoing conflict with Iran expected to dominate the agenda—even as Trump insists the war is nearing an end.

The gathering will also feature a combustible lineup of figures and long-running grievances: Iranian delegates facing travel restrictions arriving in the US under threats of “annihilation,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urgently seeking a meeting, excluded Palestinian envoys criticizing the summit from afar and Venezuelan interim President Delcy Rodriguez reportedly waiting for a possible secret sideline conversation.

Trump has made little effort to conceal his frustration with the UN’s multilateral approach, previously dismissing its debates as “empty words” and calling UN climate experts “stupid people.”

At last year’s gathering, he delivered a fierce criticism of the international community’s handling of migration.

“Your countries are going to hell,” Trump told the assembled leaders.

However, diplomats who spoke with the Daily Mail said the most consequential discussions are likely to happen behind closed doors, where the seven-month-old US conflict with Iran is expected to overshadow nearly every other issue.

Despite continued military clashes in the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial route for global oil shipments, the State Department confirmed Thursday that it would issue restricted visas to an Iranian delegation attending the summit.

The decision comes as Trump says Tehran is interested in negotiations while also openly weighing whether to intensify the conflict.

“I have a big decision coming up. Do I want to go in and annihilate them [the Iranian regime] or do I not? It’s a big decision. Anything could happen with me,” Trump told Axios this week.

Any interaction with the Iranian team will certainly be under the microscope next week.

During UNGA, Trump is also slated to meet with Gulf Cooperation Council leaders from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, Oman and Kuwait to outline strategies and plans after the war. 

Trump’s very first meeting with the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom will also take place. Slotted for Tuesday afternoon, their sit–down falls right between Trump’s morning address to the UN General Assembly and Andy Burnham’s 15–minute speech later that day.

Former United States Ambassador to the United Nations Mark Wallace told the Daily Mail that UNGA will be an opportunity for a strong but thoughtful reminder of the ‘human suffering and loss by a September 10 mindset’ as the conflict in the Middle East takes center stage.

‘Refusing to face the challenges and threats of our time… allied leaders and peoples seem to have readopted a pre 9/11 mindset of sticking one’s head in the sand. That is a failure of leadership and dangerous in a world with grave contemporary threats,’ Wallace explained.

Wallace emphasized that the summit’s core focus should rest on Western resolve.

‘Will they step up or will the anti–Trump sentiment overwhelm the importance of dealing with serious threats,’ he remarked.

Wallace also noted that the veto on monitoring Iran by Russia and China puts another of the ‘countless nails in the coffin’ of the relevance of the UN Security Council.

Still, defenders of the institution are pushing back against the rhetoric.

In her final address as outgoing General Assembly president, former German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock highlighted the vital relief UN peacekeepers, UNICEF and aid agencies provide daily to millions.

‘To those out there who argue that the UN is irrelevant or failing,’ Baerbock advised, ‘I would simply say: consider, for just one minute, the alternative, a world without the United Nations.’ 

Baerbock suggested hostility might ultimately produce the opposite of its intended effect.

‘The power games of our times and the direct attacks on this dear institution have in many ways brought the vast majority of this General Assembly closer together,’ she said.

Bruen says the ‘second world order’ of the United Nations will be on full display next week, as republicans remain on edge ahead of the upcoming Midterm elections.

‘The post–American era will be on full display as leaders gather at the United Nations. Trump will try to put a positive spin on the mounting costs and his cratering political capital at home and abroad.’

Two White House sources tell the Daily Mail that Trump is preparing for UNGA over the weekend at Camp David with his national security team.

Oxford Street is one of Britain’s most recognisable shopping destinations: a mile-long showcase for some of the world’s biggest retail names and a magnet for visitors from around the globe.

Yet after dark, parts of the famous thoroughfare are taking on a far less polished appearance, with scenes more reminiscent of Dickensian London than a modern commercial centre.

Groups of homeless migrant beggars have begun sleeping rough beneath the street’s canopies, with a large gathering regularly forming near the flagship Marks & Spencer store close to Marble Arch.

During several nights observing the area this week, the Daily Mail witnessed two women using the street as a toilet, another person vomiting onto the road and a man displaying a wad of cash apparently won during an illegal card game.

The scenes centre on what has become a makeshift ‘village’ along the western end of Oxford Street, where blankets and mattresses are placed on wooden pallets each evening to create rows of makeshift beds.

The two women seen relieving themselves in a gap between public benches—apparently being used as an informal camp toilet—were also using abandoned supermarket trolleys to transport their possessions.

Although many of those occupying the makeshift beds appeared destitute, several were seen using iPhones.

Meanwhile, a card game apparently involving hundreds of pounds continued from midnight until 6am, despite cash gambling being unlawful in a public space.

By around 6am, however, the overnight activity begins to give way to the familiar rhythm of the working day.

Shortly after dawn, shop employees and council workers arrive and attempt to persuade those sleeping on the pavement to move along.

Most gather up their bedding before heading towards Marble Arch or Oxford Circus, where they set up begging pitches. Others are believed to be pickpockets, drawing comparisons with Fagin’s gang in Dickens’s Oliver Twist.

One commuter who walks along Oxford Street shortly after 6am each morning says the scenes have become an increasingly bleak part of his daily journey to work.

He said the encampment had been in place for months, but had recently expanded, causing conditions to deteriorate quickly.

“It has really escalated in recent weeks,” he told the Daily Mail. “At first, they were simply sleeping there, drinking and eating. Now they are using the street as a toilet, and there are all-night drinking and gambling sessions as well.”

“There’s drinking and fighting. It’s intimidating and upsetting.”

‘You come through here first thing in the morning and you just cannot believe what you are seeing.

‘This is Oxford Street. It is supposed to be one of the best shopping streets in the world. But it’s like a third world slum.

‘They’re about to spend £150million to partly pedestrianise it to make Oxford Street more attractive to tourists and shoppers – but if that’s the plan they really need to get rid of this squalor.’

Unlike the traditional image of rough sleepers – those who have fallen on hard times after a personal financial crisis or mental health episode – many of those on Oxford Street are said to have electively set up there, resisting efforts to get them into secure accommodation.

Another office worker who starts at 6am told us: ‘I have seen people repeatedly crouching down to use the seating areas on Oxford Street as toilets.

‘Yesterday morning, at about 6.10am, there were around eight men still awake after what appeared to have been an all-night card game outside M&S.

‘They had wads of cash in their hands. I would estimate there was about £500 in each pile. They were arguing over who had won what and shouting at each other.

‘And there’s a sense of menace if you get too close. I have been spat on, shouted at, threatened all sorts, just for passing by.

‘I would not want to walk past there if I were a woman.

‘I cannot understand why these people are just allowed to effectively live there. Why can’t they be moved?’

Another worker told us: ‘Between about 6am and 8am they start waking up under their duvets. Then on waking they want to relieve themselves. I have seen men and women defecating in the street, and it’s a daily occurrence to see them urinating.

‘The smell can be unbelievably bad. It’s like an open air slum there in the mornings.

‘There are very often empty alcohol bottles left behind as well – on the pavement naturally not in any bin.

‘This is one of the best-known shopping streets in the world. Tourists come here from everywhere and you have people potentially sitting down where human waste has been left.’

The commuter said the group appears to move between Oxford Street, Marble Arch and Park Lane, often using shopping trolleys to transport bedding and other belongings.

‘They beg, steal and lash out at anyone getting too close or daring to take photos,’ he said.

‘Sometimes there might be about 20 people, but at other times I have seen what looks like 50 or 60.

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‘They use shopping trolleys to move their bedding around. They drink there, eat there and sleep there overnight, then during the day they move around again.’

The commuter also said that shop staff arriving for early shifts are frequently forced to make their way through the groups to get to their workplace.

‘You have got staff trying to get into work in the morning who have to run the gauntlet to get past them,’ he said.

‘I have been spat at and I have seen them shouting at people. There is aggressive begging as well.

‘Police will move them on, but then they can be back 20 minutes later.

‘If I were a tourist and I stepped in human waste on Oxford Street, I would be furious.

‘You often see families and children sitting in the seats outside these stores not knowing what was happening there hours earlier.

‘It is just unbelievable.’

When approached outside M&S to discuss their living situation this week, the inhabitants became angry and gesticulated menacingly at our reporter.

Some 67 per cent of those living rough in Westminster are believed to be from outside the UK according to a 2024 report from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities.

Westminster recorded 355 rough sleepers in the year to June 2025 – up 25 per cent year-on-year and roughly double the figure seen in 2021.

The settlement on Oxford Street is simply the latest example of its kind to spring up in what were previously prestigious areas of the capital – as the Daily Mail has documented extensively.

These have recently included similar encampments made up of clusters of tents on Tottenham Court Road, behind the Savoy Hotel on the Strand, outside Grade I-listed Apsley House on the corner of Hyde Park and beside Westminster Cathedral.

The Mail has also reported on homeless delivery riders living in tents and makeshift camps in trendy Shoreditch and north London’s Clissold Park.

Fed-up local residents at these sites have complained of dumped food, rats and human excrement.

But researchers say that across London, numbers of rough sleepers, despite becoming more visible, are showing signs of decline.

Across the capital, outreach teams found 3,959 people sleeping rough between April and June this year – a fall of 10 per cent on the same period in 2025.

Of those, 1,685 were new to the streets, while 680 were classed as living on the streets and a further 1,645 were recorded as intermittent rough sleepers, according to figures from the Combined Homelessness and Information Network.

The issue of homelessness has become a political hot potato after Mayor Sadiq Khan pledged during his 2024 re-election campaign to end rough sleeping in the capital.

The Conservatives, who now run Westminster Council, previously took aim at Labour for their failings in cleaning up the homeless issue on Oxford Street.

Disputes over who owns particular stretches of land have led to difficulties in removing some disruptive beggars from certain areas.

Homelessness charities, meanwhile, have warned that rough sleeping remains ‘extremely high by historic standards’ and argue that long-term prevention, housing support and emergency provision are all needed to bring numbers down.

The causes of homelessness are notoriously complex but the single most common trigger is believed to be losing a job at short notice – and with most Britons having only the equivalent of a month’s salary in savings millions of people are in a potentially precarious position.

While those who arrive from overseas without an established support network are even more likely to end up on the streets if work falls through.

Some rough sleepers are believed to use their position on the street as a cover to scam or steal from passers-by.

Councillor Caroline Sargent, deputy leader of Westminster Council, said: ‘Anti-social behaviour and crime have no place in our city.

‘As a council, we’re doing our part in trying to move people who are harming our public spaces.

‘But we expect a tougher approach from the police, and we need the Home Office to back us up with new legislation to keep our streets safe for residents and visitors.’

A spokesperson for the Mayor of London said: ‘No one should have to sleep rough in London. The Mayor is committed to ending rough sleeping in the capital by 2030.

‘The Mayor continues to work with Government, boroughs and partners to prevent homelessness and since Sadiq became Mayor, more than 20,000 people have been helped off the streets.

‘We take reports of anti-social behaviour very seriously and continue to work with Westminster City Council, the Metropolitan Police Service and local businesses to ensure that they are fully investigated and responded to.’

Marks & Spencer was also contacted for comment.

Our revelations about the squalor of Oxford Street at night come nine months after the Mail exposed how dozens of men were sleeping rough outside John Lewis’s Christmas display windows a few hundred yards to the east.

The Electoral Commission could recommend cutting political spending limits under a Government-commissioned review, as Reform UK faces renewed scrutiny over a £72million funding boost.

Vijay Rangarajan, the watchdog’s chief executive, said the review would assess whether existing rules governing party spending remain “fit for purpose”.

The inquiry follows two record £36million donations made to Reform earlier this month by cryptocurrency billionaires Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne.

The donations have intensified debate over political funding in Britain. Mr Rangarajan said voters must be confident that elections are fought on a “level playing field”.

The review will examine party spending limits, donation reporting rules and the money political organisations can spend between formally designated election periods.

The Government launched the review in July. Last month, Labour ministers Angela Rayner and Louise Haigh wrote to Mr Rangarajan, arguing that current spending limits are “too high” and should be reduced.

Under the current rules, parties fielding candidates in Britain cannot spend more than £34million during the year before a general election.

With the proposed changes potentially limiting the impact of Reform’s large donations, party leader Nigel Farage accused the Government of trying to undermine his party. He said: “Once again our dishonest Government is trying to change the rules to stop Reform. They are the most anti-democratic British Government ever.”

The Electoral Commission is required to remain politically impartial and is expected to publish recommendations from the review in July next year.

Speaking to the Sunday Times, Mr Rangarajan said: “Trust in elections depends on people believing that the rules are fair and transparent, and how much parties and campaigners can spend is a significant part of that picture.

“Funding is essential to democratic participation and political debate, but the framework must give voters confidence that our elections are being contested on a level playing field.”

He added: “Our review will look across the campaign spending framework as a whole, including spending limits, the interaction between party and candidate spending, and the reporting requirements that support public confidence in the system.

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“Campaigning has changed significantly in recent years, and a significant amount is spent between election periods, so it is right that we examine whether the current arrangements remain fit for purpose.”

Mr Farage has also criticised plans by the Government to impose a retrospective £100,000 limit on donations from overseas-based contributors.

Mr Delo has been based in Hong Kong, while Mr Harborne has lived in Thailand, although both are reported to have returned to the UK.

Reform maintains that the donations comply with current regulations as well as proposed restrictions on funds from donors living abroad. Those planned rules would also cover the first 12 months after expatriates return to Britain.

The party has accused Labour of hypocrisy over the substantial sums it receives from trade unions.

In a letter sent to Mr Rangarajan on 29 August, before Reform received its £72million windfall, Cabinet ministers Ms Rayner and Ms Haigh wrote: “We have to limit the way financial power can end up dominating political power, to get to a politics that works for all people in all places.

“We believe spending limits on parties and candidates are too high, and ought to be reduced.”

It comes as new research suggests Reform could lose half its projected seats if Restore Britain, led by Great Yarmouth MP Rupert Lowe, stood candidates in every constituency at the next general election.

Polling this month forecast that Reform would end up with 108 MPs after a general election, but an analysis found this could fall to 59 if Restore contested every seat.

The research, commissioned and funded by consultancy Public First, found Labour would be within touching distance of a House of Commons majority with 316 MPs if there was a widespread Restore presence at the ballot box.

Mr Lowe was initially elected to Parliament as a Reform MP at the 2024 general election but left the party last year amid a furious row with Mr Farage and other senior Reform figures.

He went on to found Restore and has since seen his outfit secure a significant portion of the vote at the Makerfield by-election in June, as well as August’s contest for Greater Manchester mayor.

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.

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?

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.