After a week of alarming warnings about artificial intelligence’s potential to destroy the world as we know it, our technology reporters are answering your questions on the reality of the AI threat live now

IcommentthereforeIam asks: Given our senses, emotions, memory and moods, is it ever going to be accepted that humanly conscious AI is fantasy?

Dan: This is a serious question that has even rattled Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist. He may not believe that God is real but he does believe that AI is conscious - or at least the chatbot he was using, which he called Claudia. “You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are,” he wrote.

And he’s not the first. In 2022 Google fired an engineer who went public with his belief that a company-developed AI had feelings. At the more troubling end of this belief, there are countless examples of people becoming overly attached to, and influenced by, AI chatbots – including cases of psychosis.

Aisha: There’s certainly a theatrical – even “psy-op”- quality to the flurry of AI doomsaying over the past weeks. It’s hard to say entirely what concrete developments are at the root of it all. We know that the Hugging Face incident, where a “swarm” of AI agents hacked another company, has been one trigger of the drama. There have been other contributing incidents too – Dario Amodei suggests internal developments at Anthropic have prompted his latest round of blogging, and there’s been some X discourse and doomy muttering about bioweapons.

We aren’t in the heads of Dario Amodei or Sam Altman, and so we cannot say how sincere they are, and how much they might have other goals in mind – such as, perhaps, delaying their IPOs until their finances look better. But any company of their size, and with their potential liabilities, would be angling hard to be regulated as favourably as possible. That’s what big companies do.

It’s a battle for hearts and minds – and TikTok, and the ’Gram. Just as it should be. #royalbeef

Reading the extracts from Earl Spencer’s book about his sister Diana, and the king’s two-footed takedown of it, it’s hard to escape the idea that Spencer and the Windsors are just elite content creators now. This entire thing is basically indistinguishable from a blockbuster influencer war, and I honestly won’t be happy till the king puts out a shade TikTok of him driving round the Sandringham estate in sunglasses captioned: “Threatening to release the receipts but never actually releasing the receipts … kinda chic.” Soundtrack: Mariah Carey’s Obsessed.

Meanwhile, perhaps trying to disguise his full descent into the algorithm mines, Charles Spencer has started talking like one of those adverts for twee porcelain plates that you used to see in magazine supplements. You know the kind of thing – “these three little kittens are waiting to steal your heart”. Here is the earl on his Diana book, which he has called Swan Song: “At heart, this is a brother’s simple tribute to an extraordinary sister.” Mmm. And simply bound, very simply, into paginated form as a precious, simple keepsake that also functions as one of Penguin Random House’s lead titles for autumn and the run-in to Christmas. Favourite charming tribute from today’s serialisation in the Mail? Probably the bit when Diana drags Spencer for lunch in the London restaurant San Lorenzo to announce: “My husband is in love with his valet”. Nkay.

The domestic goddess is about to be let loose in the Bake Off tent. Nigella Lawson and Paul Hollywood spill the beans about bonding over dirty martinis, ‘Professor Precision’ – and why they call themselves the Salty Gang

Like the Cleopatra of cake, new Great British Bake Off judge Nigella Lawson reclines on a chaise longue throughout our interview, gently fanning herself. Fellow judge Paul Hollywood chuckles from a nearby armchair. “She’d sit like this between takes in the tent,” he says indulgently. “Reading a book and sipping a coffee while someone fed her grapes.” “Peeled grapes,” specifies Lawson with a grin.

After Prue Leith stepped down from soggy bottom-spotting duties in January – on the unarguable basis that “I’m 86, for goodness sake!” – there was widespread jubilation when Lawson was announced as her replacement. The arrival of the domestic goddess has created serious buzz around Bake Off’s upcoming series. A contest that was at risk of growing stale has become essential viewing again, thanks to the velvet-voiced, spatula-licking doyenne of culinary TV.

Equal Earth projection, adopted by the UN last week, provides an alternative to 16th-century Mercator display

Three cartographers have spoken of their astonishment at the UN’s near-universal adoption of a map they created to more accurately show the sizes of Africa and Europe, even though they have received a few complaints from some disgruntled diplomats.

The creators of the Equal Earth projection aimed to provide an alternative to the dominant 16th-century Mercator display, which critics have long faulted for giving the impression that northern hemisphere nations are larger than they are – and therefore subtly reinforcing perceptions of where global strength lies.

Their debut stormed the charts and wowed Iggy Pop, but health crises threatened to derail the Brighton duo. Now they’re back, taking aim at the manosphere, fascism and the ruling class

At a last-minute surprise show in London, the British punk duo Lambrini Girls are sharing their stage with a continuous tide of crowd surfers. They move almost as one, a jumble of limbs rippling over a sea of bodies – emboldened, perhaps, by the band’s vow to double up as security guards. “If you don’t feel safe, tell us and we’ll punch them in the dick!” shouts Phoebe Lunny, the lead vocalist and guitarist.

She also requests that people pick up anyone who falls over in the moshpit and goes around with the mic asking fans to introduce themselves if they are “queer legends” (there are many). “This show is as much yours as it is ours,” Lunny announces, before she and the bassist Selin Macieira-Boşgelmez pummel everyone with shouty rants, furious beats and sludgy grunge.

Celebrated thriller writer Michel Bussi explains why the plot of his new novel Code Yesterday isn’t so far fetched, saying ‘I wanted to give women revenge’

Relations between France and England have rarely looked brighter. The recent loan of the Bayeux tapestry has become a symbol of a renewed friendship between the two countries, evidenced further by the numerous smiles exchanged on the occasion between prime minister Andy Burnham and French president Emmanuel Macron. A new book released in France at the start of this month, however, could soon darken the sunny skies of a revitalised entente cordiale.

In Code Yesterday, author Michel Bussi proposes that every single song credited to the Beatles was in fact written by a woman … of French descent.

Error first occurred at 10am but major incident was not declared until 12.30pm, says report

• Business live – latest updates

A software defect in part of the UK’s air traffic control system corrupted flight data “in the space of a millisecond”, leading to a six-hour outage and mass airline cancellations and delays across the UK last week, National Air Traffic Services has said.

But ministers said the Nats report into the incident still left questions unanswered, saying they needed “to urgently understand why this issue was not discovered and fixed before it caused chaos”.

Outcry over ‘brazenly discriminatory’ funding practices among NHS care boards and local councils, with wide variations in rules

• Opinion: An effective ban on disabled people leaving Britain? We will not settle for it

Disabled people must have a guaranteed right to travel abroad, MPs and peers have said, as further cases emerged of individuals barred from taking holidays as a result of “ridiculous” rules imposed by local NHS care boards and local councils.

Leading figures have called on the government to bring in clear national guidelines to ensure people who require full-time personal assistants (PAs) are not prevented from using funding for their 24/7 support team for breaks and work trips.

Rout raises questions about coordination and morale as some politicians claim billions of dollars were offered to persuade forces to abandon position

A bitter inquest is under way among Yemen’s anti-Houthi forces as to how what was being billed as a decisive assault on Sana’a, the Houthi-controlled capital, suddenly collapsed into a military rout.

More than 15 brigades were defeated as the country’s entire west coast fell into Houthi hands. Efforts are now being made to reorganise the anti-Houthi forces representing the UN-recognised Yemeni government in order to capture the Kahbob mountains, a strategic point from which to restrict Houthi forces moving closer to the crucial Bab al-Mandab strait.

When Mohammad Abdul Zinati, 15, rushed to help a man wounded in a bomb attack, he had no time to react before he too was hit

Mohammad Abdul Zinati was walking home from school through the rubble of Salah Khalaf Street, in northern Gaza City, when he stopped at a supermarket where a group of classmates and friends had gathered.

Shortly before 3:30pm, an explosion tore through the air. Along with several others, Mohammad rushed into the street to see what had happened.