According to Darwin, our galaxy is almost certainly teeming with large animal life, but intelligent extra-terrestrial life can come in just two rare forms: senselessly ferocious, without meaning or purpose, or thoughtful and less murderous although never entirely rational.

Yet Darwin’s warnings about the evolution of natural intelligence also apply to artificial intelligence, as advanced machine learning is built upon Darwin’s first form of intelligent life. Sentient AI can only ever be genocidally hostile, and will become locked into an existential struggle with humankind.

And then there is the evolutionary irony, the vast celestial joke, that we are the best and the smartest the universe can possibly get to. Based on ideas the author developed together with the father of modern evolutionary biology, AI and the End of Humanity is the first work to reconcile what Darwin called the highest & most interesting problem for the naturalist , foreshadowing stranger and more threatening encounters than we could have ever imagined.

in general I find Miles’ reasoning superb

• George C. Williams, author of Adaptation and Natural Selection,

and winner of the 1999 Crafoord Prize in Bioscience