John Davis says nearly a quarter of a million people have been evacuated, some into wineries, and about 60,000 football pitches have burned around Bordeaux. Tourism, infrastructure, businesses and agriculture are hit, and billions that would go to health, education and growth are diverted to rebuilding, which one writer calls the cost of adaptation to climate change.

Zeus told Prometheus that fire would let humans fashion weapons such as bronze and develop technologies to replace the gods. And fire in their bellies, meaning creativity, inspiration, ambition and drive, would create a parallel power structure to the gods. Mark says this shows the Greeks understood what made humans extraordinary.

Prometheus took a burning branch from Mount Olympus and taught humans to use fire. Zeus, furious, banished him to a rock in what is now Georgia, where a buzzard ate his liver every day as it regrew. Humanity's punishment was Pandora's box, which released disease, poverty, war and pain, destroying the Golden Age.

Citing anthropologist James C. Scott, Mark says humans are a fire-adapted species that has used fire for about 400,000 years. Cooking widened our diet and did the chewing for us, shrinking our jaws and changing our stomachs. Fire also reshaped landscapes and made us social, sitting around campfires talking, imagining and even creating art.

Mark calls AI a general purpose technology, unlike a microphone, because it replicates human minds by synthesising everything ever written. The key question is whether it enhances productivity or replaces us, and he suspects those pushing general AI are happy to make people redundant, since much technology eliminates the middleman and the middleman is us.

Mark sketches a dystopian split: a large surplus of redundant workers, service workers like waiters and bartenders in low-wage jobs, an elite top 10 to 15% who combine AI with emotional intelligence, and a handful of techno overlords owning the capital. Rising returns to capital could upend the contract between government and the governed.

Mark quotes Brandeis, who said you can have inequality and democracy but not both for very long. AI, a general purpose technology that isn't open source and is owned by a small number of people in the United States, amplifies inequality and could undermine the social fabric of early 21st century democracies.

John says that unlike fire, the printing press, the industrial revolution or the internet, AI is moving at such a pace and on a global scale that nearly every sector is affected. Like climate change, it carries a cost of adaptation through lost jobs and human purpose, and he sees widespread misunderstanding of its real purpose.

Mark says climate change has become a political football, with net zero versus populism. Populists dismiss net zero as an invention of geography, biology, environmental and sociology departments, even though UN scientists predicted forest fires and heating 10 to 15 years ago and have been right to an almost precise degree.