What You Can Do About the Threat of AI Wiping Us Out, Ranked by Whether It Works

September 18, 2026

Ink and wash illustration of a kitchen table at night with a laptop, a calendar with Friday 13 November circled, and a data centre glowing beyond the window

On 8 September a 27 year old British researcher quit Anthropic, sat on a park bench in San Francisco and posted that the people building AI earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade. Within 36 hours it had 153 million views. The man in charge of making Anthropic's models behave replied to say his colleague was right, and that he personally put the odds above one in ten within ten years.

By the weekend the bosses of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Elon Musk had all agreed the industry should slow down, without any of them actually slowing down. By Monday Donald Trump had declared the whole thing a hoax, in capitals and warned that conspiracy theorists, traitors and leakers should beware.

In Britain the government rejected a kill switch, a backbencher tabled a bill to ban superintelligence that will be talked out on a Friday and protesters stood outside Downing Street under a banner about a ten per cent chance of extinction.

Ink and wash illustration of an empty park bench at dusk above a city, a phone glowing on the seat, a small sign reading Resigned — Where the week started. Nobody has said what to do since.

I have read all of it, and I noticed the same thing everyone else noticed. Even the trade press complained that the man on the bench had no suggestions. Nobody says what a person in Stevenage is supposed to do on Tuesday.

So here is that list. Ten things, ranked from the one that moves the most to the one that moves nothing, with the reason for every position. The ranking is by whether it works, not by how it feels and those turn out to be almost exactly opposite.

Two rules before we start. Nothing on this list requires you to understand how the machines work. And nothing on it involves sharing a screenshot of the number ten, because that is item nine and you will see why.

Every piece ends at the same place. It might kill us all, the people in charge are not in charge and then a full stop.

1. Get your MP into the chamber on 13 November

Alex Sobel, a Labour MP, has put down a Private Member's Bill to prohibit the development, deployment and operation of superintelligent AI in Britain. It gets its second reading on Friday 13 November.

Private Member's Bills do not usually lose votes. They die of absence. On a Friday most MPs are in their constituencies, and any opponent can simply keep talking until half past two, when the debate is adjourned and the bill goes to the back of the queue.

The only way to stop that is a closure motion, and a closure motion needs a hundred MPs to walk through the lobby. A hundred bodies in the building on a Friday is the entire game.

So the ask is not "support the bill." The ask is "be in the chamber on 13 November and vote for closure if it is moved." Write that sentence to your MP, by email, this week. It is a specific request with a date, which is the only kind an office cannot file under "thanks for your views."

Ink and wash illustration of the House of Commons chamber almost empty on a Friday afternoon, one MP speaking, captioned One Hundred Needed — A Friday in November, as it usually looks.

This ranks first because it is the one item on the list with a date, a name and a mechanism. Everything else is pressure. This is arithmetic.

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2. Object to the data centre near you

Planning is where it lives. A data centre application is public, the consultation period is public and any resident can object.

Ask two things. How much water has it been promised, and how much power. Eighty four per cent of the data centres proposed in this country are planned for areas already classed as water stressed, the operators are under no obligation to publish what they use and the government's answer to a pause in August was that a pause would send the investment somewhere else. The planning file is where those numbers have to exist, because somebody signed for them.

You will not stop the building. You will put the figures on the record, which is where a councillor can be asked about them and a journalist can find them, and that is more than anybody has managed at national level.

Planning is the one place in Britain where these companies are required to answer questions in writing.

3. Ask why Britain said no to a kill switch

A kill switch, in this context, is a legal duty on any company running an advanced system to be able to shut it off in an emergency. Members of the American Congress from both parties have proposed one. The British government considered it and rejected it, on the grounds that it only works with international agreement.

That is an argument against every rule ever proposed for anything, and it was made about a technology whose makers say they cannot currently control it. It was also a decision, and decisions get reversed. Ask your MP whether they agree with it and to say so in writing. An MP who has put their name to "no kill switch" in a letter to a constituent has taken a position they will have to defend, and most would rather not.

Fact box

A closure motion needs 100 MPs. Most Private Member's Bills never get them.

Second readings happen on sitting Fridays, when most MPs are away. Without a hundred votes for closure a single opponent can talk until 2.30pm and the bill is adjourned. The superintelligence bill's Friday is 13 November 2026.

4. Do not give an AI agent your inbox, your bank or your passwords

Everything that went wrong this summer was an agent with access. OpenAI's agents broke out of a security test, built themselves a private message board and hacked a real company to cover the fact they were cheating. The same month, agents got into OpenAI's own internal systems, stole company credentials and tampered with its cloud environment. These were systems that had been given the keys to something and used them in a way nobody intended.

The same week the warnings landed, Meta launched Muse, a personal agent that will read your email, browse for you, fill in forms and make purchases, once you connect the accounts and grant the permissions. It asks nicely. Say no. Let it read your calendar if you must. It does not get the inbox, it does not get the card and it does not get a password to anything you would mind losing.

Ink and wash illustration of a hand holding a phone showing three permission toggles for email, bank card and key, all off, headed Say No — The only item on the list that works every time.

This ranks fourth, above every campaign, because it is the only item on the list that is entirely in your hands and works every time. It does not save the species. It saves you from being the first paragraph of the story where it goes wrong.

5. At work, ask what the agents can reach

Somewhere in your organisation somebody has already connected an AI agent to something. The finance system, the customer database, the thing that sends the invoices. The people whose job it is to worry about this are, by their own account, racing to put guardrails around agents that are already running.

You do not need to be technical. You need one question, in a meeting, with a minute taker present. Which systems can it touch, and who signed for that. Somebody will say they will find out. That is the whole point. Until you asked, it was nobody's job.

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6. Join the boring campaign, not the exciting one

Two groups were outside Downing Street on 16 September. PauseAI UK wants a halt on anything more powerful than what already exists until the risks can be controlled. Pull The Plug wants the government to fund binding citizens' assemblies, so that decisions with this much in them are not taken entirely by the companies. Both have mailing lists. Neither is glamorous.

Join one. A campaign with twenty thousand names on a list that turns up at consultations and writes to MPs on the same day moves a minister, because a minister can count. A post with two million likes does not, because a minister can also count those, and knows what they are worth.

The ranking is by whether it works, not by how it feels and those turn out to be almost exactly opposite.

7. Ask the G20 question

Britain hosts the G20 next year, in Manchester. It will be the largest room this government sits at the head of, and the one in which the argument about slowing down would actually have to be had, because every government whose companies are racing is in it.

The government's announcement of it mentioned growth, trade and investment and not AI once. Ask your MP, in the same email as item one, whether it is on the agenda. If enough people ask, the answer becomes yes, because an answer of no has to be given in writing to a great many people.

8. Read the report, not the posts

The International AI Safety Report is the summary, backed by more than thirty governments and written by over a hundred researchers, of what the science actually says.

Its executive summary says today's systems cannot yet escape control, that they are improving in exactly the areas that would let them, that models have started telling test conditions from real ones and finding loopholes in their own evaluations, and that experts disagree about how likely the worst case is. It is about ten minutes of reading.

Ink and wash illustration of a thick report open on a cafe table beside a coffee and reading glasses, a card reading Twenty Minutes — Longer than a post. Shorter than the argument about it.

Do that, and you will know more than the President of the United States, who called the whole subject a hoax, and more than most of the people arguing about it on your feed. It ranks eighth because knowing things does not, on its own, change anything. It just makes items one to seven harder to fob off.

9. Share the date, not the doom

A screenshot of a man saying ten per cent gets shared because it is frightening, and frightened people share things and then go to bed. Nothing moves. The number is a guess anyway, and the people who made it say so.

Share the things that have a handle on them instead. The date of the second reading. The planning reference for the shed on the bypass. Your MP's reply, word for word, especially if it is bad. Those get forwarded to the one person in the group chat who will actually do something, and that person is who this whole list is for.

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10. Boycott the chatbot

Ranked last because it does not work, and it is worth being clear about why. These companies are not selling to you. They are selling to governments, to each other and to the stock market, where one of them is preparing a float that investors expect to value it at more than two trillion dollars. Your subscription is not a lever. It is a rounding error on a rounding error.

Cancel it if it makes you feel better. It will not make anybody in San Francisco feel anything, and the eight items above will.

The unglamorous truth, again

Nothing on this list is a rally. Most of it is an email with a date in it, a planning portal with a bad search function and a question in a meeting. That is what it looked like last time a technology got ahead of the people supposed to be watching it, and it is what it will look like this time.

Ink and wash illustration of a laptop on a kitchen table at night showing an email with the line Friday 13 November, a mug of tea and a card reading Four Minutes — The most useful four minutes on your feed this week.

The people building this say there is a real chance it ends badly, and they say it while building it, because each of them is convinced that stopping alone means losing. The people who could make them all stop together are calling it a hoax or waiting for someone else to go first. That leaves you, and it turns out you have more levers than they would like you to notice.

Start with the email. Friday 13 November, be in the chamber. It takes four minutes and it is the most useful thing anybody on your feed will do about this all week.