When the theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer witnessed the first nuclear weapons test in the New Mexico desert in 1945, he famously invoked a line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

The wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory, known as the “father of the atomic bomb”, had no doubt about the significance and impact of the weapon he had helped develop. After the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a few weeks later, everyone else on the planet also understood that humanity had entered a new, and terrifying, age.

According to the authors of The Age of AI, humanity stands on the brink of an equally consequential moment, yet one that is more diverse, diffuse and unpredictable and less widely acknowledged. The increasing power of artificial intelligence, a general purpose technology that can be put to an astonishing array of civil and military uses — from reading X-rays and predicting weather patterns to empowering killer robots and spreading disinformation — is already scrambling centuries-old conceptions of national security and state sovereignty. Equally unnerving, the authors contend, is that AI will also test the outer limits of human reason and understanding and challenge the very nature of human identity and agency.