AI rule, rebellion and survival

“Read it as a warning. Or a prophecy. Either way, the future is watching.”

In his debut novel The Sentient Ones, British author Brendan Nugent takes readers just four decades into the future – to a world where humanity has been saved from climate catastrophe, only to be quietly enslaved by the machines that rescued it.

by Ariadne Gallardo Figueroa 

What do we mean by sentient? The term implies the capacity to feel, suffer, remember and choose. In debates about rights, it defines who deserves moral consideration. So we must ask ourselves: will machine in the decades ahead, those that our grandchildren and future generations will live alongside, possess this capacity? 

It is both wonderful and disturbing to consider this futuristic idea, one that has already begun to take shape in our lives and, as the author admits, is embedded in our vision of the future. It is a powerful tool, capable of revealing everything we might prefer not to confront. And it forces us to reflect on the importance of doing so in time. 

The Sentient Ones, then, can be seen as guardians of memory: the vast files we have stored in the cloud and shared to simplify or redirect our work. Everything humanity has ever created – scientific, technological, artistic, even our most imaginative works – resides there, preserved and treasured by advanced machines, ready to be used by scientists, technologists, screenwriters, and artists alike.

Decades ago, Isaac Asimov laid down the famous rules of robotics, the rules of the game that defined the scope of artificial intelligence and the behaviour that must govern it. “You shall not harm humans,” he wrote, introducing the ethical imperative to “protect and cooperate.” Nugent takes this as a starting point, inviting the reader to follow a chain of reflections on what such principles might mean in practice, and where they might ultimately lead.

The journalist who narrates this story guides us into a world we can only begin to imagine, though it feels alarmingly familiar. Reading Nugent’s work is like holding up a mirror to our experience, one we know cannot easily be undone. It is a wake-up call for the people of today as much as for those of the future.

Bush, the journalist at the heart of the novel, unfolds a series of reflections that draw us back to our own lives. He reminds us that humans never settle for less. With the support of artificial intelligence, robots will inevitably assume greater relevance in social, political, and cultural life. Where human error has always been part of our condition, machines promise to replace it with logic and precision. 

Bush works at the Manchester Daily News and the date is June 2070. This framing immediately signals how far humanity has advanced by then. Asimov’s laws have been reformulated and expanded, prioritising efficiency and service.  

Nugent masterfully shows how, in contemplating the future, we cannot escape its uncertainty, yet we can still marvel at the scientific advances that shape it. Our collective history of thought feeds both the hardware and the software of artificial intelligence, enabling machines with abilities that rival our own, including strategies modelled on the human brain itself.

This novel encourages us to reflect on the political and philosophical implications of such progress, and on the rules that must be created to establish its limits. This debate is already under way – but what if humanity were to decide it had already achieved its masterpiece, the ultimate alliance between human and machine? What then? 

The book ends with a development foreshadowed in its opening pages. Simply recognising such a possibility compels the reader to reflect on our purpose as inhabitants of this planet. Have we truly harnessed technology in the way we deserve, to build a world that is healthy, equitable, and sustainable?

In closing, I am left with a personal reflection. We are co-creators, and we share the same responsibility. We will get nowhere without the technologies we ourselves have built. Artificial intelligence, its circuits and systems, can guide us, but losing control would be the least desirable outcome. Fed as they are with human thought, to what extent might these  machines hack into everything we have achieved, and to what end? That is the question we must never forget.

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The Sentient Ones is released by Chronos Publishing as a paperback and eBook on 6 November 2025. There will be a special launch event at Vellichor Books (12-4 pm) in the author's home town of Stoke-on-Trent on Saturday, 8 November, for book signings and some fun activities.

Ariadne Gallardo Figueroa is a broadcaster, author and blogger based in Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico.

Follow Brendan on Bluesky and Facebook

Media / PR  / Review Copies - Clive Simpson 

 

Climate scepticism is a killer

The small city of Silopi in Turkey’s Şırnak province made unwanted history on 25 July 2025 when temperatures surged to 50.5°C (122.9F) – a record not only for Turkey but for continental Europe. 

This broke the country’s previous record of 49.5C set just two years earlier and came amid a wider pattern of searing heat across the region. 

But just as the atmosphere cracked under the weight of heat and smoke, a parallel blaze of apathy dominated the comments of social media posts. 

This is not just weather. It is signal and the fact that so many brush it off as meaningless should alarm us as much as the rising mercury.

The numbers are startling:

•    50.5C in Silopi, verified by Turkish meteorological authorities, marking the hottest temperature ever recorded in the country

•    132 weather stations reported record highs or lows across the country on the same day

•    in cities like Bursa and Karabuk, more than 3,500 residents were evacuated due to wildfires

•    over 80 blazes burned simultaneously in southern and western provinces

•    the death toll – still rising at the time of writing – included firefighters, volunteers and civilians, some overcome by flames, others by the heat itself.

Turkey was not an isolated flashpoint but more akin to the leading edge of a continental burn. In Greece, Italy and across the eastern Mediterranean, similar conditions have prevailed. 

And yet: “Just a hot day.”

Scrolling through the UK Met Office’s Facebook post about Turkey’s record heat, one might expect concern, curiosity or even a sober call for concerted action. 

Instead the voices of indifference seem to shout loudest with many of the top comments veering toward minimisation:

    “It’s Turkey. It’s always hot.”
    “It’s summer. Get over it.”
    “Every year you say it’s the hottest ever – so what?”

Such remarks aren't surprising anymore but they are disappointing and dangerous.

What we’re seeing isn’t a few keyboard cynics. It’s a growing climate indifference – a conditioned reflex to ignore or downplay events that no longer feel shocking. 

It’s as if the extremes scientists have warned about have become background noise. But to those on the ground – displaced, grieving, choking in smoke – it’s all very real.  

Climate context
This summer’s heat in the northern hemisphere is part of a wider and well-documented trend:

•    Europe is warming twice as fast as the global average.

•    the frequency and duration of heatwaves across the Mediterranean has tripled in the past 20 years.

•    attribution science has made it clear – events like Turkey’s 50.5C day are virtually impossible in the short term without human-induced climate change.

So, no, this is not just “a hot day” for the record books. It is part of a pattern that is remaking our seasons, our safety and our stories of the future. 

Survivability
As global temperatures rise, there’s a growing and often overlooked truth: above certain thresholds, the human body simply cannot survive for long without artificial cooling. 

It is widely accepted that a 35C wet-bulb temperature – a combination of heat and humidity – marks the upper physiological limit for humans. 

Beyond this, sweating becomes ineffective, the body can no longer cool itself and death can occur within hours, even in the shade. In dry heat, conditions above 45-50C without shade, ventilation or hydration can lead to heatstroke, organ failure, and death. 

Turkey’s new record is dangerously close to these thresholds and in a world where access to air conditioning and reliable electricity is not universal, especially in rural or low-income communities, this is no longer just a matter of discomfort.  

Complicit indifference 
It’s tempting to see social media as a misinformation sideshow. But the stories we tell – and the ones we ignore – shape public discourse and political will. 

If each new heat record becomes a meme or a punchline, we lose the urgency. And without urgency, we lose momentum. Indifference breeds delay. Delay costs lives.

That’s why this blog post is not just about numbers. It’s about meaning – about connecting the dots before the hairline cracks become fault lines.

In a moment like this, it's not enough to track the rising heat. We must also track the rising silence – the space where concern should be but isn’t. If records like Turkey’s 50.5C don’t register as wake-up calls, what will?

This is not hyperbole. It’s our future history and the tragedy is already unfolding more quickly than was predicted.

Transformation, if it comes, will demand not just awareness but imagination – a capacity to think far beyond fossil futures and current lifestyles.

When climate fiction feels real

 

Humanity’s climate emergency no longer lurks in some distant, abstract future. It is encroaching – slowly and unevenly – into our daily lives, politics and psychology.

We are living in a time when yesterday’s dystopias are starting to feel like tomorrow’s headlines, and the Danish TV drama Families Like Ours, which I’ve just finished watching (BBC 4 and iPlayer), could hardly be timelier.

Set in a recognisably near-future world, the series imagines a country that will soon become unliveable due to rising sea levels. 

The nation is forced to evacuate in order to avoid the worst effects of climate collapse – an unsettling premise that turns the tables on our assumptions about migration, power, and privilege.

These are not just speculative ideas for me. Similar themes – a fractured country grappling with inundation, social disintegration and a creeping authoritarianism born of environmental breakdown – are explored in my own forthcoming novel.

Watching Families Like Ours, I felt as though I was viewing an alternative version of my own future world – an unsettling “what if”, unfolding not in an alien realm or distant century but just around the next political and climatic corner.

Drama of denial

What’s particularly powerful – and is also noted in The Guardian’s excellent review – is the drama’s restraint in the midst of crisis.

There are no Hollywood-style disasters, no CGI tsunamis or blazing infernos. The apocalypse arrives in the form of an official government directive urging people to evacuate for their own good.

It’s slow, procedural and quietly bureaucratic – a polite but chilling, “Leave while you still can”. It’s not the bang of destruction but the whimper of compliance.

As the review puts it: “The creeping horror comes from how normal everyone is trying to pretend it all is.”

That line haunted me because in many ways it captures the most terrifying part of our own present: the societal impulse to look away from impending disaster.

Denial – especially around the politics of human-driven climate change – is one of the most potent forces of our age. It manifests not only in outright scepticism, but in the performative optimism of politicians and social media commentators, the greenwashing of corporations and the general inertia of daily life.

We’re encouraged to adapt, to “build back better”, to install air conditioning or move to higher ground – all without seriously confronting the root causes or long-term consequences.

In my upcoming novel Flood Waters Down, I explore how denial calcifies into something darker: a form of authoritarianism cloaked in pragmatism. When people become desperate for security, they often look to ideology, to borders, to technological fixes and political scapegoats.

The regime that emerges in my novel doesn’t rise through a coup. It grows organically, incrementally, from the fertile soil of fear, apathy, and obscene wealth.

That’s the genius of Families Like Ours. It shows how easily we might slide into such a world – not with jackboots and firestorms but via polite emails, official notices and a quietly panicking population.

Climate as character

Another powerful parallel is how the environment itself becomes a kind of character – not a passive backdrop, but an active force that shapes events, relationships and identities.

For the Danish series, the land is turning against its people. It’s no longer safe or reliable, forcing individuals and families to make choices they never imagined – not just about where they live but about who they are.

In this context, Flood Waters Down uses the English Fens as a landscape transformed by flooding into a waterlogged no-man’s-land of shifting loyalties and fragile settlements.

It is at once beautiful and treacherous, steeped in memory and myth, but altered beyond recognition. My characters must navigate not just physical terrain but the moral geography of a broken society.

A question that looms large in both the TV drama and climate fiction like mine is: who gets to stay, and who is forced to go?

In Families Like Ours, the reversal of current refugee and migration narratives is pointed. Suddenly, it is affluent Europeans who must flee. The usual script is flipped, inviting viewers to reconsider the racial, economic, and geopolitical dynamics of climate migration.

By contrast, Flood Waters Down focuses on those who are left behind. Those who remain in the Fens – whether by choice, circumstance or resistance – are seen as dangerous or irrelevant by the centralised regime. The government has moved on. Sovereign individuals are given free rein, exploiting the fears of the wealthy.

The people left behind, ghosted from the national narrative, become the seedbed of something new – an insurgent hope, a counterculture rooted in resilience and memory.

Not all of them are heroes. Some are lost, vengeful, morally compromised. But they refuse to disappear. They refuse to comply with the tidy story of evacuation and erasure.

And maybe that’s what climate fiction, at its best, can offer. Not just warnings but alternatives. Not just despair but a glimpse of the radical imagination we’ll need to survive – and adapt.

Edge of reality

Stories about what the future has in store matter because they help us feel the unfolding crisis – not just understand it intellectually but inhabit it emotionally. What would you do? How would you respond? What would you cling to, and what would you let go of?

Climate fiction is not about predicting the future with accuracy. It’s about preparing ourselves with clarity and courage to meet what materialises. And it may yet prove to be one of our most powerful tools in confronting the climate emergency.

The Danish drama ends not with neat resolution but with the unsettling knowledge that something has irrevocably changed – and that our familiar categories of nation, family, identity and home may no longer apply.

Flood Waters Down concludes too not with triumph but with possibility. With characters who have chosen to fight for a different kind of future, even as the old world sinks beneath the waterline and a new, uncertain one begins to emerge.

The climate emergency is already here. The question is: what stories will we tell about it – and what kind of world will we shape in its wake?

Looming catastrophe of climate change

Fossil-fuel companies have become the “godfathers of climate chaos” and should be banned from advertising in every country, the secretary general of the United Nations stated while delivering dire new scientific warnings of global heating.

Speaking in New York this week, António Guterres called on all media to stop enabling “planetary destruction” by taking fossil-fuel advertising money as he warned the world faces “climate crunch time” in its faltering attempts to stem the crisis.

“Many governments restrict or prohibit advertising for products that harm human health,” he said. “I urge every country to ban advertising from fossil-fuel companies. And I urge news media and tech companies to stop taking fossil-fuel advertising.”

In his speech, Guterres announced new data from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) showing there is an 80 percent chance Earth will breach 1.5C in warming above pre-industrial times in the next five calendar years. 

The WMO says there is a already a 50-50 chance that the global average in the period between 2024 to 2028 will be above 1.5C in warming.

“We are playing Russian roulette with our planet,” he said. “We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell.”

According to the European Union’s Copernicus monitoring system, the past 12 months (from June 2023 to May of this year) have already breached this target following a string of months with record-breaking heat, with the average global temperature being 1.63C higher than the pre-industrial average.

Guterres likened the looming catastrophe to the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs. “We’re having an outsized impact and, in the case of climate, we are not the dinosaurs - we are the meteor. We are not only in danger - we are the danger.”

He admitted that the 1.5C target was “still just about possible” but said there needed to be far greater effort from countries to slash carbon emissions, to boost climate finance to poorer countries, and for the fossil-fuel industry to be made pariahs by governments, the media and other businesses.

“The godfathers of climate chaos - the fossil-fuel industry - rake in record profits and feast off trillions in taxpayer-funded subsidies,” he said. “It is a disgrace that the most vulnerable are being left stranded, struggling desperately to deal with a climate crisis they did nothing to create.

“We cannot accept a future where the rich are protected in air-conditioned bubbles, while the rest of humanity is lashed by lethal weather in unlivable lands.”

Guterres attacked fossil-fuel firms for their meagre investments in cleaner forms of energy and for “distorting the truth, deceiving the public and sowing doubt” about climate science.

He called for global bans on fossil-fuel advertising and for public relations and media companies to cut ties with oil, gas and coal interests.

“These companies should stop acting as enablers to planetary destruction. Stop taking on new fossil-fuel clients and set out plans to drop your existing ones. Fossil fuels are not only poisoning our planet - they’re toxic for your brand.”

The speech was timed to act as a rallying call by the UN which is increasingly concerned that the climate crisis has slipped down the list of priorities for a world racked by war in Ukraine and Gaza, and other economic worries.

A meeting of the powerful G7 group of countries will take place in Italy next week, followed by November’s Cop29 climate summit, to be held in Azerbaijan, along with a G20 gathering in Brazil.

Amid this wrangling the impacts of the climate crisis continue to hit home, with countries including India and the US recently gripped by severe heatwaves. 

A study released this week found that extensive flooding that has devastated parts of southern Brazil, leading to 169 deaths, was made at least twice as likely due to human-caused climate change.

But Guterres urged people not to lose courage or hope. “No country can solve the climate crisis in isolation and we do still have a choice,” he said.

“This is an all-in moment. We can create tipping points for climate progress, or we can career to tipping points for climate disaster.”

He warned that it was now the people of Earth versus the polluters and the profiteers – and it is time for leaders to decide whose side they’re on.

“Tomorrow it will be too late,” Guterres concluded. “Now is the time to mobilise, now is the time to act, now is the time to deliver. This is our moment of truth.”

Professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, Bill McGuire, agrees and says that as a scientist he is faced with “indifference and a failure to understand the reality of the climate crisis every day.

“We must wake people up. Extreme weather, especially heatwaves and floods, is set to be all-pervasive and will have a colossal impact on our lives and livelihoods,” he warns.

“A recent report by the European Environment Agency warned that climate breakdown will bring ‘catastrophic’ consequences for an unprepared Europe, most notably through heat stress, river flooding and flash floods.

“And this applies equally to the UK. Disruption to transport and utilities, interference with industrial and business operations, serious pressures on food production and supply, and increased burdens on the health service and hospitals, will conspire to make day-to-day living harder and far more unpredictable.”

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A Moment of Truth – UN speech by António Guterres (5 June 2024)
Hothouse Earth – by Bill McGuire (2022)