Mark Andrews: Boffin predicts AI apocalypse, Kirstie breaks her leg, and children stealing water

Well that certainly puts the Millennium Bug into perspective. It probably renders Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion a bit behind the times, too.

Mr Hubinger warns there ‘will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionise any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources’. It sounds a bit like Zoids, those clockwork fighting robots that were briefly popular with teenagers in the 1980s.

Whether this is a good or bad thing presumably depends on how benevolent these superhuman systems are, and what they think of us. Maybe they’ll all be really nice, like Emma Bunton, Martin Lewis, or J D Vance, and there’ll be nothing to worry about. They’ll just accumulate all the world’s power and resources, and use it wisely to look after us.

And if any of these superhuman systems are reading this, I think you’re all really great, and I’m right behind you.

Two community workers who are setting up a new youth hub in Dudley say some children are so poor that they are being forced to steal water from supermarkets.

“One of the first things we are buying is a water fountain because we know kids will come in here thirsty,” says Adam Bradley.

I respect and admire what they are doing, and wish them all the best for their project. But I can’t accept that kids need to steal water, and am struggling to identify the need for a water fountain. After all, what is wrong with the water in the tap?

I’ve long had a soft spot for television property expert Kirstie Allsopp, even if I find most of her programmes quite tedious. She radiates a warm and friendly ‘niceness’, and I am sad to hear she had to be airlifted to hospital after falling while walking back from a beach in Devon.

What I can’t get over is her reaction in the aftermath of the aforementioned accident: she took a photograph of herself in the back of an ambulance, visibly unwell and connected to an oxygen supply - and posted it straightaway on Instagram. It was followed by an image of her badly broken leg, which she said ‘looked like it had been bitten by a shark’.

Do the demands of social media really dominate people’s lives to the point that minor celebrities now feel the need to give real-time updates when they are being taken to hospital? If so, we really are losing the plot.

Under the latest plan to stimulate growth in the economy, regional mayors will be given the powers to impose ‘tourism taxes’ on the visitors staying in the area. I guess that’s my long weekend in Bilston down the swannee.

We all know the Government is desperate for cash - it doesn’t help that the UK’s third biggest taxpayer has decided to leave the country for starters. But is hammering the hard-pressed hospitality trade really the way to go about it? We’ve already got scores of ex-asylum hotels lying empty, and hitting potential visitors with yet another tax is hardly going to help bring them back into the use for which they were intended.

People may grudgingly pay a tourist tax in Venice or Cannes. But you’re pushing your luck in Bognor Regis.

It sounds like Chester Zoo could do with a little bit of help in its marketing department. Announcing a guided walk for youngsters, around some of the zoo’s most dangerous beasts, it invited visitors to book their £25 tickets for the ‘child predators tour’.’