Don't be worried by alarmists who insist we're all doomed! Christopher Stevens reviews The Future With Hannah Fry

The Future With Hannah Fry (BBC2)

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The end is nigh. Ask any expert. Climate change campaigners will try to convince you the world is going to disappear under water as the Arctic melts.

Astrophysicists insist we're long overdue for a meteorite strike, the kind of megabomb from space that wiped out the dinosaurs. Virus watchers are predicting a mutation of the Black Death that will be resistant to antibiotics. Every scientist has their own version of the bleak fairytale.

Professor Hannah Fry, on her half-hour show The Future, was talking to AI analysts who promised us nothing can prevent the onslaught of superintelligent robots.

Berkeley professor Stuart Russell announced AI would strip us of everything that makes us 'a human civilisation... to me, that's almost worse than extinction.'

They're all wrong, and it's easy to prove. Ask doomsayers when the final catastrophe will come, and you'll discover that their pessimism is really a projection of a personal fear about their own impending deaths.

'Humanity can't survive beyond the end of the century,' says the 25-year-old. 'We'll all be dead within two decades,' replies the 70-year-old.

That's always been the case. Think of Private Fraser, the elderly undertaker on Dad's Army, and his mournful catchphrase: 'We're all doomed — doomed, I tell ye!' It was funny because Fraser was ancient.

Nothing Prof Hannah discovered looked terribly alarming, unless you're a rodent. She watched a slice of mouse brain being inflated in a chemical solution and placed under a microscope so that researchers could count the neurons. If we do get expunged from the planet, it'll be good news for white mice.

She also played with a mechanical grabber that responded to verbal instructions. Slowly, it was able to pick up a spoon and put it in a bowl. The programmers were highly excited about this, though I've seen grabber claws at the funfair do a better job.

I'm also old enough to have lived through this panic before, in the 1990s. When chess champion Garry Kasparov was defeated by an IBM machine called Deep Mind, computer scientists were quick to announce that their creations were already smarter than the most brilliant human.

Civilisation didn't fall apart. In fact, even more gifted grandmasters came along, such as the Norwegian genius Magnus Carlsen, as the game evolved.

But the alarmists don't want to hear that everything will be all right. Hannah listened soberly as the Berkeley professor quoted the godfather of computing, Alan Turing, on the inevitability of killer algorithms: 'He was terrified. He said it's hopeless. We have to expect machines to take control. There's no solution, this is just going to happen.'

Turing was such a miserabilist that he didn't even wait for death by microchip. Instead, he injected an apple with cyanide and ate it. Bizarrely, he was obsessed with the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. That's the danger of believing in fairytales.