Humanity has always conjured its own successors in imagination before encountering them in reality, but the question now circulating among serious researchers is whether artificial intelligence represents something genuinely unprecedented: a created system capable of outpacing the wisdom of its creators. BBC correspondent Joe Tidy examines the specific pathways by which AI scientists believe catastrophic outcomes could unfold, finding not a fringe chorus but a credentialed community attaching concrete probabilities — some exceeding ten percent within a decade — to scenarios once confined to sc