Carlo Rovelli, one of the most celebrated physicists of this era, is surprisingly optimistic about AI and the future of the human race.

The highly decorated and engaging Italian, 70, spoke to The i Paper on a visit to the UK to promote his latest book, On the Equality of All Things, a summation of his thoughts about science and philosophy. His previous books on time, physics, and quantum physics still occupy bestseller lists.

“We can stop AI’s worst effects,” he told me over an espresso in a London hotel. “We have options, and choices.”

“The idea that the future is predetermined is a silly idea,” he added. “We go through a deliberation process all the time. Even in physics, the future isn’t determined.”

His plea for calm comes amid rising panic over a series of rogue AI scandals and bleak forecasts. Last week at the UN General Assembly, the Australian Government revealed it had been hacked by autonomous software originating from OpenAI. The company knew of the incident weeks before informing Canberra.

Rovelli, whose gift for communicating deep science to the public matches that of the late British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, believes that power over the transformative technology must pass from a handful of moguls to governments and the wider public in order to serve humanity.

“Let’s listen to the community as a whole, the world community we see in the United Nations,” he said. “If there’s a chance for the future, it’s giving this way of thinking traction.”

But he sees danger in AI becoming part of great power rivalries. The weaponisation of the technology is even giving Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party pause for thought, with Xi calling for cooperation between Beijing and Washington over AI development at a meeting with Donald Trump last week.

Rovelli cites nuclear arms control deals during the Cold War as a potential model for AI regulation. The physicist, who believes that the creation of nuclear weapons is among the most egregious missteps of the scientific community, notes that the US and Soviet Union were able to avoid a catastrophic war over more than 50 years of intense hostility.

After the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, President John F. Kennedy and First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union wrote lengthy personal letters about avoiding nuclear confrontation.

Two decades later, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met in Iceland and forged agreements to slash their nuclear stockpiles.

Rovelli suggests this history could offer a template for management of AI. His latest book argues that the job of understanding our world and the future is far from done. We have many choices and much to think about. This is Rovelli’s real antidote of hope against the doom-sayers who predict human immolation by super-intelligence and killer robots, the feral spawn of AI.

But the physicist fears that the apocalyptic threat that haunted previous generations is resurfacing. Rovelli recalls a recent conversation with a culture minister of a major government, who said he thought “an atomic bomb falling down somewhere in the world is not so bad after all”. The conversation left him “terrified that the need to avoid nuclear escalation isn’t registering on a politician’s agenda any more”.

Rovelli has a fascinating insight into a critical part of the development of the atomic bomb, involving a meeting between the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who worked on the US Manhattan Project, and Werner Heisenberg, a leader of the Nazi nuclear programme, in Copenhagen in 1941.

The story goes that Heisenberg left the impression that Nazi Germany was developing an atomic weapon to end the war, and Bohr passed that on to the leaders of the US and UK. The rest is history, culminating with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

Rovelli claims that the available evidence indicates that Heisenberg knew the Nazis couldn’t develop a nuclear bomb before the expected end of the war in 1945 or 46. Bohr returned with a sketch by Heisenberg, which he said seemed to be for a bomb. “I don’t think it could possibly have been,” Rovelli tells me. “It is clearly for a civil power plant.”

“Nuclear strategy was weaponised after the war as an instrument for strategic dominance”, says Rovelli, and we must learn from this.

Rovelli’s On the Equality of All Things details the great qualities of Bohr, his spirituality and generosity of mind. The new book is a summation of the author’s work in reconciling the two great theories of 20th-century physics: Albert Einstein’s General Relativity, with its notion of space-time flexibility, and Heisenberg’s pioneering of quantum mechanics.

One of the key themes of this work, Rovelli concludes, is the acceptance of different perspectives, which means “even our enemies have legitimate different perspectives, and we have to listen to them”.

That approach may yet help to steer humanity clear of the next threatened catastrophe.