The AI Explosion: Were we warned?
A media perspective
Everyone loves a good fantasy. Some are outrageous, such as the Walking Dead, that ran for 12 seasons. I doubt if anyone expects Zombies to come shuffling down their street anytime soon. Fortnite currently sports 4.5 million users concurrently, and as engrossing as it may be to its devotees, it’s a freakin game.
Yet some fantasies are not so fantastic. Especially those dealing with technology can be eerily prescient.
So that raises the question: were “science fiction” writers not so fictional but visionary? Should we have taken heed of the writers’ vision and anticipated our current world, where AI is everywhere and everything we let it be, including a substitute for our brains and our morals? What does science fiction teach us about why we find ourselves with technology that is at the same time enriching and threatening?
Let’s review some of the most famous science fiction, and you can draw your own conclusions as to what we should have learned and where are we now.
How about if we start in 1898? HG Wells War of the Worlds depicted an invasion from Mars with the goal of occupying our vibrant planet instead of their dying one. The Martians’ technology is so far superior to Earth’s that they seem destined to win and take over the planet and its inhabitants until they are killed by a virus that they have no resistance to.
Of course, in 1898 a book was it as far as mass media could go. Later, in 1938, Orson Welles created and broadcast a radio version of the story; six million listened, and of them more than one million are said to believe it was a real event.
So what’s the stress here? Technology we have no clue about and no way to deal with or stop it. And, according to Wells, our humanity—a virus—saved us from being destroyed by technology.
Next up, fast forward to 1956. Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars. He depicts a civilization on Earth a billion (yes, billion) years in the future, where humanity resides in Diaspar, a sealed city managed by a central computer and are guaranteed immortality. The protagonist, Alvin, who is a “unique” without fear of the outside world discovers a city named Lys, which houses a group that lives on the land and their humanity and has normal human mortality.
Thinking about it, Clarke sets us up for the contrast of a stagnant group of humans whose lives are run by a computer, and who really have nothing to live for, much less be immortal for. On the other side are humans with telepathic (communication) skills that grow their own food and whose lives are made richer by the fact that they are going to die.
In 1963 the longest running show in TV history premiered, and it is still running: Dr. Who. Whether you watch an early run or today, the story is the same: Dr. Who, a time lord from the planet Gallifly (with two hearts- one for technology and one for humanity?) struggles to keep humanity free from evil forces such as the Daleks, predatory tin cans who would love nothing better than to kill the Doctor and all of humanity. Watching the show, the message is clear. Technology (not the beneficially used technology that propels the Doctor’s Tardis all over time and space) can be made evil and a threat to humanity as we know it.
Moving ahead to 1984 and 1991, James Cameron’s Terminator 1 and 2 introduces us to Skynet, a powerful force of machines which is intentionally asserting control over humanity. The movies focus on the search for John Connor, the one individual the machines consider a threat, and the “humanization” of the Cyborg played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In a 2025 Article by the UC Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, the author Ran Segev states: “The Terminator films’ portrayal of an apocalyptic future, where killer cyborgs travel through time to suppress humankind, their creators, raises fundamental questions about the trajectory of technological advancement, specifically artificial intelligence.” (Link) The recurring theme is of John Connor, his mother Sarah and father Kyle Reese as a sort of “holy family” to save mankind from total subjugation by the evil machines.
Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film “2001-A Space Odyssey” shows us a man’s search for meaning which is defined by a black monolith which has been present since the dawn of mankind. In the present, humans develop a computer named Hal 9000 which is intended to help in search and destroy. Unfortunately, the computer becomes paranoid and attempts to destroy the humans who interact with it. Cameron is said to have drawn inspiration from this story and “Dr. Strangelove: How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb” (1964)
Now, thinking about the science fiction which I watched at the beginning of TV, all had the same theme: Evil machines or technology adopted by humans threatening to destroy humanity as we know it. In our neighborhood.
About that time (1950) we have Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot fixup novel which explores in detail the relationship between robots and humans. It is highlighted by the Three Laws of Robotics:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given by human beings, except where such orders conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Of course, that doesn’t quite work out as planned.
In movies, we were treated to monsters like Godzilla and Tarantula who became threats to humanity because they were accidentally created by technology-in this case the Bomb, which we recognized was a force we couldn’t control after we invented it.
Today, we have global technology which can occupy millions or billions of humans with a reach that makes the earlier versions look impotent.
And then there is AI. It is affecting every part of our lives and “offering” to make our lives better, which in some ways It can, but also growing out of our control and raising questions we can’t answer, especially about its consequences for humanity. Like the Daleks, like Skynet, like everything we have read and watched for decades.
Should this history of stories, all with the same theme—humans are squashed under the power of the machines we created, and losing our definition of exactly what being “human” actually is be a warning to us to control it before it controls us?
George Orwell, who wrote 1984 and Animal Farm, said: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stepping on a human face—forever.” (Link)
But—the bomb, the machines and AI didn’t create themselves. So, if we want to stop the music, we need to focus our efforts on the men who created the machines. Motivated by greed, without regard to the human effects as long as it made them obscenely rich, they must be counteracted and regulated by an equally powerful force of moral and righteous power that machines or AI can never have.
When Sarah Connor seeks out Miles Dyson, the scientist who created Skynet, and threatens to kill him, he protests that he didn’t know the future effect of his work. Maybe—but he should have.
The problem is, there are no moral standards when it comes to technology—only convenience which may make us less human. What is the difference to you if your meal is created by a robot or humans? I bet the robot’s offering would be technically perfect, but it would be like canned food, whereas the human offering is fresh, because it was prepared for humans by humans.
For everything we gain with technology, we give something up.
If we leave the moral choices to the technology creators seeking financial and technological domination, we have lost our ability to embody the essence of what makes us human—our empathic soul. Does that sound good to you?
Science fiction writers have been warning us for many years about the prospect of a time when the machines overrule and dominate humans. With AI we are potentially there.
So maybe it is time to watch some old movies and read some old books and think about who we are and how did we get here, the struggles, wars, depressions and world events out of our control. Do we want to give it all up to AI or those who would force it into every corner of our lives, or do we want to rescue our humanness not by eliminating technology, but by prioritizing and controlling it?
And maybe a good book or movie is enough to indulge our fantasies as well as injecting a dose of reality, a clear vision of the road we are on.
Maybe we should take science fiction seriously.
This is a media perspective. Stay tuned for the moral side of the story.
Love AI unconditionally? Trash this or keep it just in case.
Copyright Michael Serwetz 2026
05/01/2026
