From ‘Years and Years’ to ‘Black Mirror’: TV’s best prophecies about how AI will end all our lives | television

TThere aren’t a lot of TV shows yet about how AI will impact our daily lives. After all, there’s not much dramatic potential in shows about creatively flabby people using ChatGPT to write sad little Facebook updates. But that doesn’t mean we’re not getting close.

For many years, fictional works about AI have tended to focus exclusively on killer robots, but some shows have taken a more nuanced look at how AI will shape our lives over the next few years. Here are the best of them.

8. Humans

As the Channel 4 sci-fi series continued, it leaned more and more towards the killer robot trope, as artificial humans gained consciousness, realized how badly they had been treated by the human race, and sought revenge. But in the more speculative first season, Humans was more about the idea of ​​how humanity and artificial intelligence would interact. In an age where people fall in love with their chatbots, and parents are suing OpenAI for ChatGPT encouraging their children to kill themselves, this element of the show is starting to seem terrifyingly prescient.

7. Person of interest

Another slightly lazy thing for creators to do is use the AI ​​as the all-knowing bogeyman, as the last two Mission: Impossible films proved. Jonathan Nolan’s character narrowly avoided falling into this trap, even though it was about an artificial intelligence program designed to prevent crime before it’s committed. The “person of interest” became more important as it introduced a second, less precise program that was determined to destroy the first. If you’ve ever looked in amazement at what looks like an AI race to the bottom, this will resonate.

6. Developers

Alex Garland’s series took a big leap when it predicted what artificial intelligence could achieve by using machine learning to analyze every bit of data in the universe to map the past, present, and future of all of human history. Given that today’s AI has roughly the same skills as a trained copywriter, this may still be a few years away. However, the culture that brought technology into existence—and that valued progress over morality—seems quite contemporary.

5. Next

This short-lived Fox procedural was about an artificial superintelligence that went out of its way and wreaked havoc on the world. Obviously this hasn’t happened yet (wait six months), but it has done a very disturbing job of showing how easy it is, since everything we own seems to be connected to the Internet. The emails were fraudulent. Phones dropped. Wi-Fi connected cars are a mess. I can’t remember if someone’s smart fridge ended up killing them, but honestly, it’s only a matter of time.

4. Years and years

Russell T Davies wrote his dystopian thriller more than half a decade ago, but with each passing day it seems as if he is getting more and more right. The series predicted the Ukraine war, the pandemic, a second Trump term, and a right-wing populist leader eager to break up the BBC. Another theme of the show is having characters forced to work in low-paid service after their jobs are taken over by artificial intelligence. Which is frustrating, but since the show also features bombings and death camps, it could always get worse.

3. Mrs. Davis

On the surface, Vince Gilligan’s new show Pluribus has a lot in common with Damon Lindelof’s 2023 series Mrs Davis. Both feature a woman determined to save the world from a force that seems to have united the rest of the world against her. In the case of Pluribus, an alien virus destroys personality, replacing all of humanity with a single, absurdly blissful consciousness. But in Ms. Davis’s case, the threat was an all-knowing artificial intelligence that people willingly signed up to — even though it was destroying the planet — because it made their lives a little easier. Sound familiar?

2. Capture

A BBC drama with a premise that becomes more relevant by the day; What if you can no longer trust your eyes? The film The Capture depicted artificial intelligence as a propaganda tool, whereby governments could use deepfake technology to film anyone doing anything, with the results indistinguishable from reality. Again, this isn’t impossible to imagine – there are already fake photos on TikTok of Queen Elizabeth II having a tantrum at Greggs – but the idea of ​​using AI as a means of controlling reality is more frightening than any killer robot.

1. Black Mirror

He’s clearly the father of dystopian AI nightmares. Black Mirror has been around so long, and it’s so full of ideas, that you can basically use it to predict any given set of ways AI will destroy us all. Non-consensual deepfakes? Joan is terrible. Do people undoubtedly form destructive bonds with chatbots? I will come back. Are authorities using AI to commit atrocities to keep their hands clean? Hated in the nation. Literally killer robots? Metalhead. When the end comes, as it surely will, it’s frustrating to think that your last thought will probably now be: “Oh, I think I saw this on Black Mirror once.”