An examination of how media distorts artificial intelligence, and what stoicism can teach us about navigating it.

The Machine That Cried Wolf

Open YouTube on any given afternoon and you will find it: another breathless narrator, another countdown to civilisational ruin. “MIT Scientists Reveal 10 Possible AI Futures, Including the Human Farm.” The phrase hangs there, palpitating your heart, asking you to click. Click it, and you’ll find a video dramatising speculative trajectories presented as though a lab coat were equivalent to a crystal ball.

If that isn’t scaremongering, the word has lost its meaning.

We are living through a moment of profound technological transition, one which demands serious, grounded thinking. Instead, what the media and everything in between largely delivers is a theatre of catastrophe.…