A 1983 TV Movie Helped Stop Nuclear War — Can One Stop AI?

A newly published essay makes a big, uncomfortable argument: artificial intelligence is improving so quickly that we may soon build a machine smarter than all of us combined — one whose goals don't match ours. The author points to recent breakthroughs, like AI cracking a famous unsolved math problem, helping create new medicines, and directing a robot arm to paint the Golden Gate Bridge. Only four years ago, ChatGPT didn't exist.

The writer's model is the Cold War. In 1983, roughly 100 million Americans watched 'The Day After,' a TV movie showing a nuclear strike on ordinary families in Kansas. It wasn't a documentary or a lecture — just a story. Yet it reportedly left President Reagan depressed for days, and within a few years the U.S. and Soviet Union signed landmark arms treaties. The Doomsday Clock, a symbolic measure of how close humanity is to catastrophe, moved further from midnight between 1984 and 1991 than at any other time.

The author admits many forces were at work — new Soviet leadership, better communication, economic pressure. But argues the movie did something politicians couldn't: it made an abstract threat feel real to ordinary people. His hope is that something similar happens for AI, so voters and lawmakers act before a disaster rather than after.

The catch: the essay offers no concrete plan, and plenty of experts think the 'everyone dies' framing is overblown — or that it distracts from genuinely urgent problems like job loss, biased algorithms, and AI-generated misinformation. History also cuts both ways: scary stories can inform, but they can also mislead.