I really want to believe this is true. Ronald Reagan’s 1980s idea for a missile-defense system—he called it the Strategic Defense Initiative, while Democrats derisively nicknamed it “Star Wars”—might have been inspired by his role in the 1940 spy adventure Murder in the Air, which featured a powerful ray weapon capable of knocking down enemy aircraft.
What is certain is that the 40th president, addressing the United Nations General Assembly in 1987, said, “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”
Those are just a couple of examples suggesting America is a country steeped in science fiction and shaped by it. Not that there should be much argument about my claim. Eight of the 10 highest-grossing films of all time in the US, including all of the top five, are computer-generated spectacles about superheroes or space adventures.
Consider, too, the country’s 60-year love affair with Star Trek. The original series debuted on September 8, 1966, and has since spawned 12 more TV series and 14 films. NASA named its prototype space shuttle Enterprise, and most of the fictional starship’s crew turned up for its public unveiling on September 17, 1976. Many of today’s top techies were superfans. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have both said the show inspired them to start rocket companies.
Unfortunately, our view of artificial intelligence seems informed less by Data, the amiable android of Star Trek: The Next Generation, than by the genocidal Skynet and its T-800 murderbot enforcers from the Terminator film franchise. A Politico poll conducted in September found that 63 percent of Americans think AI could one day destroy humanity—presumably after it takes all our jobs.
The AI world has its own sci-fi touchstone. Doomers or not, the people who build and opine on the technology often reach for Dune, the book series launched in 1965 by Frank Herbert, when they imagine machines run amok. (The third installment of its successful film adaptation arrives at Christmastime.) A foundational event in that future universe is the Butlerian Jihad, humanity’s revolt against thinking machines—and against the men who used them to dominate everyone else. When the last of those machines was destroyed, the carbon-based survivors bound themselves with a sacred commandment: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”
Elon Musk is a well-known fan of the book series, and before he started building super AI, he was warning about it, as in a 2014 post on Twitter, now X: “Dune series by Herbert also brilliant. He advocates placing limits on machine intelligence.” References to the Butlerian Jihad crop up frequently in the online debate about advanced AI. Some are tongue-in-cheek. Others seem less so. “They think the transition to a posthuman world will just magically happen,” AI critic and podcaster Émile P. Torres wrote in a post on X recently. “No: there will be masses of people in the streets fighting against the ‘posthuman elite’ in a bloody-if-need-be Butlerian jihad.”
Journalist Michael Cuenco was nearly as earnest in a 2023 Compact magazine essay headlined “We Must Declare Jihad Against A.I.” He cast such a real-world Butlerian rebellion as “an opportunity to forge a new class truce uniting all who stand to lose from the AI revolution against the forces who stand to profit from it.” Among other limits, he would, like the humans of Dune, make preventing human-level AI “an explicit objective” for policymakers.
Anyone who suspects we live in some bizarro simulation might note that the novel’s great prohibition has now found its way into legislation in Washington. The Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, from Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Representative Greg Casar (D-TX), would, as its name suggests, “permanently ban the development and deployment of superintelligent AI.”
More worrisome: “Butlerian Jihadist” was the online alias of Daniel Moreno-Gama, the 20-year-old accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman’s San Francisco home in April. He used it on PauseAI’s Discord server and in writings warning that AI could drive humanity to extinction.
Fortunately, classic sci-fi also offers a saner way to think about the dawning Age of AI. Central to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels, published in the early 1950s (and now loosely adapted for television by Apple), is the “Seldon Crisis.” Hari Seldon is a ‘psychohistorian’ (an amalgam of economics, history, psychology, and sociology) who uses the science of mass behavior to foresee inflection points in the inevitable fall of a galactic civilization. As each crisis comes to a head, the danger looks existential. Yet deeper forces are already bending humanity’s fate toward an eventual renaissance. The greater threat is that fear will push people into rash mistakes that knock the recovery off course. Those guarding the future must keep their nerve and let Seldon’s elegant math do its work.
America is experiencing something like its own Seldon Crisis. In the two decades since the housing bust and banking panic, economic growth has downshifted sharply. A pandemic then gave way to a bout of inflation that has yet to fully abate. Only a third of Americans think the country is on the right track, and 69 percent believe its best days are behind it. Stagnation and turmoil are explanation enough for the rise of populism. When the pie grows this slowly, it starts to look fixed, and many conclude that someone else’s gain, whether a tech billionaire’s or a recent immigrant’s, must be their loss.1
I shudder at the thought of what our political economy might look like after another decade or two of growth so slow it doesn’t feel like growth at all. And yet the deep magic of human innovativeness, as expressed through Moore’s law and neural networks, is right now on the move through our socioeconomic system. Even without progress toward beyond-human intelligence, advanced AI can accelerate the economy so much that living standards—wealth and health and opportunity—would be indisputably rising.
The AI revolution could provide the positive economic shock and ongoing uplift that America needs to stop zero-sum thinking from taking deeper root and reverse the populist rot. It’s happened before. The internet boom of the 1990s jolted America out of its post–Cold War torpor. As in a Seldon Crisis, the right response is mostly hands-off patience: Let a powerful technological force play out within the existing system, and intervene only when there’s reasonable evidence that government action is needed to contain big risks—and even then, policymakers must weigh opportunity costs and unintended consequences.2
But America risks fumbling its Seldon Crisis—a moment when civilization seems headed for disaster, yet the forces already in motion point to a way through for anyone wise and patient enough to see it—and becoming trapped in a zero-sum doom loop. Economic disappointment breeds an ever more risk-averse society. That culture in turn saps the innovative, entrepreneurial capitalism on which rising living standards depend. America then compounds the damage with drawbridge-up economic policy. Protectionism and immigration restrictions are the obvious examples.
More important still is the current backlash against AI. Banning data centers and trying to freeze AI progress based on speculative harms would be an unforced error. With apologies to Rahm Emanuel, never let a Seldon Crisis go to waste.