From Years and Years to Black Mirror: the best TV prophecies for how AI will end us all

There aren’t many television shows yet about how AI affects our daily lives. After all, there isn’t much dramatic potential in shows about creatively flaccid people using ChatGPT to write woeful little Facebook updates. But that is not to say we haven’t come close.For years, fiction about AI tended to be exclusively about 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 this Channel 4 sci-fi wore on, it headed more and more towards the killer robot trope, as the synthetic humans gained consciousness, realised how shabbily the human race had treated them, and sought revenge. But in the more contemplative first season, Humans revolved around the idea of how humanity and AI interact. In an age in which people fall in love with their chatbots, and parents are suing OpenAI for ChatGPT allegedly encouraging their children to kill themselves, this element of the show is starting to look horrifyingly prescient. 7. Person of Interest Another slightly lazy thing for creators to do is to use AI as an all-knowing bogeyman, as the last two Mission: Impossible films proved. Jonathan Nolan’s Person of Interest narrowly avoided falling into this trap, even though it was about an artificial intelligence program designed to prevent crime before it is committed. Person of Interest became more relevant when it introduced a second, less scrupulous program that was determined to destroy the first. If you’ve ever looked on aghast at what seems like AI’s race to the bottom, this will resonate. 6. Devs Alex Garland’s banger of a series took a leap when it predicted what AI could achieve by using machine learning to analyse every piece of data in the universe to map the entire past, present and future of human history. Given that today’s AI has roughly the same skills as a trainee copywriter, this may still be some years away. However, the culture that brought the technology into being – which favoured progress over ethics – does feel quite contemporary. 5. Next This short-lived Fox procedural was about a superintelligent AI that broke out of its confines and thrust havoc on the world. Obviously this hasn’t happened yet (give it six months), but it did a very unsettling job of showing how easy it would be, since every single thing we own seems to be connected to the internet. Emails were faked. Phones went down. Wifi-connected cars went haywire. I can’t remember if someone’s smart fridge ended up killing them, but frankly 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 every passing day it feels as if he is getting more and more right. The show predicted the Ukraine war, the pandemic, Trump’s second term and a populist rightwing leader keen to dismantle the BBC. Another running theme of the show is having characters who are forced into low-paid service work after their jobs are taken by AI. Which is depressing, but given that 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 individuality, replacing all of humanity with a single inanely cheerful consciousness. But in Mrs Davis, the threat was an all-knowing AI that people had willingly signed up for – even though it was ravaging the planet – because it made their lives marginally easier. Sound familiar? 2. The Capture A BBC drama with a premise that becomes more and more relevant by the day; what if you could no longer trust your own eyes? The Capture depicted AI as a tool of propaganda, where governments could use deepfake technology to depict anyone doing anything, and the results were indistinguishable from reality. Again, this isn’t impossible to imagine – there are already TikTok deepfakes of Queen Elizabeth II having a tantrum in Greggs – but the thought of AI being used as a way to control the truth is far more frightening than any killer robot. 1. Black Mirror Clearly the daddy of dystopian AI nightmares. Black Mirror has been around so long, and is so full of ideas, that you can essentially use it to predict any given combination of ways that AI will destroy us all. Non-consensual deepfakes? Joan is Awful. People unquestioningly forming destructive bonds with chatbots? Be Right Back. Authorities using AI to commit atrocities to keep their hands clean? Hated in the Nation. Literal killer robots? Metalhead. When the end comes, as it surely will, it’s depressing to think that your final thought will now probably be: “Oh, I think I saw this on Black Mirror once.”