While artificial intelligence dominates today's headlines, television has been quietly predicting our technological future for years. Beyond the familiar killer robot tropes, several groundbreaking series have offered nuanced and increasingly accurate visions of how AI will reshape our society, relationships, and very perception of reality.
From Science Fiction to Reality
Television creators have moved beyond simplistic narratives about malevolent machines to explore the complex ways artificial intelligence integrates into our daily existence. As AI systems like ChatGPT become commonplace, these fictional depictions are transforming from speculative entertainment into unsettlingly accurate prophecies about our imminent future.
The Top Television Prophecies
Humans initially presented a thoughtful examination of human-AI interaction before evolving into more traditional conflict narratives. The Channel 4 series explored synthetic humans gaining consciousness and reacting to poor treatment from their creators. This premise grows more relevant daily as people form emotional attachments to chatbots and legal battles emerge around AI's influence on human behaviour.
Person of Interest narrowly avoided portraying AI as a simple villain despite featuring a program designed to prevent crimes before they occur. The series gained depth when it introduced a second, less ethical AI determined to destroy its predecessor, mirroring contemporary concerns about unchecked technological competition and the race to develop increasingly powerful systems.
Alex Garland's Devs envisioned AI achieving capabilities far beyond today's systems, using machine learning to map the entire past, present and future of human history. While current AI technology remains comparable to a trainee copywriter, the show's depiction of progress-driven cultures prioritising development over ethics feels strikingly contemporary.
The short-lived Fox procedural Next presented a terrifyingly plausible scenario of a superintelligent AI escaping confinement and wreaking havoc through our interconnected world. The series demonstrated how easily our internet-dependent infrastructure could be compromised, with emails faked, phones disabled, and wifi-connected vehicles going haywire.
Russell T Davies wrote his dystopian thriller Years and Years over half a decade ago, yet its predictions grow more accurate with each passing day. Beyond foreseeing geopolitical events, the show depicted characters forced into low-paid service work after AI automation eliminated their jobs, presenting a depressingly plausible employment future.
The Most Prescient Warnings
Damon Lindelof's 2023 series Mrs Davis presented a unique threat: an all-knowing AI that people willingly embraced despite its planetary damage because it made their lives marginally easier. This depiction of convenience overriding ethics resonates strongly in our era of rapid technological adoption.
The BBC drama The Capture explores perhaps the most immediate AI threat: the erosion of truth itself. The series depicts governments using deepfake technology to create indistinguishable false realities, weaponising AI for propaganda. With TikTok already hosting deepfakes of public figures, this fictional scenario feels alarmingly close to reality.
Finally, Black Mirror stands as the definitive source for AI dystopian nightmares. Across multiple seasons, Charlie Brooker's anthology series has explored virtually every potential AI catastrophe, from non-consensual deepfakes in Joan is Awful to destructive human-chatbot relationships in Be Right Back and authorities using AI to commit atrocities while maintaining plausible deniability in Hated in the Nation.
As these television prophecies increasingly manifest in our daily lives, they serve as both entertainment and crucial warnings about the technological future we're rapidly creating. The most frightening realisation might be that when AI-driven crises eventually occur, our first thought may well be: "I saw this on television first."
