My wife and I have been working our way back through the prestige-TV canon — first The Americans, now Mad Men. Watched today, both dramas function less as portraits of the decades they depict, the 1980s and the 1960s, than as mirrors of the moment we still occupy. What struck me most in the second-season finale of AMC's liquor-fled Madison Avenue saga was a mood: the sense of teetering on the eve of destruction, a sensation now running 75 years and counting.

In that episode, "Meditations in an Emergency," Don Draper watches as Kennedy goes on television to announce Soviet missiles in Cuba. The characters mull over where they would want to be should war arrive. Joan brings up civil defense; Don brushes it aside. Strictly in plot terms, the crisis changes nothing — one critic has called it a clever backdrop, while another reads it as a device that pushes the characters to confront what was already inside them. Don has just resurfaced from one of his vanishing acts, and the dread of possible annihilation has a way of making people act strangely.

The debate over AI safety differs in substance, yet it summons the same unease society has carried since our grandparents' era. What becomes of a public told, again and again, that the end is close at hand?

Every generation's basement

I can feel it even from my own 1980s childhood. The Berlin Wall came down when I was 6, and the possibility of nuclear confrontation was baked into the surrounding culture. It hardly required the explicitness of Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction." I caught it in Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues," where Johnny is in the basement while the narrator stands on the pavement, thinking about the government. To my ear, that basement was a fallout shelter, though the ever-elliptical Dylan may have been saluting the "underground" world of 1950s Beat poetry instead — the scene responsible for at least one Jack Kerouac quotation in every high school yearbook.

(The Americans, by contrast, leaned far more heavily on Peter Gabriel, notably "Games Without Frontiers," whose character "Willy" may be a nod to West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. The title rendered in English the name of Jeux Sans Frontières, a European television game show on which teams from different countries competed in silly costumes at goofy tasks, with Kate Bush supplying the French phrase in the backing vocals.)

The Beats, in turn, took their cue from the French existentialists, a movement reckoning with a godless universe in the age of the bomb. And Oppenheimer, one of Christopher Nolan's defining blockbusters of the 2020s, dramatizes the very moment that entire culture came into being.

Small wonder that one of science fiction's most influential AI-doomsday narratives, 1984's The Terminator, came from action auteur James Cameron, who often recalls being 8 years old as the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded and reading through his father's bomb-shelter pamphlets. Cameron told Rolling Stone in August 2025 that he still fears a Terminator-style apocalypse built by putting AI together with weapons systems — even up to the level of nuclear weapons systems, nuclear defense counterstrike, all that stuff.

How much of the latest chapter in the American apocalypse is Cameron's inheritance?

Who's holding the bomb

Stanley Kubrick's 1964 comedy Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb imagined a rogue general ordering an unauthorized attack while the War Room scrambled to avert catastrophe. Its joke was that the machinery built to prevent the end could deliver it. Digger, this year's Tom Cruise megabomb, seems to be a self-conscious attempt to bottle Dr. Strangelove's over-the-top energy — though its climate subject appears misplaced, because the real parallel is artificial intelligence.

Kevin Roose's new book, The AGI Chronicles — AGI standing for artificial general intelligence, the hypothesized milestone at which AI systems could match human capability across most cognitive tasks — portrays Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, whose company makes the Claude chatbot, as a man obsessed with atomic questions of risk and danger. Amodei used to hand every new Anthropic employee a copy of his favorite book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. The book also reports that Amodei's personal hero is Leo Szilard, the scientist who conceived the nuclear chain reaction — to his own horror — and later drafted the 1939 Einstein letter to FDR that helped lead to the Manhattan Project. Is Amodei's Szilard worship so sincere that he is self-consciously replaying the same steps?

On Sept. 12, Amodei published a 3,800-word essay called "We Must Pace the Frontier." "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models," he wrote. He said the risks include losing control of AI systems and misuse for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and he proposed outside monitoring, coordination among labs, and international cooperation — a concrete agenda for measuring whether warnings are matched by action. In late September, Reuters reported on a prospectus for Anthropic's planned IPO warning that its technology could pose a "catastrophic or risk to humanity" — an odd choice for a financial disclosure, given that the market would not exist without humans to run it.

Cal Newport, the New Yorker columnist and Georgetown computer science professor, recently described this mindset to Ed Elson on the Prof G Markets podcast as a "weapon of mass anxiety." The AI doom talk coming out of Silicon Valley, he argued, is largely the product of an ideological community that has been repeating the same message for 15 years. In his telling, ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Anthropic, and their loudest critics are locked in a "family fight" over whether the world is ready for an AI "god," and many of their concepts — recursive self-improvement among them — come straight out of futurist theory rather than computer science.

Real wolves

In fairness to every generation of doomsayers, they did not make it all up. Janan Ganesh, a Financial Times columnist, pressed the point in an Oct. 10 column titled "The danger of pessimism fatigue." The panics of yesteryear, he wrote, "were founded on large, concrete events: Pershing missile deployments, 9/11, a coronavirus." He walks through the same scares I grew up with: nuclear annihilation in the 1980s, then al-Qaeda, then the pandemic. And he opens with the number that hangs over this whole debate: a 10% chance, according to some in the field, that AI causes human extinction.

By Ganesh's own accounting, though, the alarm outran the threat nearly every time. "Turns out the Cold War was ending, not turning hot," he wrote. Of al-Qaeda, he added: "The threat was not invented but nor was it ever remotely existential."

There is also a serious case that the AI wolf is wearing the wrong costume. Arvind Narayanan, a Princeton computer science professor who directs the university's Center for Information Technology Policy, wrote an influential essay with his colleague Sayash Kapoor called "AI as Normal Technology." They argue that AI looks a great deal like earlier revolutionary technologies, which means we already have a road map for managing it.

On Ezra Klein's podcast last week, in an episode titled "Intelligence Isn't Power," Narayanan and Klein debated whether AI is comparable to "electricity, the internet, the bicycle" or to "something more like an alien mind." The "swarms" of agents, Narayanan argued, are dangerous — but so were computer "worms," or viruses, in their day, and it took innovation to keep the lid on them. One could extend the argument to nuclear technology and nuclear proliferationn
James Cameron was 8 when he watched Kennedy on television. I was 6 when the Wall came down. Somewhere, a kid that age is hearing that the machines might end the world — and hearing it from the people building the machines.

Cameron needed 22 years to turn Cuba into Skynet, the rogue military AI of the Terminator films. Check back in 2048. For the rest of us, I fear we will get used to life under the specter of the bomb, again.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.