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PORTSIDE CULTURE
FROM YEARS AND YEARS TO BLACK MIRROR: THE BEST TV PROPHECIES FOR HOW
AI WILL END US ALL
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Stuart Heritage
November 25, 2025
The Guardian
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_ Will AI take all our jobs? Prevent all crimes from being committed?
Or finally develop skills beyond that of a trainee copywriter? Here
are television’s finest depictions of our imminent future… _
The daddy of dystopia … Black Mirror. , Photograph: Everett
Collection Inc/Alamy
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
[Mia (Gemma Chan), Max (Ivanno Jeremiah) and Flash (Ritu Arya) in
Humans.]View image in fullscreen
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Horrifyingly prescient … Mia (Gemma Chan), Max (Ivanno Jeremiah) and
Flash (Ritu Arya) in Humans. Photograph: Colin Hutton/Kudos/Wild
Mercury/Channel 4
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
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and parents are suing OpenAI
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for ChatGPT allegedly encouraging their children to kill themselves,
this element of the show is starting to look horrifyingly prescient.
7. PERSON OF INTEREST
[Michael Emerson in Person of Interest.]View image in fullscreen
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A race to the bottom? … Michael Emerson in Person of Interest.
Photograph: TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy
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
[John Slattery in Next.]View image in fullscreen
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Deeply unsettling … John Slattery in Next. Photograph: Everett
Collection Inc/Alamy
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
[Emma Thompson as Vivienne Rook in Years and Years.]View image in
fullscreen
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Things can only get worse? … Emma Thompson as Vivienne Rook in Years
and Years. Photograph: Album/Alamy
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
[Betty Gilpin in Mrs Davis.]View image in fullscreen
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Planet ravaging stuff … Betty Gilpin in Mrs Davis. Photograph:
Landmark Media/Alamy
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
[Isaac Turner (Paapa Essiedu) and DCI Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger)
in The Capture.]View image in fullscreen
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Far more frightening than any killer robot … Isaac Turner (Paapa
Essiedu) and DCI Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger) in The Capture.
Photograph: Ray Burmiston/BBC/Heyday/Universal International Studios
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
[Black Mirror: Be Right Back]View image in fullscreen
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Could our chatbots destroy us? … Be Right Back: Black Mirror.
Photograph: Channel 4
Clearly the daddy of dystopian AI nightmares. Black Mirror
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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.”
* artificial intelligence
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* AI
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* culture shifts
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* dystopias
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