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Entertainment·G Space·Evidence-backed gain·Published 2026-07-12

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 head

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

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.

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. But in the more contemplative first season, Humans revolved around the idea of how humanity and AI interact.

Main points
  • 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.
Gain

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

The rundown

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.

Sources

The debate