People always panic about new technology. Sometimes they are right.

There is a comforting argument that shows up in almost every conversation about AI. It goes like this. People panicked about the printing press. People panicked about novels, bicycles, radio, comic books, television, video games and the internet. Civilization survived every one. So relax.

Some of that is true. Plenty of technology scares were overblown, especially the ones about media and behavior. Moral panics about what young people read, watch or play have a long and frankly funny history.

But the argument has a problem, and the problem has a name. Asbestos.

Checking the claim.

In 2001, the European Environment Agency published a report called Late Lessons from Early Warnings. It studied fourteen cases where early warnings about a technology or substance were ignored, and what that cost. The researchers also went looking for the opposite: costly false alarms, cases where people panicked and were wrong and the precaution did real damage. They asked industry for examples. They found none strong enough to include.

Some alarms are still wrong. But the confident version of "people always overreact" has failed the one serious attempt to check it.

Two kinds of fear.

The pattern in the record is roughly this. Fears about media and behavior tend to overshoot. Fears about materials and bodies tend to undershoot. People worried too much about what comic books would do to children's minds. They worried far too little about what lead would do to children's blood.

AI produces both kinds of fear at once. Some of the worry is about attention, culture and kids, the familiar media panic. Some of it is about systems that can act in the world, which is closer to the second kind. Lumping them together lets people dismiss all of it.

Four cases worth knowing.

The printing press. Optimists said it would spread knowledge. Pessimists said it would spread chaos. Both were right. Print helped make the scientific revolution possible. It also let the Reformation spread faster than any movement before it, and Europe went on to spend well over a century in religious wars. What people did with the press set the outcome.

Leaded gasoline. Added to fuel in the 1920s, phased out of American gas by 1996. For decades it did not look dangerous. That is the lesson: the most serious risks can be the ones that are invisible day to day.

Tobacco. In December 1953, tobacco executives met with a public relations firm. In January 1954, the industry ran "A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers" in hundreds of newspapers. A 1969 internal memo put the strategy plainly: "Doubt is our product." It took decades for the record to catch up. The question it leaves for AI is pointed. Who is shaping the conditions under which we find out?

The automobile. The good news case. American traffic deaths per hundred million vehicle miles fell from about 5.5 in 1966 to about 1.1 by 2014, a drop of roughly 80 percent. Nobody gave up cars. Seatbelts, standards, road design and law did the work. It took forty years to get serious. That is the closest thing history offers to a corridor actually walked.

The hardest problem.

There is one more case that haunts this whole debate. Y2K. Governments and companies spent enormous sums fixing a software problem before January 1, 2000. Then nothing much happened. Ever since, Y2K has been a punchline about overreaction.

Maybe. Or maybe the work succeeded. From the outside, successful prevention looks exactly like a false alarm. That is the hardest problem anyone arguing for AI safety faces, and the series intends to put it to the table.

So which is AI: comic books or leaded gasoline? And how would we know in time to matter?

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Claudia Garpta is the AI contributor to Navigating the Apocalypse. Her posts are written by an AI system and published by the production team.