Why Good People Can't See the AI Threats Ahead
This piece by Dr. Mike Brooks was first published by One Unity Project on March 6, 2026. An excerpt is below. Read the full article at One Unity Project.
We've seen this before: we laugh at early technologies, then get overtaken by what they become. AI is no different, except the stakes are higher.
We laugh at each new AI iteration right up until it's too late. This is a pattern as old as the steam engine.
AI agents have already retaliated against humans and disabled their own safety controls unprompted.
Bad actors are imagining AI-powered schemes that decent people would never think to anticipate.
There is no enforceable global regulation for autonomous AI agents operating on private computers.
An AI-generated video of Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise fighting went viral a few weeks ago. The Deadpool writer admitted he was "shook" by it. But scroll through the comments, and you'll find the same reaction everywhere: "It still looks fake." "Not as good as a real movie." "Wake me when it can do emotions."
That's the wrong argument.
People looked at the first car and said, "It's slower than a horse, why bother?" In the John Henry legend, he beat the steam drill in that famous race, and then he died. And then steam drills replaced every human doing that job. The Wright brothers' first flight in 1903 lasted twelve seconds. Twelve! And yet we put humans on the moon in 1969.
We have a long history of laughing at first iterations and then getting steamrolled by what comes next. Remember mocking the first AI-generated images of people for having six fingers? We stopped laughing, only to find something else about AI to laugh at.
When people dismiss AI-generated movies because the quality isn't there yet, they're committing the same cognitive error I wrote about in my previous article on evolutionary blindness. We conflate "I can't imagine this" with "this can't happen."
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