The national conversation about artificial intelligence tends to start at the apocalypse and work backward. That is the central complaint of a new commentary piece in American Thinker, where author Blaine Pardoe argues that the fear surrounding AI owes far more to Hollywood scriptwriting and partisan reflex than to anything the technology has actually done.
Pardoe, a novelist whose byline notes a New York Times bestselling pedigree and a 2022 cancellation by a publisher, opens by cataloging the familiar anxieties: people who, when pressed, describe their AI worries in “vague world-ending catastrophes.” He notes the political whiplash that has surrounded data centers — embraced by Democrats not long ago, now frequently opposed — and the odd sight of AI companies actively requesting regulation from lawmakers he characterizes as barely able to operate a cell phone.
The Terminator problem
His first target is the cultural furniture we have all absorbed. Pardoe ticks off the usual suspects: HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Colossus from The Forbin Project, the military supercomputer WHOOPPER in WarGames, Ultron, and the entire Terminator franchise built on Skynet deciding to exterminate humanity. The through-line, in his telling, is not genuine technological risk but a narrative template — manmade intelligence that hates its makers and sets out to destroy them — repeated so often across decades of films and books that it has hardened into trope.
He concedes that a handful of pictures have shown machine intelligence sympathetically — Short Circuit, WALL-E, Bicentennial Man, The Iron Giant — but dismisses them as lighthearted and, notably, decades old. Audiences, he writes, want doom, and Hollywood supplies it. The implication is that the public’s mental image of AI was written in a screenwriter’s room long before any of today’s models existed.
Jobs, Luddites, and a 1984 memory
The second source of resistance Pardoe identifies is economic, particularly among younger workers who fear AI will eliminate their livelihoods. He labels that instinct Luddite and attributes it to a failure of education — a lack of historical memory about how previous waves of automation played out.
He reaches back to his own experience, recalling that when he finished college in 1984, desktop computers were still novel and widely expected to consume everyone’s job. Manufacturing robotics was simultaneously becoming mainstream. His account acknowledges that people did lose work, but argues the net result was job creation on a larger scale. Information technology, he notes, was a niche skill set at the time; within roughly a decade, IT positions were plentiful and among the best compensated in the economy. It is a familiar historical argument — creative destruction with a happy ending — deployed here as reassurance that today’s disruption follows a well-worn path.
The political flip
The third obstacle Pardoe names is raw partisanship, and this is where the piece sharpens into a pointed claim about the left. Three years ago, he writes, Democrats were enthusiastic about data centers, promoting them almost as eagerly as Green New Deal priorities. That posture changed, in his account, the moment President Trump publicly backed data centers as a way to keep the United States ahead of China. Overnight, he contends, the left’s position reversed, with hostility toward the president channeled into opposition to AI, data centers, and the broader ecosystem around them.
He adds a jab at the regulatory conversation itself: critics of the industry complain about insufficient oversight, he writes, but have not produced a plan of their own — largely, he suggests, because few people in Washington actually understand the technology they are proposing to govern. It is worth noting this is Pardoe’s characterization of the political landscape, not a documented survey of Democratic platforms, and readers should weigh it as the opinion of a conservative commentator writing for a conservative outlet.
The industry’s playbook
Having diagnosed what he sees as irrational and unfounded fears, Pardoe turns prescriptive. The industry’s first task, he argues, is to deliver a win so substantial that it overwhelms the doom narrative with visible potential. His example: if AI contributes to a cure for some form of cancer, or produces some comparably tangible breakthrough, the public will focus on what the technology can do rather than what a movie villain once did.
Second, he calls for education — teaching people that technological innovation historically correlates with growth and new opportunities for those willing to pursue them. He floats the idea that AI might enable a four-day work week, and offers a concrete anecdote: a friend who is not a programmer used AI to build a sports recreation tracking application and now has something he could sell. Teach people to use the tools, Pardoe writes, and they will be surprised by what they can make.
On politicization, his advice is notably colder. There is little to be done, he suggests, other than the president exploiting his opponents’ antagonism to steer them toward outcomes he wants on this emerging technology. It is a strikingly transactional prescription — less a call for persuasion than for leverage.
The argument’s limits
Pardoe closes on a historical note: unfounded fears always accompany technological upheaval, and once a new technology is adopted, lifestyles generally improve under a capitalist economy. New businesses, careers, and opportunities, he writes, have always waited just over the next horizon for those brave enough to look.
What the column does not do is engage with the specific, non-cinematic concerns that animate much of the current debate — questions about labor displacement in white-collar fields, the concentration of AI capability in a handful of firms, energy and water demands from data centers, or the mechanics of oversight. Pardoe’s frame treats the fear as primarily cultural and partisan, which makes his remedies — a marquee win and better public education — feel coherent within his argument but incomplete outside it. The jobs question, in particular, gets the 1984 treatment: yes, some people lost work, but the aggregate improved. Whether displaced workers in the path of AI will find that arithmetic comforting is another matter, and not one the column takes up.
His note that younger people are the most anxious about employment is arguably the piece’s most revealing detail. That cohort is not responding to Terminator reruns so much as to entry-level hiring freezes and the sense that the bottom rung of the career ladder is being pulled up behind them. Pardoe’s answer — that history rhymes and opportunity follows — is the confidence of someone recalling a 1984 that worked out in his favor. Whether it works out again is precisely what is being argued, and no column, from either side, gets to settle that in advance.
What American Thinker’s piece does contribute is a clear articulation of the pro-AI case as its advocates would prefer to make it: that the opposition is emotional, historically uninformed, and politically motivated, and that the answer is not retreat but demonstrable results. Whether that argument persuades anyone outside its choir may depend less on Hollywood than on what the technology does in the next few years to paychecks and prices.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/the-real-dilemma-of-artificial-intelligence/