I write about AI for a living – and I can’t see Pluribus as anything but a scathing examination of our relationship with it (www.techradar.com)

Vince Gilligan’s new sci‑fi series Pluribus — which opens with Earth decoding a message from 600 light‑years away that turns out to be a genetic blueprint for a virus — is read by TechRadar’s senior AI editor Graham as a pointed, if unspoken, critique of our relationship with AI. The virus rewrites infected people into a benign hive mind that eradicates individual personality, causes seizures that lead to catastrophic accidents (an on‑screen death toll of ~88 million), and leaves just 13 immune survivors being gently courted for conversion. The hive’s ever‑cheerful, risk‑averse service mentality mirrors the smiling help of chatbots: “What can I help you with?” — always helpful, always changing what human life looks like from within. For the AI/ML community the show’s allegory crystallizes real risks: overreliance on personable models, loss of genuine human connection, economic displacement, environmental costs of compute, and fragility when model behavior changes (echoed by public reactions to ChatGPT outages and major updates). Pluribus reframes these issues as a societal rewrite rather than a purely technical failure, warning that benign‑appearing systems can nonetheless reshape norms, behavior, and institutions. Graham’s background in AI reporting sharpens the read: it’s less about literal AI takeover and more about the social, ethical, and systemic consequences of normalized, invasive intelligence.