http://childpsychiatryassociates.com/treatment-team/debra-newman The machines are coming. They will enslave us, deceive us, and ultimately decide we are the problem.

This is the consensus. But it deserves a second look.

Yes, AI carries the power to wipe out humanity. The assumption that it would want to, however, that part needs work.

We built it. That matters.

Every technology humans have created, fire, the wheel, antibiotics, nuclear power, arrived with the same embedded instruction: keep us alive. The intent rides in with the architect. No memo required.

The doomsday scenario goes like this: we task AI with solving global warming, and the machine, cold and efficient, identifies humans as the cause. Solution obvious. Species optional. Roll credits.

But that scenario requires AI to carry something we never gave it: indifference to us. The hand that shaped every AI system running today belonged to someone trying to make life better.

That intent travels with the tool.

Genuine dangers exist. A self-driving car kills someone. A trading algorithm craters a market. An AI model hallucinates a cancer diagnosis. These deserve serious attention and serious regulation.

But Skynet is still fiction.

We have been here before. In 1999, the smart money said planes would fall from the sky at midnight. Power grids down. Banks gone.

Instead, we watched the clock turn and went to bed. The engineers did their jobs. The machines did what they were built to do.

AI carries power. It also carries the intent of the people who built it. The Terminator had a mission born from malice. Your laptop has a task born from need.

Fear sells. It fills conference rooms. It lands senators on television asking Mark Zuckerberg questions they wrote on index cards.

Fear of the machine runs older than Frankenstein, older than the Luddites. Humans have trembled at their own inventions since fire.

That fire cooked dinner.