The obsession with fantasy fears helps hide the more mundane but also more significant problems with AI that should concern us; the kinds of problems that ensnared Reid and which could ensnare all of us. From surveillance to disinformation, we live in a world shaped by AI. A defining feature of the “new world of ambient surveillance”, the tech entrepreneur Maciej Ceglowski observed at a US Senate committee hearing, is that “we cannot opt out of it, any more than we might opt out of automobile culture by refusing to drive”. We have stumbled into a digital panopticon almost without realising it. Yet to suggest we live in a world shaped by AI is to misplace the problem. There is no machine without a human, and nor is there likely to be.