{"id":406641,"date":"2026-01-14T12:54:16","date_gmt":"2026-01-14T12:54:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/406641\/"},"modified":"2026-01-14T12:54:16","modified_gmt":"2026-01-14T12:54:16","slug":"what-pluribus-reveals-about-ai-and-our-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/406641\/","title":{"rendered":"What ‘Pluribus’ Reveals About AI And Our Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rhea Seehorn<\/a> is about to dominate awards season for her spectacular performance as Carol Sturka in \u201cPluribus,\u201d the wildly unsettling sci-fi series on Apple TV from Vince Gilligan (\u201cBreaking Bad,\u201d \u201cBetter Call Saul\u201d).<\/p>\n

On Sunday night, she won the Golden Globe<\/a> for Best Performance By A Female Actor In A Television Series – Drama. Earlier this month, she won the Critics\u2019 Choice Award for Best Actress in a Drama Series.<\/p>\n

In \u201cPluribus,\u201d both identity and individualism are under direct threat. An alien virus spreads across the globe, absorbing nearly everyone into a collective consciousness \u2014 the hivemind \u2014 leaving behind just 13 \u201clucky\u201d people who are immune. Lucky might be the wrong word; unlucky might be worse. These survivors become keepsakes of an old world almost overnight.<\/p>\n

Carol loses her wife, Helen (Miriam Shor), during the \u201cturning event.\u201d While other immune survivors savor their new reality, Carol rejects it.<\/p>\n

The hivemind does not retaliate against her. Instead, it accommodates her. It assigns her a constant companion named Zosia (Karolina Wydra), whose role is to manage Carol\u2019s day-to-day life and anticipate her needs. Zosia is attractive, calm and composed to an unnatural degree, and she bears an uncanny resemblance to one of the central characters from Carol\u2019s bestselling book series. It\u2019s the hive\u2019s idea of kindness toward the survivors.<\/p>\n

\"RheaRhea Seehorn and Karolina Wydra star in “Pluribus.”<\/p>\n

The show had social media in a full chokehold, not just because of flashy effects or twist-of-the-week gimmicks, but because no one could quite figure out what the hell the hivemind actually wanted. People were arguing timelines, motives, ethics \u2014 trying to reverse-engineer the soul of something so soulless.<\/p>\n

On the surface, the hivemind\u2019s goal is clean and seductive: singularity. It wants a collective consciousness that promises eternal bliss, total harmony and the end of suffering. No war. No hunger. No lies. No loneliness. <\/p>\n

What\u2019s unsettling is that most of the 13 don\u2019t actually hate the new reality. One even joins the hive voluntarily. The hivemind \u201cloves\u201d them in its own alien way. It cannot lie to them. It gives them anything they want, whether that\u2019s comfort, safety, pleasure or power. Even an atom bomb, if you ask. Imagine that.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the quiet horror that \u201cPluribus\u201d sits in so comfortably. The entire world in \u201cPluribus\u201d bends its knee to you, anticipates your desires, removes friction from your life entirely. That sounds like a dream, until you realize the cost.<\/p>\n

Beneath all that generosity is the hivemind\u2019s unconscious objective: to absorb you and strip you of your identity.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the real conflict of \u201cPluribus.\u201d Do you trade your individuality for eternal bliss as a hive member? Do you accept ultimate servitude from the hive as one of the immune, living like royalty atop a hollowed-out world? Or do you try to save humanity by restoring it to what it was: wars, hunger, inequality, contradictions, beauty, mess and all? None of the choices is clean. None of them feels heroic. And that\u2019s what makes the show linger.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t help but see the parallels between the hive and artificial intelligence. In a world in which AI is \u201cperfecting\u201d our writing, our speech, our imagery, our bodies, and now even generating idealized versions of humans themselves, it raises a question: How exactly do we benefit from this, and what does that benefit quietly take from us in return?<\/p>\n

Gilligan, the show\u2019s creator, said the series isn\u2019t actually a direct response to AI. Polygon editor Jake Kleinman asked Gilligan if the show\u2019s hivemind is supposed to be equivalent to ChatGPT.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wasn\u2019t really thinking of AI because this was about eight or 10 years ago. Of course, the phrase \u2018artificial intelligence\u2019 certainly predated ChatGPT, but it wasn\u2019t in the news like it is now,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not saying you\u2019re wrong,\u201d he continues. \u201cA lot of people are making that connection. I don\u2019t want to tell people what this show is about. If it\u2019s about AI for a particular viewer, or COVID-19 \u2014 it\u2019s actually not about that, either \u2014 more power to anyone who sees some ripped-from-the-headlines type thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

But that doesn\u2019t make the parallels disappear. <\/p>\n

Why struggle when the world\u2019s largest, smartest agent can do it better, faster, cleaner? That\u2019s the same pitch the hivemind makes in \u201cPluribus.\u201d A perfectly ordered life. No suffering. No inefficiency. No dissent.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what scares me about AI. Not the technology itself, but the quiet trade we\u2019re being asked to make. Convenience for identity. Ease for authorship. Bliss for humanity.<\/p>\n

\u201cPluribus\u201d isn\u2019t warning us about aliens. It\u2019s holding up a mirror and asking whether we\u2019d recognize ourselves if the world worked perfectly.<\/p>\n

And whether we\u2019d even care if we didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\u201cPluribus\u201d is streaming on Apple TV.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rhea Seehorn is about to dominate awards season for her spectacular performance as Carol Sturka in \u201cPluribus,\u201d the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":406642,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":["post-406641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=406641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406641\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/406642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=406641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=406641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=406641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}