The Present Indicative, 28 October 2025

My Current Mood: Horror Stories

“It’s a perfect night for mystery and horror. The air itself is filled with monsters.” Mary Shelley (Bride of Frankenstein)

It’s the Season of the Witch in Salem, Massachusetts, and our haunted population swells with tourists both weekends and now weekdays. In the last twenty years it’s visibly obvious that the annual crowds are growing and come earlier. It once was just October; now the costumes start to show around Labor Day.

The reasons are multi-fold. When social restrictions eased with vaccination, people looked for quick relief from Pandemic lockdown. Salem is a quick roadtrip for most of New England, and we saw a lot of license plates from New Hampshire and Connecticut in 2021 and 2022.

But then the plates began to come from further afield. Pennsylvania. Michigan. Oklahoma. Everyone loves a good horror story, and what’s more fun than the kitsch of witchcraft at the expense of 20 people executed by the Court of Oyer and Terminer 333 years ago. We’re only halfway to the Number of the Beast.

“They’re making our food out of people.”

Horror movies have always held a dirty mirror up to the institutions and customs that run our routines. There are no monsters in polite society until we bring them back from foreign lands (Dracula). Science must respect the boundaries of man’s limits (Frankenstein). It’s protocol to respond to distress beacons coming from strange planets…hey what’s in this slimy pod that just peeled open (Alien).

These monsters seem quaint compared to our present dystopia. Our FUD comes from greater existential forces than the Boogie Man. Do you remember Soylent Green? Our nightmares once involved overpopulation, a recurring 20th-century premise in film and literature feeding our claustrophobia, and our cannibalism.

“Very odd, what happens in a world without children’s voices.”

And yet…overpopulation is the opposite of our 21st-century concerns. Despite 2.44 billion more people on this planet than were here 30 years ago, governments around the globe are diligently examining depopulation, and the economic impact of demographic shifts. McKinsey even wrote a paper on it! We used to worry about Soylent Green, and now it’s Children of Men. While some towns combat the loneliness of these larger social forces with mannequins, what if we went one step further, and automated the automata?

“Resistance is futile.”

Nature hates a vacuum. While human populations might face collapse, robots are filling the void in front-running countries like China, where their numbers have grown over ten times this past decade in industrial settings. I for one look forward to the rise of the machines. There may even come a day when robot tourists come to Salem in self-driving cars. At least they’ll obey traffic lights and cross-walks (unless they glitch).

In Other News…

Next Tuesday’s episode of The Future Indicative will cover the very human topic of marketing. Marketing has been a business function under review and revision since the introduction of AI seemed to deliver us from the need for people to write press releases. My guest, Megan Heuer, was the right person to help define what marketing should be in the 21st century. As we were trading modern-day horror stories she had one to share on the topic of AI:

The last interesting article I read was “How Afraid of the AI Apocalypse Should We Be?” And it was an opinion piece—or actually an interview from an opinion writer, Ezra Klein at The New York Times—and he was interviewing a researcher who I’d never heard of, called Eliezer Yudkowsky, who is a longtime researcher of all things AI and back a number of years ago he was one of the first people to say, We really shouldn’t build this. And he literally wrote a book called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.

And I’m not much of a doomsday sort of person. I like to have faith that, I mean, eventually the Sun’s going to swallow us all, but that’s not for a few more million years. But this guy and apparently a few other scientists take it very seriously that the threat from AI is existential and as big a deal as things like climate change and the Sun swallowing us in a few million years.

But what I thought was really interesting about the article is the opinion writer, Ezra Klein, is a little bit on the side of: Hey, this all sounds a little bit science fiction-y to say that if we build AI, we’re all going to die. But I take you and others that are studying with you seriously enough to wonder. Tell me how did you arrive at that conclusion? And why do you continue to defend that position so vigorously? And why do you want other really smart people who are out there building these things to pay attention to this?

And it broke it down into some interesting arguments that I hadn’t ever really thought about. They still feel a little bit abstract in that the researcher was making the argument that the reason behind AI being able to come for all of humanity is because it’s essentially akin to trying to have a conversation with natural selection. And that got to a level of abstraction saying, You really can’t talk to natural selection. And even trying to anthropomorphize natural selection is sort of doing it a disservice in terms of the big disconnect between saying this thing that has resulted in the creation of all humanity, and everything else, is essentially the reasoning behind why this thing that we’ve just built will be the doom of all of us.

But it was thought provoking. And I think sometimes I’ll look at an article like this and I’ll say, Hmm, that’s a provocative headline. There’s the marketer in me paying attention to something that got my attention. But in this case, when I was reading, I thought what was really interesting was these two people who clearly have thought a lot about a topic—one who’s a particular world-renowned expert—having an argument that I probably only understood about two-thirds of. But that was really interesting to read and valuable to read and maybe will have me look at things a little bit differently. And that’s really all I can expect from an article in The New York Times on a Wednesday.

And now I share it here with you here on a Tuesday. A few other resources from that episode include:

Mark Twain quotes on Advertising, Lies, and Lightning.

The Simpsons, Season 7, Episode 24

Happy Halloween!

Alex Effgen