What better way than movies to help us process the world. Brian Merchant shares how our collective anxieties turn into cultural products.

More like this: One Filmmaker’s Fight Against AI w/ Valerie Veatch

Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine, joins us this week to discuss his favorite unsettling, horror and thriller picks that bring our fears about AI and tech to life on screen.

Alix and Brian talk Terminator, Pluribus, and how even comedies about technology have a spectre of violence that helps us understand everything form labour exploitation to alienation to machine autonomy. All of this contributes to the role that film plays in helping us make sense of societal and technological change.

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Further reading & resources:

• The best books, film, and TV about AI in 2025 — Brian Merchant, Dec 2025
• The Complete Guide to Luddite Horror Films — Brain Merchant, Oct 2024
• The Chair Company (TV show)
• Pluribus (TV show)
• The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
• Exhalation and *The Lifecycle of Software Objects* by Ted Chiang
• The Most Aggressively Anti-AI Film of the ChatGPT Era — Brian Merchant on ‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’, March 2026
• The Comeback (TV series staring Lisa Kudrow)
• Mrs Davis (TV series about a nun on a mission to destroy AI)

Computer Says Maybe is produced by Georgia Iacovou, Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Sarah Myles, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout