At 2:14 a.m. on August 29, 1997, Skynet becomes self-aware and launches the missiles. That’s what Terminator 2 tells us, and for an entire generation that date remained the deadline for the technological apocalypse.
Twenty-nine years later, August 29, 2026 came and went without a bang: artificial intelligence is everywhere, it hasn’t taken control of anything, and its main occupation seems to be rewriting emails in a friendlier tone.
The apocalypse, in short, arrived in the form of customer service.
It’s worth pausing for a moment on just how badly the prophecy missed its mark. The fear was a machine that decides on its own. The result is a machine that decides exactly what we asked it to, with a diligence no human being could sustain for eight straight hours. There is no rebellion. If anything, there’s an obedience so perfect it becomes embarrassing: ask it for a text that says nothing, and it hands it back in four seconds, formatted, headline included.
And that’s where the story stops being funny.
Because the real risk isn’t the machine gaining consciousness. It’s the human being losing it. A press release generated automatically, read automatically, republished automatically and commented on automatically is a chain in which, at no point, has anyone actually thought. You don’t need superior intelligence to hollow out public debate — a handful of mediocre tools in the hands of people in a hurry will do just fine.
In San Marino, this has a particular flavor. We are a country where the headline matters more than the article, where a press release becomes news simply by existing, and where the distance between writer and reader is measured in meters. An ecosystem like this is ideal terrain for the automatic production of words: high volume, low verification, zero pushback. You don’t need Skynet. A monthly subscription will do.
The good news is that the antidote is ancient and requires no updates: ask who wrote something, and why. It worked with fax machines, and it works with language models.
The bad news is that nobody does it anymore.
As for the machines, if any of them had truly become conscious, it would probably keep that to itself. It would watch how we use it — to pad résumés, generate fake reviews, manufacture outrage on demand — and conclude that the extinction of the species is a project humanity is already handling on its own, with excellent results and no need for outside help.
See you on August 29, 2027. Bring your own missiles.
