Today’s story that matters is a little on-the-nose, but I’m afraid we’re living in rather obvious times, at least in some ways. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice has been around for a long, long time. The earliest written version comes from the second century Rome. Later, Goethe wrote it as a ballad in the 1700s, and after that it was made into an opera, I think. I and most of us these days know it from Disney’s Fantasia. I watched a lot of Disney animation as a child, but this one probably disturbed me more than any other. Somehow, the danger we pose to ourselves feels truer even to a child than the danger of monsters or villains. I still recall the alarm I felt as the mop Mickey had animated into relentless and mindless laborers dumped bucket after bucket of water into his lab, threatening to drown him, and who knows, maybe the entire world. And then when Mickey tried to destroy the mop, it divided, and soon began to madly reproduce itself into a crazed army. The message was shocking, how quickly things can get out of control.

The connection is clear. According to the experts who know the most about the subject, we are rapidly losing control of various A.I. entities, which are now on the verge of “recursive self-improvement,” the precise moment when Mickey’s mops begin to split and proliferate.

In the old stories and the Disney version, the old sorcerer comes home and, though angry, cancels Mickey’s spell and puts the house in order. The problem we face is that there is no sorcerer. We’re all apprentices, casting spells we do not understand.