If a recent crop of commercials touting the benefits of artificial intelligence is any indication, lots of Americans these days feel unduly burdened by the demands of everyday cognition. Apparently, it's asking way too much to expect a human to figure out how to make a small repair, or write a note to a friend, or plan a meal to feed a child. I've got a perverse favorite among these ads, for Apple Intelligence. A sharp-looking Black man of maybe fifty named Lance sits down at a drab, clean conference table full of colleagues. Somebody asks him if he's read a "prospectus," and Lance decides to lie about it.

There's a hilarious illustration from Paris in late 1839, mere months after an early type of photograph called a daguerreotype was announced to the world, that warned what this tiny picture portended. In Théodore Maurisset's imagination, the daguerreotype would bring about a collective hysteria, La Daguerréotypomanie, in which crazed masses arrive from the ends of the earth and overrun a small photo studio. Some in the crowd want pictures of themselves, but, mon Dieu, others demand cameras to take their own pictures--Maurisset shows them loading the machines like contraband onto steamships bound for foreign ports--and still others throng simply to ogle at this newfangled thing and all the lunatic proceedings surrounding it. The clamor is so feverish that it brings about a mass hallucination, in which nearly everything else in the landscape around the studio, including railroad cars, a clock tower, a basket for a hot air balloon, indeed anything remotely boxy in shape, morphs into cameras. As they march to the studio, the crowds pass by half a dozen gallows, where in response to the daguerreotype's appearance artists have hung themselves.

Emerging anxieties pertaining to the rapid advancement and sophistication of artificial intelligence appear to be on a collision course with historic models of human exceptionality and individuality. Yet it is not just objective, technical sophistication in the development of AI that seems to cause this angst. It is also the linguistic treatment of machine "intelligence." But what is really at stake? Are we truly concerned that we will be surpassed in our capacities as human beings?

"Education must not simply teach work -- it must teach life." Du Bois were echoed by the U.S. Department of Education's Twitter account, but ironically, with a spelling error. The account attributed the words to W.E.B. "DeBois." Of course, people on Twitter noticed right away and were not afraid to bring out the red pens and correct the "alternative spelling." Later, the account apologized for the error -- but, sadly, it botched that too.

And then, of course, there's the possibility that we'll be attacked by aliens. Or that robots might become smarter than humans and put us in zoos. The Sci Fi Channel sponsored a discussion on Capitol Hill yesterday speculating on 10 exceedingly lousy ways our species might meet its end. It was part of an elaborate promotion for a television special called "Countdown to Doomsday," which airs tonight at 9. Amazingly, the channel managed to lure two congressmen and some serious experts to essentially shill for the show by talking about the various paths toward mass extinction. The event was moderated by Linda Douglass, a former ABC congressional correspondent, who kept saying that "Countdown" was so scary that she'd been having trouble sleeping.