What Pluribus Has To Teach Us About The Future Of AI

Rhea Seehorn is already dominating awards season for her spectacular performance as Carol Sturka in Pluribus, the wildly unsettling sci-fi series on Apple TV+ from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan.

Earlier this month, she won the Golden Globe for her work in the series, having already picked up a Critics’ Choice Award for the same role the previous week.

In Pluribus, both identity and individualism are under direct threat. An alien virus spreads across the globe, absorbing nearly everyone into a collective consciousness — the hivemind — leaving behind just 13 “lucky” people who are immune. Lucky might be the wrong word; unlucky might be worse. These survivors become keepsakes of an old world almost overnight.

Carol loses her wife, Helen (played by Miriam Shor), during the “turning event”. While other immune survivors savour their new reality, Carol rejects it.

The hivemind does not retaliate against her. Instead, it accommodates her. It assigns her a constant companion, Karolina Wydra’s Zosia, whose role is to manage Carol’s day-to-day life and anticipate her needs. Zosia is attractive, calm and composed to an unnatural degree, and she bears an uncanny resemblance to one of the central characters from Carol’s bestselling book series. It’s the hive’s idea of kindness toward the survivors.

The show had social media in a full chokehold, not just because of flashy effects or twist-of-the-week gimmicks, but because no one could quite figure out what the hell the hivemind actually wanted. People were arguing timelines, motives, ethics — trying to reverse-engineer the soul of something so soulless.

On the surface, the hivemind’s goal is clean and seductive: singularity. It wants a collective consciousness that promises eternal bliss, total harmony and the end of suffering. No war. No hunger. No lies. No loneliness. 

What’s unsettling is that most of the 13 don’t actually hate the new reality. One even joins the hive voluntarily. The hivemind “loves” them in its own alien way. It cannot lie to them. It gives them anything they want, whether that’s comfort, safety, pleasure or power. Even an atom bomb, if you ask. Imagine that.

That’s the quiet horror that Pluribus sits in so comfortably. The entire world in Pluribus bends its knee to you, anticipates your desires, removes friction from your life entirely. That sounds like a dream, until you realise the cost.

Beneath all that generosity is the hivemind’s unconscious objective: to absorb you and strip you of your identity.

That’s the real conflict of Pluribus. Do you trade your individuality for eternal bliss as a hive member? Do you accept ultimate servitude from the hive as one of the immune, living like royalty atop a hollowed-out world? Or do you try to save humanity by restoring it to what it was: wars, hunger, inequality, contradictions, beauty, mess and all? None of the choices is clean. None of them feels heroic. And that’s what makes the show linger.

I can’t help but see the parallels between the hive and artificial intelligence. In a world in which AI is “perfecting” our writing, our speech, our imagery, our bodies, and now even generating idealised versions of humans themselves, it raises a question: How exactly do we benefit from this, and what does that benefit quietly take from us in return?

Gilligan, the show’s creator, said the series isn’t actually a direct response to AI. Polygon editor Jake Kleinman asked Gilligan if the show’s hivemind is supposed to be equivalent to ChatGPT.

“I wasn’t really thinking of AI because this was about eight or 10 years ago. Of course, the phrase ‘artificial intelligence’ certainly predated ChatGPT, but it wasn’t in the news like it is now,” he said.

“I’m not saying you’re wrong,” he added. “A lot of people are making that connection. I don’t want to tell people what this show is about. If it’s about AI for a particular viewer, or Covid-19 — it’s actually not about that, either — more power to anyone who sees some ripped-from-the-headlines type thing.”

But that doesn’t make the parallels disappear. 

Why struggle when the world’s largest, smartest agent can do it better, faster, cleaner? That’s the same pitch the hivemind makes in Pluribus. A perfectly ordered life. No suffering. No inefficiency. No dissent.

And no self.

That’s what scares me about AI. Not the technology itself, but the quiet trade we’re being asked to make. Convenience for identity. Ease for authorship. Bliss for humanity.

“Pluribus” isn’t warning us about aliens. It’s holding up a mirror and asking whether we’d recognise ourselves if the world worked perfectly.

And whether we’d even care if we didn’t.

Pluribus is streaming on Apple TV.