Metathesiophobia
The fear of technological change has been with us always. AI anxiety is just the latest version.
Every time we invent something big, we panic.
We always have. From the Industrial Revolution to the digital age, every major leap forward has arrived with two things: excitement… and dread. And now, with Artificial Intelligence reshaping nearly every part of modern life, we’re watching the same cycle repeat. The same fears. The same warnings. The same “this time it’s different.”
Some of our primate ancestors surely wanted to stay in the trees and caves, where life was familiar and safe. But our big, dangerous brains pushed us forward anyway — toward agriculture, cities, tools, and microwave ovens.
History keeps tapping us on the shoulder: we’ve been here before.
🚇 The Terrors of the Tunnel: When Subways Were “Too Close to Hell”
Picture the year 1863. The world above ground is the world you trust. The idea of traveling under a city — under dirt, under stone, under everything — felt like tempting fate.
When the first subways opened, people had genuine, visceral fear. And it wasn’t fringe fear.
Religious leaders in London warned that the tunnels dipped too close to the “infernal regions.” Some insisted that riding beneath the streets meant brushing up against hell itself.
Others believed the air underground would kill you. They said the human body wasn’t built to survive inside a sealed, mechanical tunnel.
And many were certain a breakdown underground meant instant death. No sunlight. No escape. No hope.
To them, the subway wasn’t an engineering marvel. It was a violation of the natural world.
Sound familiar?
💨 The Peril of Speed: When Cars and Planes Felt Like Suicide Missions
Then came speed.
When early cars appeared, people panicked. “Humans aren’t meant to move that fast,” critics warned — and by “fast,” they meant twenty miles an hour.
Doctors even coined terms like “railway madness,” arguing that the velocity of trains could damage the mind. They claimed the brain wasn’t designed to process the world at that speed.
Then airplanes arrived and raised the anxiety to a new level. Flying was seen as a defiance of nature itself — reckless, immoral, even blasphemous.
Again: the fear was that we were breaking the natural order. Machines were crossing lines we weren’t meant to cross.
A familiar theme.
💻 The Fear of the Mind: When Technology Threatened Our Brains
As technology moved into the mental world, the fear followed.
The telegraph would destroy writing.
The telephone would destroy real-world community.
Radio would kill imagination.
Television would kill literacy.
And running underneath all of it was the fear of job loss — from the Luddites smashing looms to the disappearance of switchboard operators, typesetters, and entire industries.
People weren’t just afraid of the machines. They were afraid of machines doing human work.
And yes, jobs vanished. But new ones appeared. Entire fields were born.
🤖 The AI Anxiety: Is This Time Really Different?
Now we’ve arrived at AI — a technology that pulls every old fear into one tight knot.
AI feels different because, for the first time, the machine doesn’t just lift or move. It thinks. Or at least it imitates thinking so well that it unsettles us.
AI presses on the deepest anxieties humans have carried for centuries:
Layered on top of that are three modern pressure points:
The Black Box Problem
AI systems are opaque. We can’t see inside them. We don’t know why they make certain decisions. That alone is enough to spark fear.
The Speed of Change
What used to take decades now takes months. Societies don’t adapt at that pace.
Existential Risk
For the first time, people worry the technology could surpass us — not just replace tasks, but eclipse the species that created it.
That’s a new fear. But it still echoes the old pattern.
💡 Navigating the Next Wave
History is clear on one thing: our darkest predictions rarely come true.
The subway didn’t open a gateway to hell. Cars didn’t melt our brains. Planes didn’t break the natural order. Computers didn’t end society. (Well, the jury’s still out on that.)
Yes, every leap forward brought problems: accidents, crashes, system failures, whole industries wiped out. But every leap also brought new safety laws, new tools, new jobs, and new ways to live.
We didn’t abandon subways after the first accidents. We made cars safer. We improved planes. We patched broken computers and kept going.
AI will be the same kind of challenge. Not a prophecy of doom — a reminder that powerful tools demand serious guardrails. Serious policy. Serious intention.
Fear isn’t useless. It forces the conversations we need to have.
This moment isn’t about surrendering to panic. It’s about recognizing the pattern, learning from it, and steering the future instead of getting steamrolled by it.
We’ve never faced a technology with this much potential. But we’ve also never been better equipped to manage it — if we choose to.