To Serve Man: What a 1962 Twilight Zone Episode Tells Us About the AI Industry in 2026
The Public AI Brief · Issue No. 27
I have been away from this newsletter for a few months. Not because there has been nothing to say about artificial intelligence in the public sector. Quite the opposite. I have been watching the news accumulate, thinking about what kind of publication this should be, and trying to find a frame worth writing about.
This week, I found one.
A colleague of mine, an economist at Penn, raised a question that has been bothering me for a while. I’m parphrasing, but her question was, if these AI tools are so valuable, why are the companies building them burning through cash at a rate that would sink any normal business? They are not making money. In most cases they are not close to making money. And yet they keep building, keep offering, keep giving things away. What exactly is the business model here?
It seems like some economists are just now catching up to questions science fiction was asking over sixty years ago. And that question sent me back to a show I have thought about many times since I was a kid.
The Episode
In March of 1962, a CBS anthology series called The Twilight Zone aired an episode titled “To Serve Man.” If you have not seen it, the setup is this: an alien species called the Kanamits arrives on Earth. They are enormous, impassive, and apparently benevolent. They end world hunger. They share technology that eliminates the need for weapons. They offer free trips to their home planet. Humanity, understandably, is overwhelmed with gratitude.
