AI Mindset

A three-part series exploring how humanity has always feared new tech.

Project details

A three-part series of educational videos produced for Marginal Revolution University, exploring how humanity has always feared new technology — and why that fear has always told us more about the present than the future.

From the moral panics sparked by bicycles and teddy bears, to the guitarist who became Jimi Hendrix by embracing a strange new pedal, to the painters who thought the camera had killed their craft — these videos trace a consistent pattern across 200 years of innovation. Each one draws on history to reframe how we think about AI today: not as an unprecedented threat, but as the latest chapter in a very familiar story.

Production company: Tilapia Film

Character design & character animation: Pipsqueak Animation

Creative & animation: Ole Sturm

AI: Midjourney

Full-Length Videos

200 Years of Tech Panics: From Bicycles to AI

Every major invention in history has triggered a moral panic — from bicycles and cars to books and the radio. This video puts today’s fears about AI in perspective by tracing that long tradition of doomsaying, and asks whether the job-displacement anxiety around AI is any different from past technological shifts. Looking at a century of US employment data, the answer is reassuring: technology destroys jobs, but it reliably creates new ones too. The real question is whether this time might be different — a thread the series continues to explore.

Pedal to the Metal: The Possibility Mindset

When Vox Amps introduced the wah-wah pedal in 1967, one guitarist heard dying sheep and put it down. Another — a journeyman nobody called Jimmy James — picked it up and never stopped experimenting. That guitarist became Jimi Hendrix. The video uses his story alongside Richard Trevithick, Grace Hopper, and Jeff Bezos to argue that the defining difference between those who shape the future and those who get left behind isn’t talent — it’s the willingness to embrace new technology with curiosity and adaptability.

When Photography “Killed” Painting

When the camera arrived in 1838, painters were convinced their profession was finished. Some were right — portrait commissions dried up. But photography didn’t kill art; it liberated it. Freed from the obligation to document reality accurately, painters like Monet and Renoir invented Impressionism. The video draws a vivid line from that single invention through to cinema, TV, YouTube, and TikTok — and closes with the observation that we always fixate on what’s being lost while missing what’s about to be born. The parallel to AI today is left as an open question.