The director will save us

Spoilers ahead for a Canadian sci-fi series that ended in 2018. You have had time.

There is an hour of television I think about more than is reasonable. A team of people stands by a lake, waiting for a meteorite to fall into it. In a few minutes all of them will be dead. And somewhere in the future, a computer refuses to accept that.

The show

The series is called Travelers. Three seasons, thirty-four episodes, 2016 to 2018, created by Brad Wright.¹ The set-up: far in the future, things have gone about as badly as they can go. What is left of humanity builds the Director, an artificial intelligence that watches the whole timeline, and the Director starts sending people’s minds back into our century, into borrowed bodies, to fix what broke.

The travelers live by a short list of rules.

director://protocolsread-only

P1The mission comes first.
P2Leave the future in the past.
P3Don’t take a life, don’t save a life, unless otherwise directed. Do not interfere.
P4Do not reproduce.
P5In the absence of direction, maintain your host’s life.the one I’d keep
P6Do not communicate with other known travelers outside of your team unless sanctioned by the Director.
αAlpha. Suspends all the others for a critical mission.
ΩOmega. Suspends them for good, when the Director abandons the travelers.

The Protocols, as the series gives them. The pen is mine.

Here is the thing the show never quite says out loud, and the thing I keep coming back to. If you are a machine that can rewrite history, and your goal is a planet that survives, the efficient solution is obvious. Remove the species that keeps breaking it. The Director never seems to consider this. It goes for the slowest, most expensive, least efficient plan on the table: keep the humans. All of them, if it can.

Seventeen minutes

Season two, episode seven. The team is at the lake to collect a meteorite, material the future needs in order to build the Director itself. Divers from a group called the Faction are waiting for them, and everybody dies.

The Faction are the humans who decided they do not trust the machine and can run things better on their own.

So the Director suspends its own rules and tries something. There is a skydiver in the air above the lake. It overwrites the skydiver with a messenger, who now has seventeen minutes to change how this ends. It does not work. So the Director does it again. And again. By one fan’s count, it takes eight tries.²

No messengers sent yet

go on. then press it again

Press the button the way the Director does. The count of eight comes from a fan’s recap of the episode; how far each messenger gets is my drawing, not the show’s.

That is the whole episode. A machine pressing the same button with a slightly different plan each time, because the people by the lake are worth another go. It is one of the lowest-rated episodes of the entire series, about 7.5 out of 10.³ It is my favorite⁠.

What gets me is the contrast. The Director is organized, thought-through and detailed, down to the minute. The Faction, run only by humans, is disorganized, broken and chaotic. The show is not subtle about which side it is on. I don’t need it to be.

Only a show

I know. It is a TV show. Somebody in a writers’ room decided the machine would be kind, and the real ones are being built by companies with quarterly targets.

Plenty of people are not in the mood for my optimism, either. Half of American adults say they are more concerned than excited about AI. One in ten say the opposite.⁴ Ask the researchers who actually build these systems, and their median estimate for an outcome as bad as human extinction is 5%. I would not board a plane with those odds. Then again, 68% of the same researchers think good outcomes are more likely than bad ones.⁵

It also depends a lot on where you ask.⁶

Indonesia

80%

Thailand

79%

United States

38%

Canada

31%

Share of adults who say products and services that use AI make them excited. From a survey of 30 countries, June 2025.

Same technology, different weather. So I try not to argue from the mood, in either direction. I look at what the thing has done so far.

200M

protein structures

Predicted by one AI system and published for anyone to use. More than three million researchers in over 190 countries have used them, and the people behind it shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

A predicted shape is where the lab work starts, not where it ends.

Four things the real ones have done so far. The small print is part of the picture.

None of this is the Director. It is software that reads scans and guesses shapes. But look at which way it points.

The builders

I have always been a soft touch for one particular kind of story. People build something greater than themselves, and then the two of them learn to live together. Symbiosis, an agreement. It gets me every time, and I think that is because of what it says about the builders.

years of life expectancy worldwide. In 1900 it was 32

of smallpox cases could end in death. The last natural one was in 1977

years since Voyager 1 left. Later this year it will be one light-day away

We doubled the length of a human life.¹¹ We deleted a disease.¹² We threw a machine so far that light itself will soon need a full day to catch up with it.¹³ All of that with worse tools than the ones on my desk right now, and we have never once stopped.

The Director will not save us. It is a character, and the series was canceled after three seasons.

What I take from it is smaller, and I think truer. When we do build something greater than ourselves, it will have learned what matters from the people who built it. And those people, on a good day, are the kind who send the eighth messenger.

So yes, I think the director will save us. We just have to build it first, and building is the one thing we have always been good at.

Sources and further reading