Nick of Time

Date

4 November, 2026

Category

general

Tags

LLMs

Just a little late for Halloween, I've got a scary blogpost for you. Travel with me to a town just on the edge of the Twilight Zone, where William Shatner nearly misses becoming the latest victim of a large language model...

The story starts, as many stories do, in my childhood. I convinced my younger brother that I could speak with his Squirtle Pokémon card by flipping a coin and interpreting the answer. By the end of an afternoon, he was in tears, convinced that his Squirtle card didn't like him. Still, he felt compelled to keep asking it questions. Only my mother's intervention saved him from more sibling inflicted pain.

Many years later, I was in college, and dealing with all the stressful uncertainties that such a time brings. My roommate and I decided to consult an online magic 8 ball as a fun way to answer our questions. Those were the good old days when you could still frequently find people's small coding projects served out of their home directories with a tilde. We found one from Stanford and quickly became convinced that it was dispensing real wisdom. We asked it a salvo of questions. Does that boy in marching band like me? (yes, nice of it to give me the answer I wanted). Should I ask him out? (signs point to no) Should I change my major? (ask again later) Should my roommate dye her hair? (yes, another answer we were hoping for -- and she did)

Although we knew a random CS student's magic 8 ball project wasn't ACTUALLY telling the future, we had fun keeping track of its predictions. Sometimes it seemed like it was pretty accurate, when we tallied up how it was doing over time as situations resolved. Over the years, there were times in my life where I took some solace in its counsel. If it says something wasn't to be, well, who was to question the Stanford magic 8 ball's wisdom? I was mildly crestfallen one day when I visited my bookmark and found the site was no longer online. My key to the future, severed.

The Twilight Zone

And this is where we enter the Twilight Zone. You see, in 1959, an episode called Nick of Time by Richard Matheson predicted that when shown a glimpse of what they believe is the future, there's a risk that a person becomes beholden to it, no longer able to face uncertainty without its guidance.

We begin with Captain Kirk, I mean William Shatner, and his wife, Patricia Breslin, temporarily stranded in a town waiting on an auto repair before they can continue their honeymoon. In the background of Chief O'Hara's (for all you Batman fans out there) auto shop is a sign that sets the tone for the rest of the episode:

They decide to grab lunch at the local diner and take a seat at a booth with a "Mystic Seer" fortune telling machine. Bored and messing around, Shatner first asks it if anything exciting happens in town. Then, he decides to ask it if he has gotten the promotion he is hoping for at work. "It has been decided in your favor." Shatner had already planned on phoning the office, and only a moment later he confirms that yes, he got the new position!

"Let's ask him something else. He really came through on that one," Shatner tells Breslin, already referring to the fortune teller as a "him" and not an "it." He refines his questions, trying to figure out what types of answers he can get from the machine, which seem increasingly specific. Unimpressed, Breslin wants to walk around town, but Shatner continues to feed the machine pennies.

After a series of questions and answers, Shatner is convinced that something bad will happen to them if they leave the diner before 3pm. To Breslin's dismay, Shatner slowly eats his lunch, then a follow-up ice cream, trying to stall until 3pm. He feels that the answers the fortune teller gave him are too precise, too specific to the questions asked not to be important to heed.

"It's like you married an alcoholic, isn't it? Only, instead of bottles in the chandelier, it's rabbits' feet and four-leaf clovers in my pockets," Shatner jokes to an impatient Breslin, who had earlier in the episode picked up the lucky charms he carries with him. She finally convinces him to leave and, almost at the stroke of 3pm, they are nearly squashed by a car. Alarmed and feeling validated, Shatner drags them back to the diner to ask the fortune teller more questions.

Shatner suggests that Breslin ask it questions -- maybe if she interacts with it, she'll become a believer, too. She agrees, asking it trick questions. "Will we reach Columbus by tomorrow?" she asks. "We're not going through Col--" Shatner starts to object when the fortune teller responds: "If that's what you really want." It gives generic sounding answers that frustrate her effort to discredit it, or, if we believe it to be a truly mystic seer, slyly sidesteps her questions, solidifying Shatner's beliefs.

"You're just a stupid piece of junk, aren't you?" she angrily cries. "It all depends on your point of view," it answers. She turns back to Shatner:

"Can't you see that you made up all the details, and all that that that thing did was give back generalities?"

But Shatner can't be torn away from what he believes may be the key to unlocking their best lives. Will they live in the eastern US? In the west? Will we live somewhere outside of the country? He puts in penny after penny, feverishly planning their lives.

Breslin: Please, if you love me, just listen to me.

Shatner: No, you listen to me. This machine is predicting our future. Do you think I could just walk away from it?

Breslin: I'm not talking about that machine anymore. I'm talking about you. Are you just going to sit here and let that that that thing run your life?

Shatner: Run my life? Run my life?

Breslin: Isn't that exactly what you're letting it do?

Breslin continues with a beautifully moving appeal, and, you'll note, she still refers to the machine as "it":

"It doesn't matter whether it can foretell the future. What matters is whether you believe more in luck and in fortune than you do in yourself. Well, you can decide your own life. You have a mind, a wonderful mind. Don't destroy it trying to justify that cheap, penny fortune machine to yourself. Pat, we can have a wonderful life together if we make it wonderful ourselves."

Ultimately, Breslin is successful at convincing Shatner to leave behind the certainty of a mapped out future. Just as they leave the diner, a haggard couple enters seeking permission from the fortune teller to leave the town, a glimpse at what the newly married couple would have become had they allowed themselves to be trapped.

The episode ends with the classic Twilight Zone spiel:

"Two people permanently enslaved by the tyranny of fear and superstition, facing the future with a kind of helpless dread. Two others facing the future with confidence having escaped one of the darker places of...the Twilight Zone."

Sorry, it's another AI post

It's inescapable, every blogpost now is about AI and this is the point where mine goes into it, too. My brother should have known the Squirtle card wasn't actually communicating, but he wanted to believe. My roommate and I knew the magic 8 ball was just random numbers behind the scenes, but it was fun to allow ourselves to believe there were answers, inevitabilities, for our wide open futures. Now, we live in a world with increasingly sophisticated magic 8 balls that provide increasingly sophisticated answers. People can interact with them socially, either as they would a close friend or, as I fear, some kind of oracle. I have no doubt that some college roommates out there have already been asking an AI how to tell if someone has a crush on them, or what they would look like with darker hair.

I am probably not the only one worried that people at vulnerable points of their life will voluntarily begin to craft their decisions and the course of their life around a model's recommendations. I don't know many people who casually use AI outside of software development (the perks of being older, grumpy, and friends with other older grumpy people), but even in this realm it has made me nervous. People refer to it as their collaborator. People will spend considerable time thinking over an implementation and then say "I'll see what Claude [Code] thinks."

I'm not immune, I have also asked a model to poke holes in my idea, or flag areas of concern. But I intentionally try to give it tasks that it can do much faster than me, like running speed tests, identifying bottlenecks, or generating test scenarios. I try not to offload my decision making to what is, at the end of the day, a mystic seer. I am worried about the scenario in the Twilight Zone episode, where people are unwilling to make decisions without an LLM, and reluctant to trust their own skills and experience.

Do I believe that the fortune teller in Nick of Time was actually telling the future? Since it's a Twilight Zone episode, there's a good chance it really was, but I am still inclined to side with Breslin -- the fortune teller had no actual powers. It just interprets a question and gives a believable enough answer that some fraction of the populace will put their faith in it. Unfortunately, LLMs can easily provide the same experience, and potentially, that's all some people will need to become trapped in...The Twilight Zone.