THE AI EXPRESS

They keep scaring us. Every headline, every podcast, every corner of the internet. “AI will take your job.” “AI will end democracy.” “AI will kill us all.”

None of this is new. Every generation hears the same chorus—new machines, new systems, new fears. A hundred and fifty years ago, Charles Dickens was already writing ghost stories about progress in general and trains in particular: the miracle of the nineteenth century and its menace. In 1866 he wrote one of the darkest little pieces of his career—The Signal-Man—a story not about locomotives, but about dread. About the terror of seeing the future and not being able to stop it.

At the time, trains were producing horrific accidents no one yet knew how to manage. That tension is the same one AI drags us into now.

Trains in Dickens’s day were the most “futuristic” thing imaginable—faster than horses, faster than human bodies were ever meant to move, carving tunnels through mountains. People were exhilarated—and terrified. The parallel to AI today is obvious: dazzling efficiency, unimaginable speed, but also something opaque and uncanny. Dickens suggests that technology doesn’t banish the supernatural or the irrational—it breeds new ghosts.

A man—never named, just “the signalman”—works in a deep railway cutting. Stone walls on both sides, a dark tunnel at one end, a red signal light glowing at night. He spends his life pulling levers, watching the tracks, keeping trains from colliding. Mechanical on the surface, but carrying enormous responsibility.

One day a traveler climbs down to visit him—the narrator. He notices how sharp and careful the signalman is. Not half-mad, but intelligent, educated, precise. And yet the man is shaken. He confides that he has been seeing something.

A figure. Always the same. It appears at the mouth of the tunnel, covering its face with one hand and waving the other as if to shout a warning.

Each time it appears, disaster follows: a collision, a death on the line. The cruelest part? The ghost never tells him what to do. It only signals dread, without giving instructions. He feels cursed—condemned to witness the future but powerless to change it.

The narrator does what any of us would do: he tries to reason with him—nerves, stress, imagination. The signalman shakes his head. He knows what he has seen. And when the narrator returns the next day, it’s already too late. The signalman is dead, struck by a train. Witnesses say the driver was waving frantically, making the same gesture the ghost had always made.

That’s Dickens. No resolution. No exorcism. Just progress and dread—technology moving faster than human beings can make sense of it.

Quick detour: I’m traveling in France right now, and their trains are a reminder of what progress can actually look like. You buy a ticket, sit in a clean, fast train, cross the country in hours instead of days. If the train is thirty minutes late, they ping you a partial refund automatically. I didn’t even notice it was late—I was busy enjoying my crème brûlée from the food car. Imagine that in the States, where airlines strand you overnight with a voucher for stale pretzels and a shrug—if you’re lucky.

French trains are the future Dickens once dreamed of—fast, efficient, human. American trains? Let’s just say the future never fully arrived. This is how progress works. Some societies embrace it, some lag, some get lost in superstition and fear.

Victorians feared trains the way we fear AI. And they weren’t wrong. Trains really were dangerous: derailments, bridge collapses, fires, mangled bodies. People had never moved at such speeds; the human nervous system wasn’t built for it. Alongside the real danger came the myths—ghosts in tunnels, omens on the tracks, rumors that the rushing air would stop your heart. Progress carried risk and invited superstition.

It’s no accident Tolstoy chose a train for Anna Karenina’s fate. Anna is a woman of a new world, stepping out of the rigid structures of her old one. The railway is both her escape and her executioner—the symbol of a society changing faster than it can absorb the people inside it. Dickens saw dread in the tunnels; Tolstoy saw it in lives that no longer fit their time.

Fast-forward to today and AI gives us the same double vision. On one side, real dangers: deepfakes that destroy reputations overnight, algorithms that amplify bias and lock people out of jobs, automation that quietly erodes whole industries. On the other, the apocalyptic chorus: extinction scenarios, machines rising up, humanity made obsolete by its own creation. Some fears may prove valid; some are our modern tunnel ghost—a projection of dread onto a system we don’t yet understand.

Can you prohibit progress? People tried with trains. They passed rules that no locomotive should go faster than a horse; they spread rumors that speed would collapse your lungs. None of it worked. The trains kept coming. They remade Europe, connected cities, changed war and commerce and love affairs. They also helped us become more human by making distance manageable—by connecting us to other people and places.

The same is true for AI. It helps us move fast—often faster than feels comfortable—and, used well, it helps us move smarter. You can regulate parts of it, you can slow it down in one country, but you can’t roll it back. Somewhere, someone will keep building. The real question isn’t whether AI will happen. It’s whether you’ll be ahead of it or behind it.

Because progress never asks permission. It arrives. The ones who thrive aren’t those who resist longest, but those who adapt fastest.

So here’s the career question: how do you use the tool before it uses you? How do you train yourself to see AI not as the ghost at the tunnel, but as the machine that gets you somewhere faster?

If you’re worried AI will take your job, you’re already behind. The only real question is how to employ it now—to amplify what you do instead of waiting to be replaced. You don’t need a PhD. Did you ever “learn” your iPhone? Take a course on how to Google? No. You started using it. Same here.

So what does using it actually mean? Three things:

1. Learn prompting like a language. The way you ask is the way you get. Think of it as training an assistant: sloppy questions bring sloppy answers; precise ones bring gold. It’s not about code—it’s about how you talk.

2. Use AI as a sparring partner, not a crutch. Don’t dump your brain in and walk away. Throw ideas at it, argue back, push until you see angles you would have missed on your own. That’s how it expands your thinking instead of shrinking it.

3. Train yourself to spot hallucinations. Victorians had to learn which rumors about trains were real and which were ghost stories. You have to do the same. AI will hand you nonsense with a straight face. Your edge is telling signal from noise.

Do just those three, and you’re already ahead of most people. And if you want not just to survive this wave but to ride it—that’s where I come in. I help people turn fear of change into advantage: career, business, strategy, all sharpened by the tools that scare everyone else.

Progress always brings fear. Trains did. AI does. The question is whether you freeze at the signal or step onboard.

The signalman saw the warning too late. Don’t be that person.