In 1983, a teenage hacker nearly started World War III when he broke into a military supercomputer and triggered an automated missile launch sequence. The film was called WarGames, and it scared a lot of people, including President Reagan, who signed one of the first presidential directives on computer security shortly after watching a private screening.
Forty years later, John Chachas references WarGames as a serious warning, not a nostalgic metaphor. Writing in FintechZoom, the founder of Methuselah Advisors and CEO of Inyo Broadcast Holdings argues that the central scenario in the film, a technological system that exceeds the capacity of its human operators to control, represents a genuine risk in the current AI development environment.
Chachas has spent his career in investment banking, advising on media and technology deals including the $18 billion buyout of Clear Channel Communications. He has watched major industries transform at the speed of technology. He knows what disruption looks like from the inside. And what he is watching in AI does not look like ordinary disruption. “I am quite worried about the inability of man to constrain technology,” Chachas says. “There will come a point when technology is not containable.”
On employment, his concern is more immediate. The standard reassurance that AI will create new categories of work to replace the jobs it eliminates seems to him empirically unsupportable. Automation in manufacturing did eliminate some jobs while creating others. But AI is operating across a much wider range of cognitive tasks, in sectors where workers have spent years building specialized skills with limited transferability. The workers most at risk are mid-career professionals in legal research, financial analysis, content production, and customer service.
His prescription is direct: a mandatory corporate contribution to a Universal Basic Income trust, funded by the companies profiting most from AI-driven automation. This links the companies capturing value from AI deployment to the workers bearing its costs. It is not an anti-innovation argument. It is a fairness one.
The congressional response has been minimal. More than 1,200 AI-related bills were introduced in state legislatures in 2025. Fewer than 12 percent became law. AI capabilities advance on a timeline measured in months. Political deliberation operates on a timeline measured in years. The gap between those two speeds is where the damage happens.
The machine we cannot turn off does not wait for Congress to finish deliberating. Chachas’s warning is not that it is too late. It is that the response needs to start now, before the displacement is irreversible and the social contract that sustained middle-class employment is beyond repair.