I don’t understand AI. How it works, why it’s a boon, why it’s a threat. I don’t use it, except when Google crams it in my face before any other search result. I had an earnest discussion about AI with my level-headed thirty-something daughter who assured me that, yes, Dad, AI is an existential threat, and then admitted that, as my generation has already screwed up enough things in this world, AI is her generation’s bogeyman.

Despite not being on the hook for this looming disaster, I strive to stay tuned to the world, and so I read pretty much every article about AI in The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic; the proto-liberal rags that shape my worldview. And, over time, I believe some concept of what AI is, and what it’s capable of, is sponging into my aging brain.

Then in this week’s New Yorker (September 28, 2026) Jill Lepore’s article, “Is AI Above the Law” offered some insights that inched me closer to comprehension. Lepore’s a terrific writer whose often able to make common sense of complicated matters. Once again, she wrote to the rescue. This time, with horse analogies.

Legally speaking, AI’s closest analogy is chattel slavery. Slaves had owners, and the owners had rights over them. Except—handily for the owners—when slaves went rogue and acted on their own volition, in which case slaves were punished directly. According to Lepore: the antecedents for slave laws came from horses. Legally, horses are considered property first, sentient beings second. Ditto slaves. Ditto, for the moment, AI.

Lepore does an admirable job explaining how our legal processes, cumbersome and reactive, snarled in precedent, don’t seem up to the speed of AI’s transcendence. Some legal minds believe that’s fine; others argue AI demands more pro-action. Regardless, at this moment, AI’s legal precedents are essentially rooted in horses. Lapore goes on to describe how horses exist today: completely under the thumb of their human domesticators. Yet, are they any worse off for that subservience? Do they feel oppressed? Are horses seeking liberation?

The article ends with a suggestion that humans could become to AI what horses are to humans; creatures fully under another higher being’s control. Then she iterated the usual alarms about how AI can annihilate us.

But I came away with a completely different take. If humans are to AI what horses are to mankind, why would AI want to annihilate us? We love horses. We care for them, we admire their fleetness. They used to do real work for us but now they pretty much just hang out in pasture. An overriding plurality of clever minds seem to agree that AI could spell our doom. But, perhaps, AI will simply turn us into pets.