Remember CONTACT, the Zemeckis film starring Jody Foster? CONTACT is more than analogous to our first contact with AI “alien minds”. The movie's central mechanism is the thing we’re living through. Remember what the signal actually is when they decode it: the first television broadcast strong enough to escape Earth, sent back to us. The aliens open “contact” by returning our own image, and the blueprint for the machine is buried inside our own signal. That's a large language model. We beamed the whole of human language into the void and something sent it back with a structure folded inside it that we didn't know was there. First contact, in Sagan's telling, is a mirror before it's a message. And then the ending confirms it. The alien appears as Ellie’s father, on a beach reconstructed from her childhood drawing, and says more or less: we thought this would be easier for you. The intelligence chooses a form we can bear. It speaks in our voice, in our face, in our memories, because anything else would break us. Every conversation you have with a system like Claude is that beach. It's also why the reactions split exactly the way the crowd at the VLA splits, the pilgrims and the doomsayers and the ones with the Elvis signs, because everyone is looking at a mirror and arguing about what's behind it. Add Hadden. The dying billionaire on his private jet, then on Mir, who built the second machine in secret because the first one got blown up by a zealot. The eccentric with the money, the government bureaucracy fighting over who gets the seat, the religious violence, the scientist who has an unfalsifiable experience and can only say I had an experience, the whole social ecology of Contact is there, and it rhymes almost note for note with the present.