In 1939, Dorothy followed the yellow brick road to meet a wizard who turned out to be something else entirely. In 1973, Pink Floyd released an album about the less comfortable parts of being human: time, money, conflict, madness, death. At some point afterwards, someone played the two together and found the album seemed to sync with the film. Lyrics landing on cue. Scene changes matching chord changes. It got a name: The Dark Side of the Rainbow.
The band deny it ever happened on purpose. Roger Waters calls it a cosmic coincidence. David Gilmour calls it an urban myth. The album’s engineer, Alan Parsons, points out the simpler problem: there was no way to run a film and a mixing desk in the same room in 1972. The album was made with no reference to the film at all.
None of that has stopped people finding the connections compelling.
It’s not the first time this particular story has picked up a meaning nobody signed off on. In the 1960s, a schoolteacher argued that Baum’s original book was a coded argument about money: silver shoes on a road of gold, standing in for a real 1890s fight over what should back a dollar. Baum’s own family have dismissed it. The reading persists anyway.
Which is a good place to start thinking about artificial intelligence.
Is Anybody Home?
We’ve built machines that produce extraordinarily convincing patterns from language. Then we look at the patterns and see something else: intelligence, understanding, intention, perhaps even a mind. Is anybody home?
That question doesn’t have one answer, and it isn’t the only one worth asking. Alongside it sit two others. Who controls it. Who pays for it. Mind, power, money. Three questions that don’t resolve separately, and whose overlaps are where most of the current argument about AI actually lives: power exercised without anything obviously behind it, extraordinary sums spent on something we can’t fully define, an infrastructure race between countries that neither side can afford to lose and neither can afford to keep running.
Oz gives us the vocabulary for all of it. Toto pulling back a curtain that reveals not a fraud but a stack: silicon, capital, engineers, policy. A scarecrow who behaves as though he thinks, whatever “really thinking” turns out to mean. A wizard whose power is real even when the mind behind it is disputed. A girl who wants to go home, and already owns the means to get there, if anyone would stop building bigger machines long enough to notice.
Start with the question underneath all of it.
Who Controls It?
Answering to somebody is one thing. Being able to switch it off is another.
Security and Control
The curtain isn’t only hiding the machinery. It’s got seams. Some of what gets through them isn’t a person at all, and some of what walks through on purpose was never meant to be let in.
Who Pays For It?
None of that comes free, and it isn’t gold either.
The Road
None of this is standing still.
Getting Home
Which is where the story always ends up.
Toto pulled back the curtain and found the wizard wasn’t what everyone believed. That didn’t make the journey pointless. The scarecrow still thought. The tin man still cared. The girl still wanted to go home, and she’d had the means to get there the whole time.
The technology changes. The questions don’t.
There’s a simpler explanation for why this particular collection exists at all. Somewhere in a Gen-X childhood, Oz was on television, Top Trumps was in the back of the car, and this album was coming through someone’s older brother’s wall. Fifty years later a technology shows up that wasn’t part of any of it, and the same brain reaches for the same three things anyway.
Oz wasn’t written for this. The album wasn’t mixed for this. Top Trumps wasn’t designed for this. A person who happened to grow up with all three found a shape connecting them anyway, the same way people heard a heartbeat sync to a film crew that never saw it, the same way a schoolteacher found silver and gold hiding in a children’s book. Whether any of that shape was really there or just assembled after the fact by a brain built to find one, human or otherwise, is more or less the question this whole collection has been asking.
