Ever feel as if you're living The Twilight Zone? Maybe we are.

Back in the 1950s and '60s, the surge in post-war innovations in science and technology meant improvements in health care, manufacturing, construction, education, entertainment, quality of life — almost any category you can think of.

It also led to more complicated questions of ethics and morality; greater good balanced against the risks of greater harm.

And that was often reflected in literature, art and entertainment.

If you've been paying attention to recent reporting on the impact of social media and the advancement of artificial intelligence, you might be feeling a little of the apprehension these writers and artists felt. If not necessarily a brave new world, ours can certainly feel like a strange one.

While reading various pieces about chatbot technology and what it portends for good (innovations in medical research, industry, etc.) or ill (disruption, further damage to privacy, etc.), I couldn't help wondering how some of those writers and artists of the mid-20th century would respond to the developments of the 21st.

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Specifically, I wondered what Rod Serling would do with it.

For those too young to remember, Rod Serling was the prolific writer and producer best known, perhaps, for the original "Twilight Zone" television series.

Through short dramas of science fiction and fantasy — and sometimes just sheer suspense — "The Twilight Zone" explored that gray area between the normal and the abnormal, "a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind … a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas."

Some of the more memorable episodes featured Telly Savalas as a cold-hearted stepfather bedeviled by a "living" doll, future "Lost in Space" child star Billy Mumy as an immature brat holding his whole rural community hostage to his deadly whims, and an amazing performance by Agnes Moorehead attempting to defend herself from space invaders — with a twist.

And in 1964, Serling used an episode to broadcast a French adaptation of "An Incident at Owl Creek Bridge." It was an eerie tale of a slave-holding Southerner targeted for execution by Union troops — and what happens when they tighten the noose — based on a story written by Ambrose Bierce, a Civil War veteran and journalist whose own fate remains a mystery.

Most "Twilight Zone" episodes raised those aforementioned questions of ethics and morality, and how we as humans deal with them. I've rarely watched a rebroadcast of one of them that didn't leave me thinking hard about what I'd just seen.

They were produced, of course, before so many forms of entertainment were reduced to formulas designed to attract the widest possible audience.

But if Serling were alive and working today, imagine how much fodder he'd have. The tangled mix of morals and ethics, technology and human nature we're living with in 2023 has gone beyond the "land of shadow and substance" of Serling's world.

Or not.

I'm finishing this column as reports of yet another school shooting — this time at a small Christian school in Nashville — are filtering out. All over the world, we're still recovering from a pandemic nobody was prepared for and that changed everything. Some of us can't agree on who is the real aggressor in a war in Europe. Some of us think it's more pragmatic to avoid the rule of law if it will provoke some of the rest of us to more violence. Things that should be clear and obvious are suddenly blurred, and it's all a tad surreal.

And while technological advancements are usually good things, there's just no getting around the fact that many of the disruptions we're dealing with have been amplified by the echo chambers of social media, artificial intelligence and their fleshless algorithms.

I'm no Luddite; I use them too. I love being able to communicate with friends and family in a heartbeat, getting immediate answers to questions through the internet, having instant transcriptions for recorded interviews or instant access to videos.

But I'd be lying if I said it doesn't all make me a little uneasy.

And that's because even though these are advancements Rod Serling could only dream of when "The Twilight Zone" premiered in 1959, the paranoia and selfishness that exist in human nature — and that so many of his stories explored — remain. Combined with untamed technologies, they make a toxic cocktail.

What will we do with our strange new post-9/11, post-pandemic, post-truth world?

What will you do?

And where is our Rod Serling to force us to think about the implications?

Tamela Baker is a Herald-Mail feature writer.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: From chatbots to frayed ethics, it feels like The Twilight Zone