Every good episode needs a villain with a name and a face. Vague villains do not work. If I tell you "technology is bad," you shrug and go back to watching videos of cats falling off couches. So today's villain has a name: Sake Oil AI, the Digital Medicine Show.

Who is it? It is any person, company, or headline that uses the label "artificial intelligence" as a giant umbrella to cover things that have nothing to do with each other. Under that one umbrella you find wonderful things, like the autocorrect on your phone, and things that do not work and never will, like the software that claims to guess whether you will be a good employee by watching you talk for thirty seconds. Same umbrella. Same sales pitch. Very different reality.

In this first episode I am not going to scare you or sell you the apocalypse. I am going to give you something more useful: a dictionary. By the end, when somebody says "an AI did this," you will be able to squint like a building inspector and ask, "Which one?" That question, honestly, is worth gold.

And since this is a show for people who say "tech just isn't my thing," here is the good news. You will not need a single equation. You will need exactly what you need when you buy a used pickup truck: healthy distrust, good questions, and a firm decision not to fall in love with the salesman.