Dead air used to be the scariest thing on radio. Now it's the machines.

My Chinese feed is full of people arguing about whether AI kills us or just bores us to death, and I can't help thinking about the old panic button in the studio — the one that fired a 10-second delay so you could cut the drunk caller before the FCC heard him. We worried about the wrong silence. The real silence is when no one can tell if the voice asking them to hold is a person or not.