Luckily when they come back they'll see that it was just a mistake, and the rest of human history is totally smart and good.

It's amazing how no philosophers have come up with the idea of "the best life is hoarding endless wealth while others toil in poverty", it's almost like it's a horrible idea.

The Lord of the Rings is considered a fantasy because the trees win the battle against industrialization.

Thomas Malthus was an English philosopher and economist who thought that because food growth grew at a slower rate than population growth, catastrophic events such as famines and plagues were always needed to "re-balance" the population. While he didn't advocate for going back to nature like Treebeard (and to a lesser extent Tolkien, although it was more nostalgia than a real policy, as he understood you can't go back), it's clear that trying to reverse technological progress, particularly in farming, would kill of millions of people in a kind of Malthusian catastrophe.
Malthus was wrong, by the way, precisely because the industrialization of farming has the exact opposite effect that he was describing (food production goes up at a much faster rate than population). Saruman's industrialization is the cure to the perpetual famines that humanity used to suffer.

Of course those captchas are used to teach the computers how to recognize things like bridges, so ultimate we are training the Terminator to bypass our locks and expediting our own demise.

Modern generative AI is sort of John Searle's Chinese Room come to life, where he postulates being inside of a machine that can pass a Turing Test and see that it is only manipulating syntax, and has no consciousness, intentionality, or actual understanding of semantics. One big opponent of his theories are the Functional Theories of Mind. People like Hilary Putnam will say that if a machine can be build that does all the functions of a mind, then it is a mind. Anything like consciousness will come along with those functions, and if Searle's room is indistinguishable functionally from a human brain, then the room itself does in fact understand as we do.
Of course they have not exactly been proven wrong either with generative AI, because while they can pass simple Turing tests they fall apart very quickly under real scrutiny, precisely because they lack the things Searle suggested. Searle believed we needed to understand how the brain creates consciousness more before trying to replicate it with machines, because what the machines are doing now is clearly quite different. As of yet, we have not created any hardware that even attempts to do this, because we simply don't know what it is. Our conscious minds do clearly seem to do something other than "make a statistical guess at what other people might have said in this situation" though.

"Yes he has devoured my body, but I have dealt him a far greater blow, I have planted the seed that will devour his soul, for as his anguish grows — AHHH OH SHIT NEVERMIND THIS IS WAY WORSE!!"

This is the ideal solution because it makes them both unhappy, revealing the horrible existential truth about the world: that Schopenhauer is an asshole.

Really though more people do need to try to Kill the Computer.