THE AI DOC: OR HOW I BECAME AN APOCALOPTIMIST Review: Timely, Personal, Must-See Doc

To Daniel Roher, the documentary filmmaker behind 2022’s essential Academy Award winner, Navalny, AI (Artificial Intelligence) isn’t just an abstract construct or the latest technological wonder endlessly hyped by Silicon Valley CEOs, the mainstream media, and self-appointed tech influencers as the end-all, be-all answer to the world's ills. Far from it, of course,

 

Contrarily, AI signifies something deeply personal for Roher, driven by a generalized anxiety closely related to impending parenthood, the pregnancy of his life partner, Caroline Lindy, a talented writer-director in her own right (Your Monster), and the upcoming birth of their son. What kind of future, Roher can’t help but wonder, awaits his son?

 

Luckily for Roher, his background in the documentary world, not to mention winning an Oscar, gave him more than enough credibility to connect with some of the best and brightest in the AI field, bring them into his air-conditioned studio, and interview them one-by-one, Often onscreen, Roher starts the documentary by asking a series of interrelated questions, from defining AI in the clearest, simplest terms (much more difficult to answer for his experts than it seems at first) to unconstrained AI used in military warfare (shades of not just of Skynet, the AI thst begins a nuclear war seconds after becoming self-aware, in James Cameron’s Terminator series, but also current-day Palantir and Anthropic and their respectve AI tech), the environmental, social, and political costs associated to the ramp-up of AI, and everything in between.

 

Roher and co-director Charlie Terrell (My Dead Dad's Porno Tapes) interview more than 30 AI-related luminaries, experts, and CEOs, including, among others, OpenAI’s controversial frontman, Sam Altman, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and his sister, co-founder/president Daniela Amodei. XAI's Elon Musk and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg both received invites to appear onscreen. Musk agreed to participate in the documentary, but never showed. Zuckerberg never returned Roher and Terrell’s call.

 

 

Collectively, the interview subjects represent some of the smartest, deepest thinkers on the subject of AI, or, in the case of the tech CEOs who appear in the documentary, are among the world's wealthiest and most powerful industry leaders. (Wealth and its acquisition, of course, does not necessarily correlate with intelligence, human or otherwise.)

 

True to the slightly overlong, if hard to forget, title, The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist falls into roughly two perspectives, the pessimists or doomers sounding the alarm about the risks, dangers, and downsides of AI, and the optimists or accelerationists, its potential rewards, benefits, and upsides, with Roher and Terrell eventually falling somewhere in the middle of the scale, neither believers in an upcoming AI apocalypse nor an AI-centered uopia of overabundance, the elimination of economic inequality, and suppposedly unlimited leisure time. On the surface, that sober-minded, both-sides approach sounds frustratingly noncommittal, motivated by an eagerness to avoid taking a straightforward stance on AI, but it also reflects the immense uncertainty facing individuals and institutions. 

 

Regardless of where Roher and Tyrell ultimately fall on the pro- or anti-AI spectrum, the documentary speedruns through key subjects, including, but not limited to, the current and/or true economic costs of AI adoption and its environmental consequences (e.g., water and electricity diverted from agriculture and urban infrastructure), its worldwide impact, especially on developing countries, and the potentially transformative social, cultural, and political effects on widespread AI adoption, good, bad or neutral. 

 

Coupled as a double-feature with Ghost in the Machine, an exhaustively researched documentary that also premiered earlier this year at Sundance, The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist offers a timely, thoughtful, provocative look at the current state of AI discourse and its discontents. As a result, it's must-see filmmaking for anyone — and everyone — interested in where we've been, where we are, and where we're possibly going AI-wise.