By John Serba

With The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist (now on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video), filmmaker Daniel Roher – co-directing with Charlie Tyrell – may be searching for the silver lining around a mushroom cloud. The Oscar-winning director behind Navalny finds his way into a macro-subject via a micro-subject: Should he and his wife be bringing a child into a world burdened by an uncertain future, wrought by the development of artificial intelligence? As the title implies, he tries to find a happy medium between the two extreme outcomes of AI – absolute destruction of the human race, or utopia – as he explores what may be the defining topic of our current era.

THE AI DOC: OR HOW I BECAME AN APOCALOPTIMIST: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: Daniel Roher can’t criticize the human race for its tendency to “rush into things without thinking them through.” After all, he and his wife, Caroline Lindy, only knew each other for a few months before they got married. And now that they’re expecting their first child, he’s starting to doubt the wisdom of that decision, since the advent of AI brings up questions about the future of humanity. As in, will humanity still exist? He illustrates his anxiety in an animated graphic, a mountain that he’ll attempt to climb figuratively in the film but literally in the animation. And he’s really starting at zero, because his first question for a lineup of 20-some interviewees – all of whom are notable, because each has their own Wikipedia page – is, simply, “What is AI?”

The answer to that – well, as the dude put it that one time, if only ’twere so simple. It gets to the basic definition of intelligence itself, which is computation, pattern recognition and the like. Essentially, AI is a computer program that learns by sucking up all the data that exists in the digital realm, and by trial and error. OpenAI’s Chat GPT program, for example, was a moron in earlier incarnations, but the fourth version of it can pass the bar exam without human assistance. Unsettling? A little, but what we should really be concerned about is AGI, or artificial general intelligence, where the learning program meets and surpasses human intelligence and can simulate human reasoning. The talking heads call AGI a “superintelligence” that can advance every tech and science field simultaneously, is smarter than the entirety of humanity and will be a development more monumental than the industrial revolution. And of course, a variety of companies in multiple countries are in a digital arms race to develop AGI first.

At this point, The AI Doc gets rather difficult to endure since a plethora of experts believe AGI will result in not the collapse of humanity, but its “abrupt extermination,” possibly within the decade. Or at the very least, as the most intelligent entity on the planet, the AGI will treat humans like humans treat ants – they’re fine, but if we murder a half-billion ants in order to build a Ross Dress for Less, big whoop, you know? A bewildered and overwhelmed Daniel turns to a very pregnant Caroline and says, “It’s not good news.” Her reply? “Figure out a way to have hope.” So he interviews experts with a rosier view: AI can solve climate change, generate sustainable energy, expand human healthspans by decades, eliminate scarcity and do all the work we flesh-and-blooders don’t want to do. Twenty minutes of hope follows 20 minutes of doom, but there’s still a lot of movie left to determine that these extreme cases may not reflect a more knotty and complicated median reality. Daniel admits he’s tempted to make the end of the movie be about, simply, babies – but Caroline puts a stop to that “kumbaya” nonsense. Good call, Caroline. Oh, and congrats on becoming a parent! 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? I believe Roher uses an Interrotron-style camera setup while interviewing his subjects, a method developed by Errol Morris, who made the doc The Unknown Known, about Donald Rumsfeld, who popularized the phrase “unknown unknowns,” and – stay with me here – I dare say AI is very much one of the known unknowns our species is confronting right now.

Performance Worth Watching: Lindy is the sleeper star of The AI Doc, a crucial supporting “character” who drops in to advise Roher – in blunt, matter-of-fact terms – at crucial points to help him determine in which direction the film should go.

Sex And Skin: None.

Our Take: At one point, Roher ponders whether humanity should just pull the plug on the AI experiment before it gets out of control, but that’s impossible: “The shit’s out of the horse, but the horse is gonna keep shitting,” one commentator elegantly puts it. The problem must be managed, and that’s where the final half of The AI Doc begins, with an animated title card reading, WHAT’S ALREADY GOING WRONG. Waning trust in world leaders (a discussion of authoritarianism is married to images of Donald Trump), the corruptive potential of profit motives and commercial and geopolitical competitiveness have us regular folk worried that AI is an existential threat comparable to the prospect of nuclear war. Roher eventually lands interviews with three of the five top CEOs – he calls them “the Oppenheimers,” and isn’t afraid to ask some tough questions – currently developing AI technology, and honestly, very little of what they say is reassuring. A positive path forward needs to minimize greed, ego and divisiveness, three concepts, rampant among our worldwide societal woes, that function like a flamethrower to the ice cube of hope.

So Roher, born in 1993, uses the film to work through an overwhelming amount of Millennial anxiety, taking a gently ADD approach – in the editing and patchwork visual style – as he wisely seeks out knowledge and motivation rather than definitive answers, since there are none. Taking an intensely personal point-of-view (compared to his more objective approach in Navalny and Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band) makes sense, considering the context of his generational angst. The documentary addresses the personal and political, the macro and micro, dread despair and hopeful elation – felt by most all of us regardless of age, although especially American Millennials, who have most acutely felt the squeeze of a tightening middle class, and are staring at a significant decline in the quality of life. 

The film makes clear that the development of AI occurs at the intersection of science, politics, sociology and psychology, and it’s more of a traffic jam than a smoothly flowing traffic circle. A lingering closeup shot of Roher’s adorably doughy, drooling newborn son isn’t going to smooth that out, so he lands on the oxymoronic notion in the title of the film, “apocaloptimism,” a glass-half-full ideology that I interpret along the lines of prepare for the worst, hope for the best. It involves common sense and a degree of international collectivism to upgrade society – an uphill climb, but the filmmaker insists we have to try. The only thing that’s certain is that things will change, and humanity will “become something new.” Something better, though? Who can tell? 

Our Call: Hear me out: What if we put a diaper on the horse? Anyway – fascinating documentary, well made, thoughtful, honest and highly watchable despite how f—ing scary it can be. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.