‘The A.I. Doc’ Explores the Perils and the Promise of AI

Both a perfectly timed movie-of-the-moment and a damned-for-obsolescence time capsule, The A.I. Doc: or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a delightful, if cloying, pop distillation of the current hysteria around artificial intelligence. A.I. will destroy us, the film’s interview subjects insist, and A.I. will also help us transform our toxic civilization into a utopia beyond our dreams. This current inflection point is either going to lead to our doom or our salvation. Or both? No one knows, but everyone is convinced they’re right.

The AI Doc: Or, How I Became an Apocaloptimist ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Daniel Roher, Charlie Tyrell
Featuring interviews with: Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Peter Diamandis, Yuval Noah Harari, Tristan Harris, Demis Hassabis, Reid Hoffman, Eliezer Yudkowsky
Running time: 104 mins

It’s a heady topic that filmmakers Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell have both leveled up and dumbed down, making The A.I. Doc an essential—and frankly urgent—primer. (Those interested in taking a deeper dive might take a look at books like If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, which came out last October; heady longform essays like Dario Amodei’s “Machines of Loving Grace” from October 2024 and its sequel,  “The Adolescence of Technology” from January 2026; and most recently, Matt Shumer’s terrifying screed “Something Big is Happening” from February 2026. They’re all riveting future-is-now plunges into the vast dread and uncertainty inherent in developing general superintelligence.)

The A.I. Doc tackles this schizophrenic “promise/peril” conundrum head-on, with Roher as the on-screen interviewer inviting predictions about our uncertain future from the so-called Scouts, Accelerationists, and Doomers (media nomenclature popularized in A.I. conversations like the ones in serial podcast The Last Invention).

Extreme pessimist and Machine Intelligence Research Institute co-founder Eliezer Yudkowsky delivers the ultimate doomer proclamation, when Roher asks if A.I. will lead to the collapse of humanity. “Not the collapse,” Yudkowsky says with calm authority. “The abrupt extermination.” Ouch.

Tristan Harris, a longtime digital ethicist and crusader against unfettered social media use, as well as the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, puts it another way. “I know people who work in A.I. who don’t expect their kids to make it to high school.” Yikes.

Roher is himself an expectant father, and he gleefully interweaves his wife’s just-announced pregnancy into the debate — the perfect hook to simplify and sharpen the film’s messaging, plus an opportunistic way to weaponize everyone’s emotional responses. Don’t let A.I. kill his baby! 

If you’re an Accelerationist like Peter Diamandis, founder and chair of XPRIZE and Singularity University, then there’s no better time for making more kids as we enter “a glorious period of human transformation.” Society needs to develop A.I. as quickly as possible to reap all its benefits: every child will have the most patient tutors, the most amazing education, the best health care. We will enter an age of abundance, of lifespan extension, no pandemics, cheaper food, ubiquitous renewable energy, and a squeaky-clean ecosystem. Sweet!

Then again, there’s the socio-political point of view from people like historian and Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari, who looks at more and more A.I. — and its unavoidable currency of deepfakes, audio clones, and misinformation — as an irreversible track towards ubiquitous surveillance and cost-effective totalitarianism. “If you lose all trust,” says Harari, “democracy is simply impossible.”

As a training-wheels primer, The A.I. Doc — sporting a kindergarten-friendly title with wacky tongue-twister “apocaloptimist” portmanteau phraseology — is the perfect entry point for laypeople of all ages. But brace for its twee sensibility, studded as it is with maudlin moments and a cornpone style that will make less charitable viewers grind their teeth.

All those cutesy animations and stop-motion shenanigans are the spoonfuls of (overly saccharine) sugar that makes this medicine go down more smoothly for a mainstream audience. Which, to be fair, allows for average folks to really grapple with a subject that desperately requires everyone’s undivided attention. “We need to upgrade society,” the film insists, and do it with transparency and oversight. And that means finding a way to communicate these high stakes to — as the film’s producer Daniel Kwan might say — everyone, everywhere, all at once. With all its flaws, The A.I. Doc just might have cracked that code.

At least until A.I. outsmarts us all.