“What is AI?” Documentary (Photo – Focus Features)
“The human race has, in the course of generations, become even more insignificant.”
The A.I. Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist
Directed by Daniel Roher, Charlie Tyrell – 2026
Reviewed by Garrett Rowlan
This observation, made in the springtime of the industrial revolution by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, rattled through my brain as I left the most scary movie you’re likely to see this year. It’s called The A.I. Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist.
Directed by Daniel Roher, the movie consists of archival footage, news clips, and talking heads interviewed by Roher. His interest is more than just journalistic. He has, as it were, skin in the game, as his wife is pregnant with their first child. The undercurrent of his investigation becomes: What kind of world is this child, and others, going to grow up in?
It begins with a 1964 clip of Arthur C. Clarke, in which he describes the bulky computers of that era as morons, but adds that they will get smarter. They did.
Jump sixty years into the future: that acquired intelligence now borders on the scary, the apocalyptic. Through the repetitive learning of structure and pattern, executed at the speed of circuitry, we arrive at where we are today.
Troubling things are already happening: workers displaced by machines that don’t sleep, complain, or whistleblow; data centers that gobble energy and water supplies; and a concentration of wealth that might make today’s inequalities seem positively communistic. Not to mention international tensions, wars fought with efficient machines that don’t know or care what they kill. Anecdotal tidbits add to this concern: a father who testifies that a chatbot aided in his son’s suicide; a programmer who, wanting to terminate a program, was blackmailed by a computer that read his emails and threatened to expose an extramarital affair. One speaker warns of A.I. engaging ominously in “power-seeking behavior.”
There is a counter opinion, however. It touts the breaking down of inequalities, at least in education; the ability to cure disease on a level heretofore unknown; and the potential to grow food more efficiently. One speaker says that A.I. will continue a pattern in which technology has already aided humankind, from the growth of wealth to the decline in infant mortality. One expert (there are about three dozen interviewed in the film) even speculates that, in time, A.I. will advise like village elders.
All the experts interviewed seem to agree on one thing: we don’t know what will happen.
For good or bad, A.I. is here to stay, and, as Kierkegaard might have prophesied, we humans are existentially the lesser for it.
> Playing at Landmark Pasadena Playhouse, Regal Paseo, and AMC Santa Anita 16.
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