One of the most important lines in the new documentary about AI, “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist,” is: “We are either building the greatest tool in human history… or the last one we’ll ever need.”

The creator and director of this well-produced documentary is Daniel Roher, who interviews both the AI Optimists and AI Pessimists and determines at the end of these two hours that there are no checks and balances to control the negative aspects or manage which country or organization should be allowed or prevented from using AI. There is also no way of separating AI into its positive and negative components. This technology is potentially as important and powerful as nuclear weapons are, but there are no plans to create a worldwide organization like the UN or NATO to monitor the direction of AI and prevent what could result in some unknown potential disaster for humanity.

The conclusion is AI is here to stay, and the wave of improvements and new discoveries is exploding like no technology ever has. For me, it seemed like the main message of this documentary was “let’s learn and expand AI, one day at a time, see what happens, and hope it is all for the best” – a message that did not provide any level of confidence about AI for the future.

This documentary is about the director Daniel Roher interviewing many of the top people in the AI field, Sam Altman, of Open AI,
Dario Amodei, CEO & Co-Founder, Anthropic, Reid Hoffman Co-Founder, LinkedIn & Inflection AI, Shane Legg Self – Co-Founder and Chief AGI Scientist, Google DeepMind. Some of these interviews were very positive about AI, and an equal number were negative. At the end of this movie, they show several babies, suggesting that they will inherit a new AI world, with no definitive opinion on whether this will greatly improve the human race or end it.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for this documentary are a very high 89%, and I agree with this rating and highly recommend this important film.