Review of The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist

To be clear, I have far more experience with AI than with reviewing movies, which may explain both the insight and the confusion in this review.

I haven’t been to a movie theater in a while. Not really. I stream things now, half-watch them, pause, check my phone and laptop, and forget what I was watching.  It’s a different kind of attention, thinner maybe, but easily distracted by random thoughts. But last weekend, in the middle of a slightly ridiculous, slightly serious rumination about artificial intelligence and the end of humankind (the kind that starts as curiosity and somehow turns into dread), I decided to go out and see “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist,” directed by Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell.

Needless to say, my internal debate did not improve. It got worse.

There’s a kind of documentary that doesn’t just present ideas, it unsettles you. This one does that almost immediately. I remember sitting there, the theater completely empty except for one other curious sole, the sound just loud enough to feel physical, and thinking, this was a mistake. Not because the film is bad. Because it’s too effective. It doesn’t let you sit comfortably in your own assumptions.

Roher structures the film like a kind of intellectual spiral. Not a straight line. You start with basic questions, what is AI, how does it work, things you think you sort of understand, and then suddenly you don’t. Or you realize your understanding was shallow, like reading the first paragraph of a very long article and pretending you grasped the whole thing (something I tend to do online). The film keeps circling, widening, pulling in voices from scientists, executives (Sam Altman: CEO of OpenAI, Dario Amodei: CEO of Anthropic, Demis Hassabis: head of DeepMind at Google), theorists, all of them certain in completely different directions.

At one point I caught myself thinking about how we’ve been here before, or at least we tell ourselves that. Atomic energy, the internet, social media, even earlier technologies, each one introduced with optimism that later feels, in hindsight, a little naive. The film gestures toward that pattern, though it never lingers too long. It’s almost impatient, like it was talking to the average 20-second attention span Gen Z consumer.  

Roher appears on screen often, asking questions that feel disarmingly simple. What is intelligence, really. Why does this matter now. He doesn’t always follow the answers, sometimes he seems to lose the thread, and strangely that works in the film’s favor. It mirrors the audience’s own confusion. Or at least mine. I found myself agreeing with people I didn’t trust, then doubting people who sounded reasonable. It’s that kind of documentary.

The interviews are cut together in a way that feels almost restless. Ideas overlap, collide, contradict. One moment you hear about existential risk, the possible end of human civilization, delivered calmly, almost casually. The next, someone is talking about curing diseases, solving climate problems, unlocking a kind of abundance we’ve never seen. Both visions feel plausible. That’s what lingers, that’s how my internal debate started.

There’s a thread about Roher’s personal life too, about starting a family, having a new child on the way, about whether this is a good time to bring someone new into the world. It sounds like a familiar question, almost cliché, but here it sounds a bit different. Maybe because the film never answers it. It just sits there, uncomfortable, like sitting in an empty theatre.

Visually, the documentary moves quickly. It’s sharp, energetic, occasionally overwhelming, like trying to follow multiple conversations at once in a crowded room where everyone is saying something that sounds important. Much like trying to stay up to date with emerging AI software. You catch fragments. You miss things. You fill in gaps, maybe incorrectly.

I left the theater feeling not exactly changed but unsettled in a way that remained longer than I expected. The debate I’d been having with myself didn’t resolve. It became messier, harder to ignore. The documentary eventually leans toward a kind of optimism that immediately starts to feel insufficient. Like trying to patch a dam with duct tape.  The film does not tell you what to think about artificial intelligence. It suggests, maybe insists, that thinking about it is unavoidable now. That thinking alone isn’t enough. What’s missing, what the film circles but never quite lands on, is the need for serious public debate. Not panel discussions on cable TV or carefully worded press releases, but real, messy, collective arguments about what we are building and who gets to decide.

Optimism is great, but hope, as comforting as it sounds, is not a strategy.

If AI is as powerful as the film argues, then leaving its trajectory to a handful of companies and optimistic forecasts feels less like progress and more like abdication. The future it sketches, both dazzling and terrifying, demands something harder like definitive global regulation and accountability.  

Mediators and Attorneys must play a key role in developing real regulation, not “frameworks”, or loosely worded principles, but enforceable, clearly defined and agreed upon regulatory structures with accountability mechanisms. 

Anyway, my recommendation is to go see it!

Robert Bergman

Robert Bergman with Next Level Mediation provides full mediation services - including proprietary and confidential Decision Science (DS) analysis that assists each party in understanding their true litigation priorities as aligned with their business objectives. Each party receives a one-time user license to access our exclusive DS Application Cloud. We… MORE