‘The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist’ Review: An Admirable Attempt to Find Nuance on Our Era’s Defining Topic

Any sincere, unbiased conversation about artificial intelligence has to begin by acknowledging how insurmountable the topic really is. No matter how locked in you are to your own ideological positions, anyone claiming to have truly wrapped their mind around AI is delusional.

We’re living through an era in which humans are purposely creating a technology that seems poised to strip us of our status as the most intelligent species on earth. It could render a majority of the jobs that humans do to support themselves completely obsolete. It could bring us to a point where a machine-induced mass extinction event is no longer just a sci-fi premise. And it could cure all of our diseases, give every child on earth a free world-class education, maximize our farmland to eliminate world hunger, and solve problems we haven’t even begun to anticipate. Or, as insufferable as it sounds to point out at parties, the results of our experiment with AI could land somewhere in between those extremes.

Daniel Roher never claims to have AI figured out, which is partially why his film “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist” is worth watching. The Oscar-winning “Navalny” director and new father set out to make a film about AI to calm his anxieties about bringing a child into a world with such a massive change on the horizon. By his own admission, he didn’t know much about the topic, so he starts from the very beginning by asking engineers to explain what AI actually is. (You’d be surprised how long it takes him to get a straight answer.) From there, he talks to the bleakest pessimists, the cheeriest optimists, and ultimately works his way up to some of the most important CEOs shaping the future of AI.

The film can be a bit whiplash-inducing, as we’re forced to watch serious people make intelligent cases that humanity will be wiped from the planet within 20 years and that a literal utopia could be on the horizon. But that’s an indictment of our insane world, not Roher’s filmmaking. The director’s onscreen role is to be the ultimate swing vote, constantly circling a position before another informed voice brings him back to neutrality and the inquiry starts all over again. His preferred term to describe his position on AI becomes “Apocaloptimist,” as he’s optimistic about its potential even as he realizes it’s capable of causing an apocalypse.

The film makes its way to the crossroads that every conversation about AI has to eventually reach: how do we get the good parts without the catastrophic parts? That debate encompasses technology, economics, geopolitics, natural resource allocation, and more philosophical questions about human relationships, religion, and what it actually means to live a purposeful life. Things get messy once it becomes clear that we’re not really talking about a technology, but about the future of human nature. As exciting as some of the AI bull cases are, most of them rely on humans suddenly abandoning all of their selfish instincts and deciding to work together. Which, historically, has not been a winning bet! The technology to bring about the end of scarcity might be closer than we think, but it’s entirely possible that the five biggest companies racing to develop Artificial General Intelligence (OpenAI, Google DeepMind, X, Meta, and Nvidia) are not thinking entirely altruistically about it.

“The AI Doc” arrives at a worldview that could be described as cautiously optimistic about AI technology, but bearish on humanity’s ability to use it for good. But aside from calling for some bland common sense regulations that should be uncontroversial to any sane person, Roher doesn’t attempt to make anyone agree with him. After all of the information is presented, the film is much more interested in exploring the human story of how each of us has to wrap our own mind around an impossibly large topic.

That’s where Roher’s first child comes in. While the documentary begins with his anxiety about becoming a parent and his determination to prove that his son will grow up in a safe world, it ends with the documentarian peacefully throwing his metaphorical hands up. Any parent will tell you having kids is not a decision that can be made with pure reason, and that many of the benefits of parenting aren’t easy to tangibly explain. Much like with AI, Roher’s only path forward as a father is to embrace something that he doesn’t fully understand. Parenting isn’t for everyone, but the specificity of Roher’s story becomes universal when you realize that we all have to navigate the peaks and valleys of our own lives while also finding a way to think about the definitive topic of our era.

No matter what happens, our time on earth may well be remembered as the Age of AI. The film argues that we can either be the generation that gets our arms around a dynamic new technology and ushers in an era of prosperity, or we can be the idiots who allow the world to end by letting the egomaniacs who sit atop five corporations run wild with it. That binary line of thinking may prove hyperbolic in the end, but it certainly doesn’t feel that way right now.

Grade: B+

“The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist” premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Focus Features will distribute it in the United States later this year.

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