The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist (trailer), a new film by Daniel Roher, the Oscar-winning director of Navalny, opened this weekend in theaters across the United States. It is a brilliant and beautifully crafted film that plays well on the ambiguity within its title: It is a documentary that tells a story about a real issue through interviews and evidence from a real world; the story it tells is true. But it is also a film that plays the role of a doctor of sorts, diagnosing our ills and offering us remedies for the ills it has diagnosed. That duality is wrapped in the most human experience possible: the decision to have a child and the anxiety of wondering whether having a child now makes sense. The film is shot through with a single question asked again and again and again by Roher, himself a father-to-be: Am I making a mistake having a child now?
Roher has taken on the most important and urgent question facing humanity. If that problem is a large and glittering diamond, his film does a masterful job of walking us across each facet of that diamond. The film begins with the pessimists, or “doomers,” as they’re called. When their story becomes too dark, the film flips to the optimists, to people who see only or primarily the good in these technologies. And then, just when everything seems like honey and light, he spins back to the character who is most central and important in the film: Tristan…
