If there’s a defining anxiety of the present moment, it may be this: We are building something we do not fully understand. The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, directed by Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell, begins from that uneasy premise and refuses to resolve it into something comforting. Instead, it becomes a wide-ranging, often disorienting attempt to map the emotional and intellectual terrain of artificial intelligence at a moment when even the experts can’t agree on where we’re headed.

Catch The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist in theaters beginning March 27th at the Laemmle Noho 7 and Monica Film Center.

Roher, coming off his Oscar-winning Navalny, positions himself not as an authority but as a stand-in for the audience—curious, overwhelmed, and increasingly uneasy. As he and his wife prepare to welcome their first child, a looming question takes hold: What kind of world is he bringing this child into? AI, once an abstract concept, suddenly feels immediate and consequential. The film uses that tension as its narrative spine, turning a global technological shift into an intimate, almost existential dilemma.

From there, The AI Doc expands outward, assembling a striking range of voices across the AI spectrum. On one end are the so-called “doomers,” who warn that the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) could lead to catastrophic outcomes, including the possibility—however speculative—of human extinction. Their arguments are not framed as fringe paranoia but as serious, technically grounded concerns: systems growing beyond human comprehension, incentives misaligned with human survival, and a pace of development that far outstrips our ability to comprehend (much less regulate) it.

On the other side are the optimists, those who see AI not as a threat but as a once-in-history opportunity. In their view, the same technology that inspires fear could unlock solutions to some of humanity’s most intractable problems: curing disease, transforming education, addressing climate challenges, and reducing global inequality.

What makes the film compelling is not that it chooses between these camps, but that it refuses to. Roher oscillates between perspectives, absorbing each argument only to have it unsettled by the next. The result is a kind of intellectual whiplash that mirrors the broader cultural conversation around AI: every confident claim met with an equally persuasive counterpoint. Even basic questions—what AI actually is, how it works, where it’s going, etc.—prove surprisingly difficult to answer in any definitive way.

By the closing act, the term “apocaloptimist” emerges as a kind of uneasy compromise, a recognition that AI holds both extraordinary promise and profound danger. The film doesn’t argue for a single path forward so much as it insists on the urgency of pondering the question: How do we navigate between those extremes? It’s a question that extends beyond engineers and executives to anyone living through what may one day be called the “Age of AI.”

“Director Daniel Roher makes a good-faith effort to engage with a topic whose potential impact only gets bigger the closer you look at it.” – Christian Zilko, IndieWire

“The type of documentary vital for someone who needs a streamlined explainer of the concerns and hopes around artificial intelligence.” – John Dotson, InSession Film