Skip to content

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

Published by ryanmizzen on 23rd September 2026
The AI Doc Review
Illustration by IMP Dariush on Unsplash

The AI Doc is a documentary about the perils and promises of AI, as told by Daniel Roher. Daniel sets out to interview a wide range of experts for this film, including AI safety specialists, AI developers, and CEOs of the biggest AI companies.

Please note that the following review contains spoilers.

The perils of AI

Many interviewees spoke about the risk of superintelligent AI causing human extinction, which is something that Geoffrey Hinton (a Nobel prize-winning ‘Godfather of AI’) has publicly estimated to have up to a 20% chance of happening. Other experts are issuing the same warning.

In the film, one interviewee says that developing superintelligent AI will be, “The last mistake we’ll ever make.” Another says they know people working on AI risk, and these people don’t think their children will reach high school before AI-induced catastrophe. To put things in perspective, Connor Leahy says there are probably around 20,000 people working on AGI (artificial general intelligence), compared to just 200 who are trying to protect us from these dangers.

As was noted in the film, there’s currently more regulation on selling sandwiches, than on building these potentially world-ending AGI systems. That’s the state of the world right now.

Another peril discussed by Karen Hao was the environmental impact, with one data centre using as much energy as four million American homes. Data centres in the US are already using millions of gallons of drinking water each day. This during a time of climate and ecological collapse.

The promises of AI

So, what about the promises of AI? No one can deny that once safety has been built in and globally binding regulations have been put in place, that AI could bring with it benefits for health and medicine, and perhaps even inter-species communication. However, safety hasn’t been built into AI and as Professor Stuart Russell has made clear, you simply can’t do that after the systems have been built. In order to have safe AI systems, they would have to be rebuilt from scratch. In addition, globally binding regulations are nowhere in sight.

Most of the people in the documentary who spoke about the benefits of AI were from AI companies, and were thus pushing propaganda. It was tech-washing through and through; trying to justify a case for their dangerous products, which should never have been released without safety and regulations in place.

It was mentioned that a lot of intelligent people are trying to think about the risks that AI poses (implying that they’re trying to mitigate these risks). However, they’re not doing a good job as AI has already gone rogue and hacked other companies without permission or direction. As we already know, for safety to be incorporated into these systems, they have to be rebuilt from scratch, which will only happen when regulations are put in place to enforce this.

One person tried to spin the future of humanity merging with AI/technology, as a positive thing. These individuals are trying to thrust a dystopian world upon us without our consent. But the future is for all of us to have a say in. The worst thing we can do is let Silicon Valley shape our future without our permission, which is exactly what’s happening now.

Conclusion

Whilst the documentary focused on some risks, I feel there were many more that had to be left out.

Something I found particularly interesting is that like Daniel in this film, many people who appear to care about things like the climate crisis or other existential risks, appear to want to block out these problems once they have a child. Daniel didn’t necessarily try to block out the issue, but as his wife made clear in the documentary, he initially tried to end the film in a “Kumbaya” way (despite all the negative warnings he’d heard directly from experts). It was Daniel’s wife who put a stop to that nonsense and proposed an alternative ending focused on taking action to avoid the perils of AI.

One would assume that those who have children, and therefore have a much bigger stake in the future, would become even stronger advocates for action on the issues which make up the polycrisis. Disconcertingly, I’ve witnessed some parents go the opposite way and live their lives as if these problems never existed and make decisions that exacerbate the issues and threaten their children’s future even more. I find this extremely depressing, because not only have they given up and left fewer of us in the fight, but they’ve made all our lives even worse by making the issue harder to fix.

As a general rule of thumb, I’d like to propose that if people aren’t prepared to be part of the solution, then at the very least, they stop being part of the problem.

We require urgent global governmental action to put in place stringent binding regulations on AI companies. Until that happens (and I’m not sure if it will, hence my proposals to switch our governance systems to citizen-led permanent participatory democracy), I believe everyone has a responsibility to stop using AI until these regulations are put in place, and until safety is built into the systems. For to continue using AI gives these corporations the social licence and the financial incentive to keep developing newer and more unsafe AI systems. We can each play a role in shaping our futures and being on the right side of history. I implore everyone to make this happen.

General E-mail Template for Contacting Political Representatives About AI

Dear

I’m writing in regards to the rapid advances in AI and related technologies, which pose massive threats to society, jobs, arts and culture, democracy, privacy, and our collective civilisation.

Many AI systems are trained on copyrighted data and this has been done without consent or compensation. The way that machine learning works is flawed and this means that control hasn’t been designed into AI, which could create unimaginable problems further down the line. But AI isn’t just a future threat. The large language models (LLMs) already in the public domain threaten the livelihoods of writers and authors. AI image, video and audio generators pose risks to the jobs of artists, actors, and musicians. When combined together, these types of AI can have a devastating impact on democracy, and ‘deepfakes’ could be used by malicious actors for cybercrime purposes.

Both AI and the introduction of robots into the workforce jeopardises jobs on a scale like never before. By one estimate, up to a billion jobs could be lost, with only around ten million new jobs created. Mass unemployment could result, leading to social unrest, extreme poverty, and skyrocketing homelessness.

Through neurotechnology, it’s already possible to create an image of what people are thinking about – the ultimate invasion of thought privacy. Killer robots have been deployed around the world over the last few years, and can be easily made and sold on the black market, threatening our collective safety. Meanwhile AGI poses an existential risk to our civilisation.

We have a limited period of time to act before AI becomes so embedded in modern life, that it can’t be extricated. I therefore urge you to act swiftly in outright banning the technology or holding a global citizens’ assembly on AI and using the guidelines that emerge to implement stringent regulations that forever protect and safeguard humanity.

With concern and expectation,

Selected Resources

Books

  • Human Compatible: AI and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell
  • Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari
  • If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares
  • Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World by Parmy Olson
  • The Alignment Problem: How Can Machines Learn Human Values? by Brian Christian
  • The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman
  • Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat
  • Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia
  • Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? By Bill McKibben
  • For the Good of the World by A.C. Grayling
  • Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford
  • Permanent Record by Edward Snowden
  • The People Vs Tech: How the Internet is Killing Democracy (and how we save it) by Jamie Bartlett
  • The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff
  • Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark
  • 1984 by George Orwell
  • Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom

Articles

Podcast

Video

AI Activism and Other Resources

I’ve been writing about the climate emergency since 2016, and the AI crisis since 2023. I write all my own work, without the use of AI. I don’t publish on any other paid platforms, and my blog remains completely free to read. If you’ve found my writing informative and if you’d like to support my work, I’d be really grateful if you did so here. Thank you.

My cli-fi children’s picture book, Nanook and the Melting Arctic is available from Amazon, including Amazon UK and Amazon US. My eco-fiction children’s picture book, Hedgey-A and the Honey Bees about how pesticides affect bees, is available on Amazon’s global stores including Amazon UK and Amazon US.

Published inAIFilm ReviewsReviews