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If you’ve felt both “AI will cure cancer” and “AI will end us” in the same week, there’s now a movie about exactly that feeling. It’s called The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, and it landed on Netflix in the US on September 15.
The setup
Daniel Roher won an Oscar for Navalny. Then his wife got pregnant, and he started losing sleep over the world his son would be born into. So he did what documentary filmmakers do: he went and asked. He co-directed with Charlie Tyrell, and Daniel Kwan — half of the team behind Everything Everywhere All at Once — produced. It runs 104 minutes.
Who’s in it
Three of the five people running America’s biggest AI labs sat down: OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis. Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk did not. Around them: Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin of the Center for Humane Technology, historian Yuval Noah Harari, linguist Emily Bender, futurist Peter Diamandis, and AI’s most famous pessimist, Eliezer Yudkowsky.
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The five big ideas
1. The doom case. The film opens with the pessimists. Asked if AI could cause humanity’s collapse, Yudkowsky corrects him: “Not the collapse. The abrupt extermination.” He goes as far as advising against having more children.
2. The boom case. Just when it gets too dark, the film flips. Diamandis argues AI will hand people abilities that were unimaginable a generation ago.
3. The builders. The CEO interviews are the reason to watch. Reviewers found them unusually candid about the risk of losing control. Amodei’s version: “You can’t step in front of the train and stop it.”
4. You don’t get one without the other. Tristan Harris is the film’s spine. His point: the same technology delivers the cures and the danger, so the real question is how good the upside has to be to justify the downside.
5. The middle path. “Apocaloptimist” comes from RAND’s Jason Matheny: take the worst case seriously and still work toward the best one. By the end, Roher claims the label.
What critics say
It sits in the high 80s on Rotten Tomatoes. Variety called it “scary, dizzying and essential.” The knocks: the Globe and Mail found its look at the environmental cost of data centers too brief, and Variety felt the ending leans too optimistic — deliberately.
Should you watch it?
If you read this newsletter, you know most of the arguments. Watch it anyway for two things: the CEOs answering hard questions on camera, and as the one film to hand the family member who keeps asking you whether they should be worried.
Disclosure: AI Super Simplified is built with Claude, made by Anthropic — whose CEO appears in the film.
On the site: a copy-paste prompt that turns your own AI worry into a short, concrete plan.
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AI Super Simplified