About half of young people ages 14-29 are now using artificial intelligence every day or week, and yet just 15 percent of them see AI as a net positive for society. And you don’t have to go far in the tech world to encounter AI doomers warning about the dire risks of AI run amok.
Indeed, such doom and gloom can be hard to avoid when the headlines constantly remind us that our world is heating up, drying up, and blowing up. And that’s what makes the new Focus Features documentary, The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, such a head-scratcher. The movie is a call to action, not just to regulate artificial intelligence so it can be harnessed for good, but a call to arms for optimists (and aspiring optimists like myself).
The AI Doc was produced by Everything Everywhere All At Once co-director Daniel Kwan and directed by filmmakers Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell. Roher, who won the Oscar for his 2022 documentary Navalny, is the emotional anchor of the movie, and he urged me to resist the siren call of cynicism around AI.
“[Cynicism] is, frankly, easy,” he said. “Very, very easy. And it’s kind of like the low-hanging knee-jerk reaction to something. You’ll realize that it’s actually the only wrong answer to this.”
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