I have watched The AI Doc. From a film making perspective, I think the movie aesthetics is good. 1 2 However, from a societal perspective, I don’t like it. I don’t want to spoil the ending of the documentary. What I can say about the ending is that I really fucking hate it. It has the post-Pearl Harbor or post-9/11 “rally ‘round the flag” vibe, but also the “oh! we won the Cold War!” overtone.
The documentary has a second title: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist and the protagonist picked up the term Apocaloptimist from an interviewee coming from RAND. Like many of these neologisms in this post-modernity, it’s easy to coin new terms like this without explaining what it means. In some subsequent interviews of the film makers, they explained that the so-called Apocaloptimism means holding the grave realities, moving towards action and finding agency through hope. (emphasis added)
I can’t help but to think about a similar documentary: An Inconvenient Truth (2006). If I could retrospectively apply a term 20 years later, this is Apocaloptimism, the OG. 3 There was also a sequel An Inconvenient Sequel (2017), which celebrates the Paris Agreement in 2015. Remember what Gore told us about hope and there are many things we can do. Maybe we should recycle the plastics. Maybe we should buy a hybrid vehicle. Yeah, “We have the ability to do this!” Yeah, there was hope!
Fast forward to 2026 and the 20th Anniversary of the original documentary: The United States has withdrew from the Paris Agreement, twice. Remember how Gore presents the Keeling Curve in the original documentary with a lifter? It was 380 ppm in 2006. It’s now 425 ppm. The last 11 years made a streak of the hottest years on record. Yeah yeah yeah, of course, there was progress. The Paris Agreement, the very slow and reluctant adoption of renewables, etc. But the fundamental life style and political style regarding climate change have not changed that much since the movie. In almost all regards, things went worse.
I truly believe Al Gore did An Inconvenient Truth in a good faith. So do the film makers of The AI Doc. But Apocaloptimism is no longer a good way to solve any crisis. In fact, it is just an extension of the capitalistic dream that in the long run the free competitive market will find a solution itself (the “invisible hand”). So don’t worry. We only need to recognize the grave realities, moving towards action (i.e. no action), the free market will do the rest so there will be hope. “We have the ability to do this!”. Yeah, the movie makes us feel great. Similar to what Marx said about religion, these movies serve as the opium of the masses (Opium des Volkes). We can move on from grave realities by going back to the status quo, anesthetize ourselves with “hope”. We can keep having the ability to solve the problem but without the will. 4
And 20 years later in 2046, if the humanity still exists perhaps we would remember there was an American documentary called The AI Doc. It got everything right because it talked about all possible scenarios. Feel good about the movie again. But as we do not have the will to change the grave realities, we could not escape the negative consequences.
However, I must also say that who got interviewed already set the tone of the movie. Apart from the elitist narrative which I will talk about in the footnote 2, the array of experts got interviewed are the “usual suspects” in that area. You know, the TED Talks or Lex Fridman caliber. You will not listen to Cory Doctorow, Kate Crawford, Meredith Whittaker, Rainer Mühlhoff, etc. If I need to find a term to describe the so-called critical perspective of the interviews, I would use the term Cory Doctorow quoted in his book: Criti-Hype by Lee Vinsel. ↩
When the AI optimist says there will be a change in education that all the best teachers are at our children’s fingertips, should we talk to the teachers, educational experts about these implicit “we don’t need school anymore” visions? When the movie quotes the Stanford computer scientist Li Fei-Fei in a news clip saying “AI will help social scientists understand economics”, should we talk to social scientists (economists inclusive) to see whether they really don’t understand economics without the help of AI? ↩
I picked this one not because this is the only documentary that did that. Many American documentaries have the same tone. There are many that also have the same Apocaloptimistic vibe: The Social Dilemma (2020), What’s Next? The Future with Bill Gates (2024), or The Antisocial Network (2024), just to name a few. ↩
Don’t ask me about what we should do instead. I am not the Lex Fridman caliber expert. This blog post is probably also my feel-goodism. Tu quoque! ↩