Would you choose to bring a child into the world right now?
That question sits at the heart of The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. Apocalypse meets optimism.
That’s the tension.
The film brings together some of the people shaping the future of artificial intelligence:
Sam Altman of OpenAI
Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei of Anthropic
Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind
Ilya Sutskever, formerly of OpenAI
Jensen Huang of Nvidia
And also those raising the alarm:
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin of Center for Humane Technology
Connor Leahy of Conjecture
Jan Leike, formerly of OpenAI
Early in the film, Academy Award winning film maker Daniel Roher, asks the question out loud with his pregnant wife.
Would I choose this now?
Because it does feel like we are standing on a threshold.
I use AI every day. It has become a kind of thinking partner—an editor, a synthesizer, a quiet collaborator. It helps me organize ideas, sharpen writing, and get more done. And it’s fun.
But live with the tension.
The fear is like the low-level hum I’ve always carried about nuclear war. Or the chokehold we are putting on the planet.
Is this a modern Frankenstein story?
Or are we on the edge of something extraordinary—something that frees us to be more human, not less?
Probably both.
That’s what makes this moment real.
The film gestures toward a third path. Not fear. Not blind optimism. Responsibility.
Guardrails.
Global cooperation.
Civic engagement.
Not leaving this to engineers alone.
David and his wife have the baby.
That feels important.
Because it’s what we do.
We move forward.
We love.
We commit to the future even when the future is uncertain.
I’m not naïve about what AI could become.
But I’m also not stepping away.
I’m going to use it. Learn from it. Build with it.
And at the same time, I’m going to stand with those calling for guardrails—for thoughtful oversight, for shared responsibility.
We may not control everything.
But we are not powerless.
We can show up.
We can ask better questions.
We can demand better answers.
Maybe that’s what it means to be an apocaloptimist.
To see clearly what could go wrong—and still choose to believe in, and work toward, what could go right.