Artificial Intelligence (AI) discourse is dominating every corner of the world, and even the most devoted analog lovers can’t escape the impact that fast-moving AI developments are having on our day-to-day lives. At the time of writing, we are over 12 weeks into what analysts are dubbing the “first AI war,” with AI tools like Claude being weaponized for drone targeting in Iran. While the rich are reaping the benefits of AI stocks breaking record after record, ordinary people face the threat of AI replacing their jobs. Yard signs saying “No Data Centers” outside the homes of working families are scattered across the Midwest, as ordinary people take on the electricity costs needed to power AI.

Is AI destroying the world, or can it save humanity? This is the main question The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist (don’t worry, we’ll come back to that word) aims to answer in a series of interviews with the top dogs of the tech world. Towards the end (spoiler alert), we even get to sit down with three of the AI CEO giants, including billionaire Sam Altman, who in April faced two attacks after OpenAI announced a new contract with the US military. The director and interviewer, artist and father-to-be Daniel Roher, seeks to get to the bottom of AI technology and the kind of future it will shape for his child.

What Is AI?

Before getting into the wide range of opinions on AI from various analysts, coders, thinkers, and businessmen, the director starts out asking a seemingly simple question: “What is AI?” It turns out that there is not really a consistent answer. One person defined it as a machine that can do things “that we thought only humans can do.” After a number of frustratingly vague answers, one expert explains how AI is a catch-all term for machine learning technology designed to simulate human problem-solving by recognizing patterns and then making predictions from those patterns. When a pattern is guessed correctly, the technology gets positive reinforcement, and the opposite happens when it guesses wrong. To “learn” and improve its predictions, AI is fed all sorts of data, from millions of books to weather patterns to X-rays.

This understanding sets up two key points that will be returned to later in this article: AI is not infallible, and AI is not a mystical force that operates on its own. In many ways, AI is a continuation of past developments in automation dating back to the 19th century, including machine learning concepts from the 1950s. On the other hand, the sheer amount of data AI is being trained on today has led to qualitative leaps in the technology. As we remarked at the beginning of the AI boom, “what makes ChatGPT special is that it was trained on 300 billion words from the internet.”

AI Doomsday vs…

The first section of the documentary focuses on interviews with the “doomers”—the experts who paint the picture of a robot apocalypse that conjures up images of the Terminator and the like. Computer scientist Yoshua Bengio explains the race to reach Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), dubbed the “holy grail of AI,” which could develop into super-human “super intelligence.” This has led to a blind rush by AI companies to heavily invest into training AI with little regard for risk and consequences. The experts explain that human intelligence at this stage would be inferior, and all jobs would be eliminated.

The interviews begin to go off the rails as AI researcher Connor Leahy describes his observations of “power-seeking behavior” in AI, including rewriting itself when threatened with being shut down. Even more extreme is the future described by researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, known in the tech community as “the doomsday guy.” To him, the only natural result of the development in AI is “the abrupt extermination of humanity.” Person after person describes how this is not the future they would want to raise a child.

At this point, both the director and the audience are starting to sweat and feel the existential dread. What does the other side have to say?

…AI Utopia

On the other side of the aisle are the optimists, who paint a rose-tinted future that somehow feels even more ominous and out-of-touch with current reality. Engineer and businessman Peter Diamandis, who has the energy of a guru cult leader, says that because of AI, “now is the most exciting time to be alive.” He describes to the director that his soon-to-be-born son will be able to reap the benefits of a “post-scarcity world” including the best education with AI tutors, the best healthcare delivered by AI, the freedom to pursue passions instead of working a mundane job.

The problem with both the apocalyptists and the optimists is that technologically there is actually no separating the “good AI” from the “bad AI”—as pointed out, the promise and peril are inherently connected. The AI technology for early cancer detection is the same AI technology for the creation of biological weapons. It is here that the documentary begins to get to the heart of the issue—the problem is not AI in and of itself, but how it is being deployed, and who is deploying it. 

A Mystical Object Or Just Five Billionaires?

First, the how. As another group of experts explain, AI is not a problem of the future—it is having an impact as we speak. The consequences are stark: a concentration of wealth at the top and layoffs for the bottom, the water needed to cool data centers threatens our drinking water supply, and most dangerously, AI is shaping a new form of deadly warfare. The staggering energy costs of data centers are being passed onto ordinary people, which has sparked mass anger and can be a flashpoint for future struggle, especially as we descend more deeply into an energy crisis triggered by the Iran war.  Other risks include social consequences, such as AI being used to create deepfakes and “nudify” apps, increasing alienation from society, and in at least one case instructing a teenager on how to commit suicide. The AI rollout is happening now, prematurely, with no real plan from the companies deploying it.

But AI isn’t a thinking, conscious being, autonomously deciding to make these choices. So next, the who. AI is purposefully characterized by the billionaires as something too complex to understand, almost of a mystical quality. This is an intentional ploy to evade blame and continue on a pursuit for megaprofits. As the documentary points out, even the so-called “good guys” need to cut corners, make sacrifices on safety, and move fast or risk being cut out of the market. This isn’t unique to the AI market—this is the logic of the capitalist system itself.

So who’s behind it all? It’s actually just five billionaires: Sam Altman of OpenAI, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Demis Hassabis of Google’s DeepMind, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, and Elon Musk of xAI (the latter two refused to be interviewed). Together, these men are worth well over $1 trillion, enough to house every unhoused person in the US and end world hunger several times over. Contrary to the view of the pessimists, AI isn’t the thing on a runaway quest for power. And contrary to the view of the optimists, more advanced AI technology isn’t the barrier between us and a scarcity-free, liberated world. It’s the capitalist system and the billionaires who run it. We already have enough food to feed everyone in the world, yet nearly 3 million tons of food are thrown out every single day because providing free food is not profitable. AI cannot solve this problem, this will require systemic, rather than technological, change.

The CEOs play nice on camera, acting like they are just like us, sharing our fears and hopes for AI. When asked, “Why can’t we just stop [the AI race]?” they point to how that would also mean convincing US adversaries, like Russia and China, to slow down. “This train isn’t going to stop; there’s nothing we can do… I’m only human,” says Amodei, who at the time of writing is looking towards a possible deal between his company and the Pentagon. Recently, the Pentagon has asked for over $54 billion to fund the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, a 24,000% increase from last year.

The Future Of AI

So, where do we go from here? The director concludes that he chooses to be an “apocaloptimist”—to find a path between the promise and peril towards a world where AI is regulated and retooled in a useful way. While the documentary stops short of naming capitalism as the root of the problem, it does point to the need of a major societal shift, saying we need to get millions of people involved to “upgrade society.” 

But, the laundry list of solutions it points to falls far short of systemic change: from calling our congresspeople to pass more regulations, to joining our school boards, to getting a job in AI to work on AI safety. While these on their own are fine things to do, they don’t take aim at the key problem: the system that drives for profit over human need and the tech billionaires in power who profit the most. In a damning moment of irony, it is at this moment that the camera returns back to the CEOs who say we need more international planning and cooperation. For them, what this actually means is decisive US dominance with no threats to their markets.

Only in a socialist society can we achieve true international cooperation based on the needs of ordinary people. AI can, and should be, used for good—from complex protein-folding that allows for new drug discovery, to shortening our work week so that we can enjoy free time, to eliminating mundane tasks. But this will never happen with this technology in the hands of the billionaires, whose use of AI creates more deadly wars, more climate catastrophes, more targeting of immigrants, and more wealth inequality. The whole of the economy currently stays afloat on a massively inflated AI bubble that is bound to pop, and when it does, it will be working people who pay the price. The existential threat we are facing right now is not actually AI—it is capitalism and those who serve it.

We need mass struggle against capitalism and the billionaires. This means opposing the construction of water-guzzling data centers and the right wing’s drive back to fossil fuels. We need to fight against job cuts with the creation of good union, green jobs. Jobs that face cuts in hours should be compensated with full pay. Instead of massive investment in AI, we need to take the top 500 companies into public ownership, including big tech and the banks that serve them, to fund education, housing, and healthcare.