Being a Doomsday Optimist: Can Concerns About AI Meet Optimism?

"The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist" is a collage of interviews that a director preparing to become a father conducted, face to face, with artificial intelligence experts. On one side it sets the fear that AI will deepen unemployment, dissolve human connection, and cut us off from the things that give our lives meaning. On the other, the promise of curing diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's and distributing a universal basic income to all of society. The two collide at the interview table.

Daniel Roher's new documentary is highly candid, but the perspective it proposes — the point where apocalyptic anxiety and optimism reconcile — is not yet convincing. Especially once you notice that the strongest proponents of that reconciliation are also the leaders who earn the most from it.

Coming from the producers of the Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once, the film opens with a simple but burning question Roher asks himself as he prepares for fatherhood: what kind of world will my child be born into? From there he sits down, one by one, with leading figures on both sides.

On the side of the builders and optimists are OpenAI's Sam Altman, Anthropic's Dario Amodei and co-founder Daniela Amodei, Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and Singularity founder Peter Diamandis. Altman's remark that none of our children will ever be smarter than artificial intelligence lands like a slap in answer to the film's opening question. On the critical side are linguist Emily M. Bender, journalist Karen Hao, and historian Yuval Noah Harari — united by a deep unease, for different reasons, with AI's current trajectory.

The film's "handmade" aesthetic — paper animation, an intimate camera — lifts the subject out of an abstract technology debate and brings it down to human scale. That is a valuable move. Whether that intimacy is enough to justify the position the film proposes is another question; for that, I'd simply recommend watching it.

What does "apocaloptimist" mean?

The word in the title fuses apocalypse with optimism — a kind of doomsday optimism: to be afraid and to keep building at the same time. It recalls Janus, the two-faced Roman god of beginnings, doors, and thresholds, one face turned to the past and the other to the future. (The word "January" comes from Janus, since the month, too, closes one era and opens another.) The documentary works the same way: showing technology's two faces while asking questions about the future that are hard to answer.

"Apocaloptimism" looks, at first, like a reasonable balance — which is exactly why it deserves scrutiny. Its strongest advocates are also the ones who profit most from it. Considering OpenAI's valuation approaching a trillion dollars, Anthropic's trajectory around $380 billion, NVIDIA's multi-trillion-dollar market value, and the optimism their leaders broadcast, one has to ask:

Could "apocaloptimism" simply be this enormous capital justifying itself?

The wage, the underclass, democracy

One of the film's most striking figures is Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, the maker of Claude. His forecast that up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs could vanish by 2030 is enough to spark panic among new graduates. But his longer-term worry runs deeper than job losses. In a roughly 20,000-word essay on his blog in January, he warned that AI could create "an unemployed or very low-paid underclass," and that as the technology's capabilities grow, that class will widen — putting at risk not only our wages but democracy itself. As he told Axios, the balance of power in a democracy rests on the average person being able to create economic value and hold leverage; if that disappears, things get frightening. And yet, even as he says this, he keeps building the very technology he is convinced will cause the problem — and seems to hand the responsibility to policymakers.

The academics disagree among themselves. Some, like the University of Virginia's Anton Korinek, argue that in an era when AI can outperform humans everywhere, no human job is safe in the long run. MIT's David Autor argues the opposite: just as our ancestors could not have imagined jobs like flight attendant or software engineer, ever-evolving demand will create work we cannot picture today.

The hackable animal

The figure who affected me most was Tristan Harris. Once a design-ethics lead at Google, he also carried The Social Dilemma, and today co-founds the Center for Humane Technology. (That film — former Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Instagram employees describing firsthand how social-media algorithms captured our buying behavior and, worse, our psychology — reached more than 100 million viewers. Before or after The AI Doc, I'd watch it too.) In The Social Dilemma, Harris noted that, for the first time in history, a few dozen designers made decisions that would shape the psychology of two billion people; his co-founder Randima Fernando added that processing power has grown about a trillionfold since the 1960s while the human brain has not changed at all — our ancient physiology trying to cope with a notification screen and a like button designed by an engineer in Silicon Valley. Harris's comments in The AI Doc simply carry that perspective into the AI era: while the culture of addictive, attention-extracting design continues, who is now shaping AI, and with which design choices? It is one of the truths the film lays on the table least often.

Yuval Harari frames the matter most broadly. In Homo Deus (2016) and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018), he described human biology as "biochemical algorithms" and warned of a worldview he called "dataism," in which authority passes from humans to algorithms. In a 2021 interview he put it more sharply still, noting that pattern analysis in a browser could detect a teenager's orientation before the teenager does — a sentence that remains unsettling. In The AI Doc he holds the same line.

The blind spot

As one Rotten Tomatoes critic noted, The AI Doc skips over the technical detail of how AI actually works — something The Social Dilemma explained far better, from the source. The criticism isn't entirely unfair. Still, the film lets us see more responsible, two-sided narratives, and the leaders who answered its questions are leaving a mark for the future. As a record, it will be a good resource.

From a Turkish perspective

The documentary is not currently screening in Turkey; it is on YouTube and other platforms, though a theater would be a different experience. The issue it raises is universal. According to a Coface and Observatory of Threatened Jobs (OEM) report for the end of 2025, nearly 12% of employment in Turkey is exposed to AI automation — around 20% in the United Kingdom. At first glance Türkiye looks "protected," but the figure stays low only because the share of knowledge-intensive work is low. The more disturbing data point: with women's labor-force participation already well below the OECD average, the first area AI hits may be exactly that narrow space where women are struggling to hold on.

In the end, whether you are optimistic or pessimistic about artificial intelligence matters more than you might think. You can, of course, watch the battle between the techno-barons who hold the planet's economic and political power with a bag of popcorn. But watching consciously will have a significant impact — first of all, on your own life.