“Sam Altman is extraordinarily good at acting human”: Daniel Roher on his new doc about the AI apocalypse
The filmmaker speaks with Silicon Valley demigods, dystopian futurists and dejected scientists. Somehow, he’s still optimistic
Your new project, The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, is terrifying. What is an “apocaloptimist?”
AI is often framed as a technology that will either end the world or save it. An apocaloptimist like myself refuses the binary. Apocaloptimism isn’t naïve. It’s the discipline of acknowledging awe and anxiety simultaneously. It’s choosing to live in the paradox. I try to be clear-eyed: some AI tech is objectively awesome. I use Anthropic’s Claude to help with research, for instance, and it feels empowering. At the same time, there’s AI that’s destabilizing and ethically murky, and systems are being put on the market faster than we can absorb them psychologically, socially or politically.
Given that uncertainty, you still don’t think we’re doomed? The worst thing we can do is to say that we’re powerless in the face of Big Tech. Fuck that. I have a two-year-old son at home. I want him to have a life filled with passions to chase and problems to solve—not one defined by a crisis of purpose. We have agency. We may not control technology, but we have a say in how it shapes our lives. That’s our responsibility.
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The home videos woven through your doc suggest that you had an idyllic Toronto childhood. I had wonderful parents and grandparents. My bubbe would take me to the AGO and to Loomis and Toles, to wander the aisles and dream. I fell hard for comic books and mixed media. Art wasn’t my hobby; it was what I did. I ended up attending the Etobicoke School of the Arts, and that place rocked. It felt like I was receiving a university education. I live in California now, but eventually I’ll be back with my family for good.
In the doc, you grill several tech titans. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg declined to participate, but you landed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis. How? Most of them started by saying no, but my co-director, Charlie Tyrell, and I had a strong team. Ted Tremper, who worked on the Borat sequel, for example, produced our movie.
That dude must be a master at begging for forgiveness. Totally. Ted doesn’t take no for an answer. He’s persistent in a way that’s both disarming and relentless. He just kept circling back. We eventually got Musk to agree, but he ghosted us at the last minute.
A lot of people see these tech execs as monsters. Who was the scariest? Sam Altman. He’s extraordinarily good at acting human. It’s like he was grown in a lab, emerging already wearing a turtleneck, prepared to deliver a keynote at some Davos-style conference. And to be fair, that’s essentially his job. But I found his perspectives—particularly on how this tech is being rolled out—insufficient. Still, he’s a genius communicator. I think it’s his ability to dominate a room that makes him so formidable.
What about the other guys? Amodei tends to describe the AI landscape like it’s a high school, full of kids you like and don’t like. That’s terrifying because he’s helping hurl humanity toward an uncertain future via tech that feels godlike. And here are these CEOs acting like a bunch of mean girls gossiping in the cafeteria. These people, brilliant as they are, are fallible.
Let’s play Mean Girls, then. Who do you like better: Amodei or Hassabis? Hassabis. He strikes me as thoughtful, humble and curious. He has a serious intellect and is a family man. Amodei, on the other hand, feels more embedded in the billionaire tech bubble and comes off as less grounded. Perhaps it’s that he doesn’t have kids. I’m being unfair, but it’s harder for me to project long-term stewardship onto him.
The fact that you haven’t yet given up on these guys as stewards gives me hope. In the film, I speak with my parents and break down at the thought of bringing my son into a world seemingly on the edge of disaster. They remind me that there’s always been some threat of apocalypse. My zaide was deported to Auschwitz at 14 years old. He was the only one in his family to survive. Then he came to Canada, fell in love, raised a family and rebuilt his life. Later in the movie, my wife, Caroline, who was pregnant while we were shooting, says in voice-over, “The world’s always ending, but the world’s always beginning too.” I choose to believe that.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Erin Hershberg is a freelance writer with nearly two decades of experience in the lifestyle sector. She currently lives in downtown Toronto with her husband and two children.
