Attempts to document the rise of Artificial Intelligence feel like trying to paint a watercolor of a tidal wave in which you’re swimming. The pace of investments and improvements is so aggressive that even the experts struggle to find a stable point to start from, let alone a cohesive narrative. However, a new documentary steps back far enough to see the pattern of the storm. It’s created by the production teams behind the political doc Navalny and the maximalist imagination of Everything Everywhere All at Once.
They didn’t just skim the surface. The filmmakers conducted 140 pre-interviews before narrowing their lens to 40 on-camera subjects, ranging from the architects of Silicon Valley to the philosophers questioning our very right to exist alongside these machines. The sheer scale of the research is staggering—over 3,300 pages of transcripts were meticulously distilled by editors Davis Coombe and Daysha Broadway into an urgent lean narrative.
The film organizes this chaos into a spectrum of human perspective. Excerpt introduce the tech,then we see the Pessimists, the so-called “Doomers” preoccupied with existential extinction; the Optimists, the accelerationists chasing a Utopian horizon; and the Ethics Critics, who are less worried about a future “Skynet” and more concerned with the immediate, tangible harms happening to our social fabric today. Finally, we are confronted by the Industry Leaders—the CEOs of the three pivotal AI labs currently holding the keys to this engine.
What makes this project work is the director’s choice to lead with “naive” questions. By asking the world’s most powerful figures things like “is it ethically responsible to bring a child into a world governed by unpredictable, non-human intelligence” the film cuts to the core of a topic that could have easily been buried under jargon.
To counter the cold, frictionless reality of a digital story, the filmmakers utilized stop-motion animation and tactile storytelling. This “handmade” aesthetic provides a visceral, analog heartbeat to a story that could have easily felt like a software FAQ.
Ultimately, the film refuses to offer the comfort of a definitive answer. It concludes instead with a provocation: a call to collective agency. By ending with a QR code that links to direct action, the filmmakers encourage us to transition from audience to activists, insisting that the future of this technology is still something we have the power to shape, provided we stop acting like spectators.
Optimistic Indie Roleplaying 