{"id":368930,"date":"2026-03-28T00:16:16","date_gmt":"2026-03-28T00:16:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/368930\/"},"modified":"2026-03-28T00:16:16","modified_gmt":"2026-03-28T00:16:16","slug":"how-to-be-optimistic-about-the-ai-apocalypse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/368930\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Be Optimistic About the AI Apocalypse"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>A still from The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. (Courtesy Focus Features)<\/p>\n

TOWARD THE END of The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, now out in theaters, codirector and chief interviewer Daniel Roher is talking to one of his guests when he drops the word \u201capocaloptimist.\u201d A portmanteau of \u201capocalyptic\u201d and \u201coptimist,\u201d the term handily sums up the schizophrenic nature of the documentary, veering as it does between terror and hope.<\/p>\n

But the documentary is only schizoid because our age is schizoid: We exist on the knife\u2019s edge of great change, a future of infinite promise and infinite peril beckoning in the middle distance. Will self-replicating machine intelligence offer us the tools to solve all of the world\u2019s problems, ushering in an age of post-scarcity human excellence in which mankind focuses not on farming or food delivery or home construction but crafting perfect sonnets and great novels? Or does creating amoral intelligent machines empower immoral state actors, businessmen, and terror groups to unleash new horrors as yet unimagined by even our greatest poets and novelists?<\/p>\n

As a longtime apocaloptimist myself, the answer I\u2019ve settled on is, almost certainly, \u201cyes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>A still from The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. (Courtesy Focus Features)<\/p>\n

Roher\u2019s journey begins as a filmmaker and an artist watching as artificial intelligence becomes able to create art (or, well, art-like designs) and write scripts (or, you know, script-like mutterings). Is he now obsolete? What does the future hold for him and his fellows? Will he join the masses of the unemployed and useless in our brave new world? Thus the first third of the film veers toward the apocalyptic: The AI skeptics air their concerns, their fears, their visions of doom. The problem with AI is that we only kinda-sorta know how it works: We understand the methods of weighting and how it jokes with us on ChatGPT. But it\u2019s a black box in a very real way. We understand very few of the individual \u201cdecisions\u201d these programs make. And they may well have \u201cdesires\u201d that are so utterly alien to us they don\u2019t even register to us as \u201cdesires.\u201d<\/p>\n

Freaking out atop his mountain of anxiety\u2014an animated hill that calls to mind Richard Dreyfuss\u2019s living room recreation of Devils Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, another totem of incomprehensible, alien doom\u2014Roher calls in the optimists. Artificial intelligence, they say, will be like a rising tide that lifts all boats: The smarter we get and the more intelligence we have access to, the more problems we can solve. You know how you have Claude running the background helping you with your vibe coding to better sort your emails? What if we can do that to solve cold fusion and cure cancer? Good news: We can! We are! It\u2019s all happening. We\u2019ll all be happier and richer and freer than ever. The sonnets and novels, they\u2019re coming. Our best selves are right around the corner.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a pleasing vision of the future. But it\u2019s one that relies on a big supposition: that people, broadly speaking, have any interest in finding their best selves. That their best selves are even findable.<\/p>\n

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I am . . . skeptical. Because I\u2019m a person and I\u2019ve seen people and I\u2019ve lived among them. We are, well\u2014just look at the world, man! Our biggest problem isn\u2019t AI.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s people.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere. (Courtesy Netflix)<\/p>\n

Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere (Netflix) is not a film about artificial intelligence. At least, it\u2019s not about artificial intelligence in the sense that The AI Doc is about artificial intelligence. But it is about artifice and a sort of emotional intelligence that allows a new generation of hyperaggressive, amoral, self-replicating man-children to influence the lost and the weak-willed into believing they are owed everything the world has to offer. Money, women, fame, success, adoration: It\u2019s all there for the taking.<\/p>\n

You just have to be good at sales.<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s a throughline in Theroux\u2019s interviews with the coterie of well-muscled internet personalities, it\u2019s that: sell, sell, sell. Always, Be, Closing as lifestyle. Harrison Sullivan (aka HS) says as much: If you can sell folks on something, you\u2019ll never go hungry. One imagines that HS and Justin Waller see Wolf of Wall Streetprotagonist Jordan Belfort as a deliverer of life lessons rather than a cautionary tale. Sell sad young men lifestyle tip sheets, get them to pony up for the Tate Brothers\u2019 education system, have them invest in the nonsense funds that do nothing but lose: As long as you can sell these saps on your own lifestyle, you\u2019ll never run out of marks.<\/p>\n

Again: Artifice, sold intelligently.<\/p>\n

Believe it or not, this is the bright side of the manosphere. As Theroux digs deeper into the world inhabited by real creeps like streamers Myron Gaines and Sneako, we see a world of truly noxious misogyny and antisemitism being capitalized on, quite literally: commenters paying to get the most noxious comments read out loud, Gaines ritually humiliating the female \u201cinfluencers\u201d stupid enough to appear on his show. The modern Colosseum isn\u2019t mixed martial arts or other human cockfights: It\u2019s the stream, the endless river of torment and nastiness indulged in by millions for a few laughs.<\/p>\n

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And this is why the apocalypticist inside of me has been edging out the optimist when it comes to our AI future. I don\u2019t know how anyone can see the proliferation of increasingly sophisticated deepfakes fooling person after person and think we\u2019re headed toward anything good, particularly when we can see who and what so many people choose to follow now.<\/p>\n

Again: Set aside the nightmare scenarios of bioterrorism or state-sponsored election interference or an AI that reduces humanity to gray goo to power an endless supply of super-Nvidia chips. The much more banal nightmare is the one we\u2019re already living in. Where the techno-optimists fail is in their assumptions about human nature. Most people are not interested in human flourishing. Given their druthers, I can\u2019t help but believe that many\u2014maybe most\u2014people in a post-scarcity society will revert to passive consumption, and revert further to the basest form of that consumption. Think of the fat slobs in Wall-E, or better yet, think of Dax Shepard on his toilet-chair in Idiocracy spending most of his time laughing at \u201cOw, My Balls\u201d when he isn\u2019t \u2019batin\u2019. You can dismiss Idiocracy as meanspirited eugenics, if you like, but you can\u2019t ignore the modern world in which so many have immersed themselves, the endless streams of petty cruelties and ugliness in which they indulge.<\/p>\n

Maybe they\u2019ll be anesthetized enough by their screens and their streams that they won\u2019t realize they\u2019re empty husks. But I am skeptical that the human urge to find meaning through production will be so easily sublimated. And I\u2019d guess that more of these people will turn to Sneako and his heirs than to Shakespeare to find meaning.<\/p>\n

Leave a comment<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A still from The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. (Courtesy Focus Features) TOWARD THE END…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":368931,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-368930","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=368930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368930\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/368931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=368930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=368930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=368930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}