Watch the trailer for The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, reaching Netflix US on September 15. The documentary follows an expectant father confronting AI’s promises and potentially catastrophic consequences.
My thesis is simple: fear of catastrophe can prepare the public to accept a concentration of power it would otherwise question.
When companies building AI and influential advocates help define both the danger and the response, “safety” deserves scrutiny. Who writes the rules? Who can afford to comply? Will independent developers and the public retain a meaningful voice?
My thread examines the film’s prominent voices alongside the surrounding push for AI controls. My concern is that an emotionally powerful warning could help make centralized control seem inevitable.
My follow-up draws a parallel with Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak, released January 22, 2020, just before Wuhan’s January 23 lockdown. It also points to King Charles’s planned AI talks. The recurring question is how media narratives can shape consent while influential institutions discuss the response.
Release dates alone do not establish coordination; The AI Doc’s Netflix arrival also follows an existing distribution arrangement. The argument is about the political use of fear and the need to examine who benefits from the remedies being proposed.
The money behind AI’s expansion deserves the same scrutiny as the messages surrounding its dangers. In my companion investigation, Bill Gates and the Billion-Dollar AI Paradox, I examine Gates’s warnings and call for international AI oversight—followed nineteen days later by his foundation’s pledge of at least $1 billion to expand AI deployment. That raises a question running through both pieces: when a major funder also helps frame the risks and advocate the rules, how much say does the public retain?
AI’s dangers warrant serious scrutiny. So does any response that could concentrate control over tools people use to think, create, and communicate.
Watch the trailer, then ask: who gets the power, and how will they be held accountable?
This is Piece 8 in a six-part series. Piece 1 documented the CCDH rebrand. Piece 2 documented ControlAI’s role in Bernie Sanders’s AI bill. Piece 3 documented Obama’s endorsement of a manufactured panic. Piece 4 documented the London drafting of the Sanders bill. Piece 5 documented the eight-year transatlantic pipeline. Piece 6: documented the elite ratification stage. Piece 7 documented Bill Gates and the Billion-Dollar AI Paradox.
I work as a freelance proofreader and copyeditor; one of my clients is a small press that publishes nonfiction for elhi school libraries on current issues. Their choices of titles for a given season are pretty much dictated by what the American Library Association (ALA) promotes---and the ALA is one of the biggest promoters of wokeness and leftist stuff there is out there. I can get a feel for what the current "issues" are by the book titles. This year they're doing a whole series on AI (5 or 6 titles usually). They're also doing a title on wildfires and, oddly, one on teen voices from the holocaust. This tells me that first of all, AI is being put out there as an important "issue" and wildfires are increasing due to climate change and are unpredictable and scary (same thing with "hurricanes". And that the Zionist cabal is worried about their reputation so are "reminding" kids of that "terrible injustice" done to them oh, so long ago now. No doubt they'll be doing one on the "measles outbreak" soon.
AI. will not be programmed with information on valid natural healing. No money to be made promoting information that will get ...and keep people well. The moneyed people promoting AI are investing in AI to increase their Bottom Line. They are not philanthropists.