Durable Human (2 book series)

Yearly Archives: 2026

The Pope, Woz, and So Long, Sora: Reasons to be Apocaloptimistic After the AI Doc

The day after I saw The AI Doc: or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, I felt strangely buoyant. Maybe we can steer the future in the right direction. I began to see reasons for hope.

All this happened after the movie’s release:

In Court

The family of a young man shot to death at Florida State University sued OpenAI, claiming Chat GPT helped the killer plan the attack. After viewing the victim’s chat logs, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier opened a criminal investigation. “If ChatGPT were a person,” he said, “it would be facing charges for murder.”

In the first of hundreds of similar cases, juries found Google’s YouTube and Meta liable for debilitating mental health harms to young people. A judge in New Mexico is about to rule on whether Meta must redesign its platforms to make them safer for children. Social media is a primitive form of AI.

Laws and Regs

On May 19, the U.S. federal TAKE IT DOWN law went into full effect. Americans can now go to this website to “report platforms that fail to remove intimate photos or videos posted without your consent.” The vast majority of non-consensual intimate images (NCII) are made with AI. Platforms must remove offending content within 48 hours.

Dozens of states also have laws protecting children from emotional and reputational harm stemming from AI-generated Deep Fake videos and NCII. So far, Congress has fended off efforts by U.S. President Donald Trump to ban or nullify state laws restricting AI.

Collective Action

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The AI Doc: From the Durable Human Perspective

Ad on a bus in San Francisco says Stop Hiring Humans

This is a synopsis of The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist:   

A father-to-be tries to figure out what is happening with all this AI insanity. The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a hand-made, eye-opening documentary about the most powerful technology humanity has ever created…and what’s at stake if we get it wrong.

The following review tells the whole story. With that spoiler alert, you may wish to leave this screen and watch The AI Doc, which you can easily do in the comfort of your home. Even if you stick around, be sure to see the movie. So, here we go:

Art reflected life as I stepped into the darkened theater.

I was in the heart of San Francisco, where all AI startups seem to be born.

In the weeks I’d been visiting the city, I’d pass people on the street and wonder: did they have a hand in a phenomenon compared to the discovery of fire? Billboards shouted AI’s benefits. Ads on busses screamed: “STOP HIRING HUMANS.”

I sit next to my daughter-in-law—herself an executive at an established startup. My son is back at their apartment recovering from upper jaw surgery. His art studio is blocks from the theater. From early days, he’d sketch in the margins of his school papers and notebooks. Soon after graduating from college with a degree in industrial design, Nike had hired him in part for how he could draw up great ideas on the fly.     

Co-director and on-screen narrator Daniel Roher draws or paints most of the graphics in the movie. Sketchbooks will play a central and active role.

As the movie begins, we see Daniel as a boy, learning about computers and having fun making his own videos. His relationship with technology seems sympatico until one day, he notices that computers have begun to churn out entire screenplays. His dander up, he determines to find out more about this precocious digital intruder.  

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