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When filmmaker Daniel Roher and his wife were expecting their first child, it brought to the surface many of the questions that new parents ask: How would life be different? What kind of world would their child be entering? And because Roher was hearing so much talk about artificial intelligence and its potential impact on life and work as we know it, he wanted to find out: Was he crazy to be having a kid now? Would AI make everything better or be the beginning of the end of humankind?
Roher took those existential questions and, along with co-director Charlie Tyrell, made “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist,” which opened in theaters on March 27.
A few days before the film’s debut, two of its producers — Diane Becker and Ted Tremper — spoke at a dinner for CNBC’s Technology Executive Council to give a behind-the-scenes take on making the movie, how they wrangled some of tech’s biggest names to sit down with them, and what they learned along the way.
Tremper acknowledged that most of the people involved in the making of the film knew very little about AI other than what they heard about in the news. “I had to listen to hundreds and hundreds of hours of podcasts just to begin to figure it out,” he said.
