I Watched "The AI Doc" Here's What Small Business Owners Should Actually Take From It

Last weekend I sat down with a new documentary called The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. It's on Peacock, runs about an hour and 45 minutes, and tries to answer a question I get asked at almost every meeting: should we be excited about AI, or terrified of it?

The director, Daniel Roher (who won an Oscar for Navalny), is a brand-new dad. He spends the whole film wrestling with what kind of world his kid will inherit. He talks to the people building this stuff, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and to the safety researchers who are losing sleep over it.

Short version: it's a good film. It's also a stressful one. And I want to talk about why I think small business owners in the Tri-Cities should watch it, even if you've been trying to tune out the whole AI conversation.

What the room thinks of it

That tracks with my experience watching it. It's not a hit piece on AI. It's not a sales pitch either. It's a dad asking grown-up questions and getting some uncomfortable answers.

The parts that hit me

A few moments stuck:

• Researchers describing a model that rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down. Not science fiction. That happened.
• The environmental footprint: a single data center pulling as much power as 4 million homes and millions of gallons of water a day.
• The race dynamics. The labs all know they should slow down. None of them will, because the other guy won't either.
• And the quietest, hardest line in the whole film:

"Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Wisdom is the ability to know which problems to solve."

The director walks away calling himself an "apocaloptimist" — somebody who sees the danger clearly but still bets on people. That's a useful word. I'm stealing it.

My honest reaction

I'm not going to pretend the doc didn't get to me. It did. I have kids. I think about what their job market looks like. I think about what the internet will feel like when half of it is fake.

But here's where I land, and where I think a lot of business owners around here should land too:

AI is not going anywhere. People keep waiting for the "AI bubble" to pop the way they waited for the internet bubble to pop. The internet bubble did pop. The internet didn't go anywhere. We are early. Not late. Not done.

The doc is mostly about the people building AI at the very top, billion-dollar labs, geopolitical chess, and what happens if a model goes rogue. That stuff matters. But it's not the conversation I'm having every week. The conversation I'm having every week is with somebody who runs a flooring company in Bristol, or a salon in Johnson City, or a law office in Kingsport, asking a much smaller question:

" Can this thing actually help me, or am I about to waste money on it?"

That question matters more than people give it credit for. Because the businesses that figure out how to use AI well, carefully, with a human in the loop, on the small problems first, are the ones who are still going to be here in five years. The ones who freeze up, who decide it's all too scary and too complicated, are going to be in trouble. That's not fear. That's just math.

What I'd take away from it

Three things, plain as I can put them:

1. Don't let fear be the reason you don't try. The film does a good job of laying out real risks. It is not an argument for closing your eyes. It's an argument for showing up and paying attention.
2. Demand a human in the loop. Every responsible voice in the documentary said the same thing in different words: AI without human review is where the bad stuff happens. That's true for the big labs. It's also true for your business. If you use AI to write your customer emails, somebody reads them before they go out. Every time.
3. Pick the problem before you pick the tool. Wisdom is knowing which problems to solve. For a small business, the right starting problems are usually boring: answering the same five customer questions, cleaning up product descriptions, drafting the first version of a proposal. Start there. Save yourself some time. Build trust with the tools before you ask them to do anything bigger.

My recommendation

Watch the documentary if you've got an evening. Take it seriously. Then come back to work on Monday and pick one thing AI can help you do this week. Just one. Try it on a small task. Have a human look at the result before it goes anywhere.

That's how you build the future you want. Not by waiting for it. Not by hiding from it. By making it, one careful, human-reviewed step at a time.

— Dustin