scientist

AI is coming. AI is here. AI is a bubble. AI is the future we want. AI is the end. AI is the path to a better us (at least the ones who survive it).

A big topic, this artificial intelligence, with a lot of different ways to think about it. To grapple with AI is a worthy endeavor for any filmmaker. (And by grapple, I don’t mean asking AI to make the film for you.)

Daniel Roher, the man behind the Oscar-winning “Navalny,” has, along with co-director Charlie Tyrell, attempted a nonfiction primer of sorts on the biggest technological, societal and existential challenge of our time with “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist,” a title boasting a hybrid coinage Roher picks up from one of his interviewed experts — one of too many, it turns out. “The AI Doc” is a well-intentioned but aggravating soup of information and opinion that wants to move at the speed of machine thought.

Roher’s approach is understandable for a mainstream doc. He assumes many of us are tech-competent, anxious and confused as to what AI even is to begin with. In his pursuit of answers, Roher employs a cloying framework: his loving wife occasionally narrating as if this were a storybook and Roher the protagonist of a scary adventure. The fable construct extends to a frenetic visual scheme of handmade art and animation that interrupts our absorption process as if we were kids needing stimulation between all the talking heads.

As for the AI itself, the experts — a mix of tech founders (such as Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Amodei siblings), historians, scientists and assorted champions and skeptics — come to Roher’s home, because he wants to foreground a key question as an expectant father: Should he be bringing a child into this world?

Perhaps more urgently, should Roher have made an AI doc that treats us like children? First, he parades all the safety doomers, seeming to believe their warnings that an unfeeling superintelligence is upon us and we can’t trust it. Then, sufficiently disturbed, he hauls in the AI cheerleaders, a suspiciously positive gang who can envision only medical miracles and grindless lives in which we’re all full-time artists.

Only then, after this simplistic setup where platitudes reign, do we get the section in which the subject is treated like the brave (and grave) new world it is: geopolitically fraught, economically tenuous and a playground for billionaires.

Why couldn’t the complexity have been the dialogue from the beginning, instead of the play-dumb cartoon “The AI Doc” feels like for so long? Maybe Roher believes this is what our increasingly gullible, truth-challenged citizenry needs from an explanatory doc: a flashy, kindhearted reminder that we’re the change we need to be.

But if you thirst for a sober-minded investigation into this ominous tool — one with an approach that treats you like the intelligent being you are — you’ll have to wait for AI doc 2.0.

March 25 (UPI) — Dutch scientist Huub Lilieveld has been named the recipient of the 2026 World Food Prize Wednesday for leading a food safety movement across 113 countries.

For six decades, Lilieveld has researched and advocated for food safety, using scientific evidence to inform regulations and legislation across the globe. His work has culminated in establishing modern global food safety, security, trade and aid standards.

The World Food Prize Foundation is recognizing Lilieveld’s contributions with a $500,000 award.

“Lilieveld lives by his conviction that access to safe food is a universal right — a philosophy shared by the late Dr. Norman Borlaug,” Mashal Husain, president of the World Food Prize Foundation, said in a statement. “Through his lifelong commitment to harmonizing regulations, he has lowered trade barriers, prevented the unnecessary destruction of safe food, promoted innovative food safety technologies worldwide and reduced the risk of foodborne illness outbreaks.”

Foodborne illnesses kill 420,000 people annually. There are about 600 million cases of foodborne illnesses per year.

Lelieveld established the Global Harmonization Initiative in 2004, to connect volunteers and food safety experts around the world to combat safe food insecurity and improve the distribution of safe foods.

“Companies large and small, as well as all consumers are negatively affected by unjustified differences in regulations,” Lelieveld said in a statement. “The Global Harmonization Initiative, therefore, strives not only to reach scientific consensus but also to ensure that findings are accessible to everyone, requiring simplification without compromising scientific accuracy and translation into local languages.”