This week I want to do something a little different.
I came across a documentary called The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, and it made a real mark on me. So this week's tip is simple. Go find it, watch it, and let it make you think.
AI is the talk of the town right now. It's all over the news, the data centers and the fights over building them, the pace of progress, the hacks that keep happening. It's everywhere. But it still seems to me that most people haven't grasped the scale and the depth of what's going on. I don't think the historical moment we're in has landed yet, or what it means for our lives and our futures.
This film gives you that sense of magnitude. And it does it by talking to the people who are deep in the industry, right at the forefront. It's not looking at AI from the outside in. This is what the people building these systems think, what worries them, what they believe is coming.
The message underneath it all is this. It's coming, and it's coming faster and bigger than most of us can imagine. You need to pay attention. You need to think about how a technology this transformational is going to reshape your work, your life, and everything around you, and you need to start forming a stance on it. So many things are about to be utterly transformed, and so fast, that the best move we have is to land on that reality now, while we still have some say in what we do next, what we choose to learn, and how we bring these tools into our lives and our companies in a way that's thoughtful and ethical.
The film doesn't push one view. It shows the doomers and the pessimism, it shows the ultra-optimists and the best case, and it takes the risks seriously. But underneath all of it, what it's really showing you is the size of the thing.
If you saw The Social Dilemma, and how much it shifted the way people saw social media, I think this film is about to be that for AI. I expect it to catch fire. And beyond the message, it's just beautifully made. A really good film and a great piece of storytelling, worth watching on its own.
My advice is keep learning, keep building, keep pushing the limits of your discovery. The gap between the people adopting AI and the people who haven't started is already huge, and it widens as the technology speeds up. Go look at what AI is already doing at the frontier of your own industry. Whatever field you're in, what's happening there is probably far beyond what you'd guess. Getting close to that frontier is the best preview you can get of where your work is headed, and it's how you buy yourself a head start.
So here's the trailer. Watch it. And if it hits you the way it hit me, spread the word.
And if you feel compelled to have a conversation about what this future looks like for you, what you could be doing to prepare yourself and your work, or just to talk through the philosophical implications of it all, don't hesitate to reach out and book some time: cal.com/santiago-restrepo/15min.
Santiago