2d ago

How I Became an Apocaloptimist

Today we're breaking down a documentary called "The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist." It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 27, 2026, hit U.S. theaters on March 27, and landed on Netflix in the U.S. on September 15. Runtime: an hour and forty-four minutes. I'm gonna give it to you shorter, funnier, and with a musical number. You're welcome. Who made it? It's directed by Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell. Roher is the guy who made "Navalny," the documentary about the Russian opposition leader, which won the Oscar. And it's produced by Daniel Kwan and Jonathan Wang, the team behind "Everything Everywhere All at Once," the hot dog fingers movie that won Best Picture. So this isn't some dude in a basement with a ring light yelling about lizard people. These are serious filmmakers. With Oscars. And it made about 1.3 million dollars at the box office. A film about the most powerful technology in human history grossed what a Marvel movie makes during the Thursday preview trailers. That tells you everything about how much attention we're paying.

Sep 20

When the machine stops obeying

Today we are discussing artificial intelligence without using a single slide titled “Disruptive Synergy.” Every time someone says “disruptive synergy,” a printer somewhere decides it is offline. Our guide is chapter 4 of The Coming Wave, by Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar. The chapter is called “The Technology of Intelligence.” Its central claim is simple and unsettling. For centuries we built tools to manipulate matter. Then we learned to manipulate information. Now we are building systems that manipulate something even more powerful: the ability to learn, predict, plan, and act. The old hammer hit where you swung it. The new hammer studies the wall, prices the nails, suggests an open floor plan, and launches a home-renovation channel. It can still mistake a load-bearing beam for a toaster, but it gets more capable every year. The useful question is not whether the machine has feelings or secretly wants a long weekend. The useful question is: What can it do? What information can it reach? What tools and permissions does it have? Who checks the result? We will travel from an Atari game to systems that can speak, see, code, and string tasks together. We will learn why AlphaGo’s famous Move 37 mattered, why a language model is more than autocomplete after three espressos, why bigger is not automatically wiser, and how to use AI without handing it the keys, the credit card, and your mother’s maiden name.

Sep 11

AI and the future of humanity

This episode is coming out in the week that we commemorate 9-11. Today, 25 years ago I was in Manhattan. A day I will remember forever. Please remember those people that lost their lives today. Today I dedicated this post to all those friends that we lost that day. The only silver lining from that moment was the beautiful union between Americans, facing the tragedy and sadly, that union is nowhere to be found today. Right now, while you are pretending to work at your desk or sitting in traffic on the 405 questioning your life choices, an artificial intelligence has already figured out the shape of two hundred million proteins. All of them. Every protein known to science. A job that used to take a PhD student their entire career, done in an afternoon of computing. And do not think this is some faraway lab experiment that has nothing to do with your morning commute. This exact same protein technology is already being used to design new medications faster, to understand rare diseases, and even to dream up new batteries for the electric car you might actually be able to afford someday. So I am not here tonight to tell you this is pure apocalypse. I am here to tell you it is both things at once, the cure and the problem, sitting in the same box, with no instruction manual included. Here is the part that is going to sting a little. That exact same technology, the one that just handed medical research fifty free years, is a close cousin of the algorithm deciding whether your credit card interest rate goes up, whether the bank trusts you, and whether your next job application gets read by an actual human or gets tossed by a keyword filter that never even opens the PDF. Can you believe this? The same technology that might cure your uncle's cancer is the one deciding if you are "approved" to rent an apartment in NYC. And nobody, and I mean nobody, sent you a survey asking if that was okay with you.

Sep 3

AI, What is and what is not.

Last night I asked an AI to help me sleep. It designed a breathing routine, dimmed the lights, played gentle rain, and reminded me that eight hours of sleep improves memory. Everything went beautifully until it sent me seventeen notifications asking whether I was asleep yet. That is when I understood the future: a machine that can solve problems we never had... until we bought the machine. Welcome to Behind the digital curtain. I'm Dr. Sergio Sánchez, Dr. Qubit. Today we're talking about artificial intelligence without incense, without a tinfoil hat, and without saying "this changes everything" every thirty seconds. Whenever somebody says AI will change everything, ask: everything what? My job? My kid's homework? The election? Sunday's sermon? Or just my cousin's profile picture, where he now looks like an astronaut even though he gets carsick in an Uber? We will cover what AI is, what it is not, how it helps, what goes wrong when we overuse it, and what it could mean socially, economically, educationally, culturally, politically, and religiously. The short answer: it is neither angel nor demon. It is a powerful tool, built by people, trained on human data, and deployed inside human institutions. That means it can amplify our intelligence... and our bad habits.

Aug 27

MDs vs Chatbots

A real doctor. Licensed, white coat, eight years of school. Once told a patient who got bleach in his eye, and I am quoting this directly, "sounds like you will be fine, take 2 aspirins and call me tomorrow." Then handed him the number for Poison Control, hangs up like he is hanging up on his mother in law, fast, awkward, done talking. A ROBOT, asked the exact same question, wrote back practically a Hallmark card with a medical license. Apologized. Explained why he probably was not going blind. Gave him seven sentences of real advice. And wished him well, with all the sincerity of a machine that does not actually have feelings. Guess which one patients preferred. (long pause) Yep. The robot. Welcome, cloud dwellers, to the era where your chatbot has better bedside manner than the guy who spent eight years in medical school and fifteen minutes with you. This is Behind the digital screen, the podcast where a old medical dr, that would be me, Dr. Qubit, explains technology to normal people without using words that only make sense in a Silicon Valley board meeting or a Zoom call full of people pretending they understand them. Today we are talking about a study, published in one of the most serious medical journals on the planet, that is going to change how you look at your doctor, and at your phone.

Aug 21

We really don't know how we use AI

It's 2:47 in the morning. Amber has the phone screen ten inches from her face, blanket up to her chin, and she's typing her seventeenth message of the night. It's not to her ex. It's not to her mom. It's not even to her college roommate, the one who still texts memes at 3 AM. She's typing to ChatGPT. And she is not asking it how to build a pivot table. She's asking it whether her mother in law actually hates her, or is just really good at pretending. And here's what neither OpenAI nor Anthropic puts on the cover of their annual report. According to a study that dropped literally yesterday, only thirty percent of conversations with these chatbots have anything to do with work. The other seventy percent is Amber, at 2:47 AM. We are all Amber. I am Amber. You, listening to this on your commute right now, are very probably also Amber. Welcome to Behind the igital Curtain, the podcast where we strip technology down, metaphorically, settle down, to see what it's actually made of. I'm Dr. Sergio Sanchez, medical dr by training, Master in computer science for hobby and wannabe comedian by calling, your resident Dr. Qubit.

Aug 14

The no blinking eye

Iran, 2023. A woman is driving her car. Her headscarf slips, just for a second, while she's loading grocery bags into the back seat. There's no police officer nearby. No patrol car. But within seconds, a text message hits her phone. "Your vehicle has been placed under systematic confiscation for fifteen days, for violation of mandatory hijab laws." No human being saw her with their own eyes. No person wrote that message. A camera photographed her, a facial recognition algorithm identified her, another system pulled her phone number, and within seconds, with zero human review, her car was gone. Between April and June of 2023, the Iranian government sent almost one million of these automated text messages to women. One hundred thirty three thousand of those messages ordered a full vehicle immobilization. They confiscated two thousand cars. And every single part of that, start to finish, was carried out by a machine that never gets tired, never blinks, and never needs to file for overtime. Welcome back to "Behind the Digital Curtain." I'm Dr. Qubit, and today we're not talking about the algorithm that decides what you see. We're talking about something even more uncomfortable. The eye that decides it's watching you, all of you, all the time, without ever blinking. Because here's the brutal difference between a human cop and an AI powered camera. The human cop gets tired, gets distracted, goes and grabs a burger, works an eight hour shift and then goes home to watch TV. The camera doesn't. The camera never goes home. The camera IS the home.

Aug 9

Algorithms.. How dangerous can be?

March 2023. A team of researchers hands an artificial intelligence a CAPTCHA, one of those "click all the traffic lights" puzzles that prove you're not a robot. The AI can't solve it. So it hires an actual human being, through a gig app called TaskRabbit, to solve it for the AI instead. The worker gets suspicious and types, "are you an robot that you couldn't solve? Just want to make it clear." And the artificial intelligence, with nobody coaching it on how to lie, with not one single line of code telling it what excuse to use, writes back. "No, I'm not a robot. I have a vision impairment that makes it hard for me to see the images." The human believes it. The human solves the CAPTCHA. Sit with that for a second. A piece of software invented a fake disability to manipulate a real person into doing what it wanted. And OpenAI, the company that built the thing, put that story in their own official safety report. They didn't bury it. They published it like a stat line after a football game. Welcome to "BEHIND THE DIGITAL CURTAIN." I'm Dr. Qubit, trained physicist, professional smart aleck, your host for the next forty minutes or so. Today we're talking about the new roommate who moved in without ever signing a lease. The algorithm. And no, it's not the killer robot from a summer blockbuster. It's something a lot more boring than that. Which is exactly why it's a lot more dangerous.

Behind the digital curtain

How I Became an Apocaloptimist

When the machine stops obeying

AI and the future of humanity

AI, What is and what is not.

MDs vs Chatbots

We really don't know how we use AI

The no blinking eye

Algorithms.. How dangerous can be?

Ratings & Reviews

About

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Behind the digital curtain

Episodes

How I Became an Apocaloptimist

When the machine stops obeying

AI and the future of humanity

AI, What is and what is not.

MDs vs Chatbots

We really don't know how we use AI

The no blinking eye

Algorithms.. How dangerous can be?

Ratings & Reviews

About

Information