Documentaries

A portrait of futurist Ray Kurzweil and his prediction of the Singularity, the point at which machine intelligence outpaces and merges with human intelligence, with critics weighing in on whether the vision is salvation or hazard.

Roboticists racing to build human-equal machines are set against AI pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum's late-life skepticism, an early and still-relevant debate about whether we should build the minds we are capable of building.

Herzog's wide-ranging meditation on the connected world turns to artificial intelligence and autonomous machines, with figures like Elon Musk weighing what it means to build minds we may not be able to control.

DeepMind's Go-playing system defeats world champion Lee Sedol, a landmark demonstration of how reinforcement learning can surpass human mastery and a vivid case study in superhuman, sometimes inscrutable, machine strategy.

Researchers and industry figures including Elon Musk and Stuart Russell map the promise and peril of increasingly autonomous AI, framing alignment, control, and existential risk for a general audience.

Narrated by an android, this HBO documentary examines deaths caused by machines and the creeping automation of work and warfare, asking who is accountable when autonomous systems harm people.

A filmmaker tries to build an AI capable of replacing him as director, using the experiment to survey how far machine intelligence has come and what human qualities still resist automation.

Physicist Jim Al-Khalili offers an accessible BBC explainer on how machine learning actually works, charting the field from its origins to modern neural networks and the questions raised by ever more capable systems.

A look inside the AI industry that follows researchers and critics through questions of autonomous weapons, surveillance, and concentrated power, asking who steers the technology reshaping society.

FRONTLINE traces the rise of machine learning, automation, and the global AI arms race between the US and China, examining the economic disruption and surveillance implications of a technology advancing faster than its governance.

An eight-part series hosted by Robert Downey Jr. surveying how machine learning and neural networks are reshaping medicine, work, art, and daily life, an accessible on-ramp to the technology behind the safety debate.

An observational look at people forming emotional bonds with humanoid and companion robots, probing what it means to build machines designed to be loved and what that reveals about human attachment.

Produced with Malcolm Gladwell, this film traces the rise of self-driving cars and weighs the promise of autonomous machines against the question of how much life-and-death control we should hand to AI.

Former tech insiders expose how recommendation algorithms optimize relentlessly for engagement, a real-world illustration of misaligned objectives and reward hacking operating at civilizational scale.

MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini's discovery of racial and gender bias in facial recognition drives an examination of algorithmic fairness, accountability, and the societal stakes of deploying flawed AI systems.

Experts including Sam Harris and James Cameron weigh the trajectory of artificial intelligence, from self-improving systems to existential risk, making the case that we must decide now what kind of AI future we want.

An exploration of AI avatars, mind clones, and digital afterlives that asks whether a machine recreation of a person counts as continuity of self, and what we owe to the artificial minds we build in our own image.

A documentary series charting the rapid advance of artificial intelligence and the debate over how increasingly capable, super-powered systems should be governed before they outpace human oversight.

This Netflix documentary follows the soldiers and scientists racing to build AI-powered autonomous weapons, and the activists warning that machines making their own life-or-death decisions on the battlefield is a line we should not cross.

An inside account of DeepMind and Demis Hassabis's pursuit of artificial general intelligence, from AlphaGo to AlphaFold, capturing both the scientific ambition and the safety stakes of building ever more capable systems.

Startups use AI to resurrect the dead as chatbots and avatars, raising unsettling questions about consent, grief, and the consequences of deploying generative systems on the most vulnerable human moments.

Unable to land an interview with the OpenAI CEO, the director builds an AI deepfake of him instead, turning the stunt into a meta-investigation of generative AI, consent, authenticity, and where the technology is taking us.

Filmmaker Daniel Roher, about to become a father, interviews leading figures including Sam Altman and Dario Amodei to weigh the existential threats and promises of AI, landing on a wary 'apocaloptimism' about the world his child will inherit.