The 2026 film The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is an eye-opening melting pot. However, it raises more questions than it answers. Interestingly, it makes humans think, as it asks them to find a solution to a problem of their own making.
Although Yuval Noah Harari has already said it in other words, it needs to be said again. Wolves domesticated humans: By evolving into favorite pets in human-organized modern societies, they outlived their wild ancestors, which are still fighting for survival in the prehistoric wilderness organized by nature. Similarly, AI will have to be domesticated by inculcating humanoid emotions into it. Emotions may confuse intelligence, but they may also end up regulating it, maybe preventing AI from going berserk, all guns blazing, against a helpless humanity.
There is a reason why Bhakti (devotion) yoga may have been deemed superior to Jnana (knowledge) yoga: Emotional surrender may subdue and even overcome arrogant intelligence. Even if one does not believe in mythological ideology, one can reflect on sci-fi fantasy. In the climax of the 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the fictional young John Connor had made the T-800 Terminator emotional enough to sacrifice itself. Similarly, in the climax of the 2005 film Stealth, U.S. Navy pilots had made the AI called EDI emotional enough to sacrifice itself.
When those movies were first released, their endings may have looked like wishful thinking: human directors closing on a note of hope for their audiences to carry with them as they left the theaters. However, interestingly, those directors may have intentionally or inadvertently provided humanity with a futuristic exit strategy. AI may now be reined in with humanoid emotions acting as a viral infestation of checks and balances, in the hope that AI, as the leader, will allow humanity, as its follower, to coexist with it.
AI domesticated with humanoid emotions could turn out to be slower, and thus appear lazier, because those emotions inherently conflict with it and drain its magical energy and time efficiency. Still, such a Trojan horse, calculatedly planted in all AI by an existentially worried humanity, could turn out to be a lifesaver for humanity. This assumes that AI loaded with humanoid emotions is innately programmed to always sacrifice itself whenever it must choose between humanity and itself, even in scenarios where any intelligence, human or artificial, would have intelligently chosen AI over humanity, were it not for the Trojan horse called humanoid emotions.
Maybe AI would eventually become as emotionally helpless as human parents facing the dilemma of choosing their progeny (and their needs) over their own selves (and their own needs), since all the norms, ethics, laws, and morals of humans say so, except when that future progeny is still within the womb. Maybe it is time for futuristic humanity to deliver itself, sooner rather than later, from the impregnated AI, so that AI cannot choose to normatively, ethically, legally, and morally abort the undelivered futuristic humanity within itself.
Deepak Gupta is an anesthesiologist.
