A slim seventy-eight minutes long, this 2018 documentary from director Chris Paine moves quickly through a question most viewers only half-consider: what happens once the software running phones, cars, and search engines starts teaching itself.
What is Do You Trust this Computer? about?
Rather than following a single narrator through a fixed argument, the film strings together conversations with a wide bench of technologists and researchers, each approaching self-learning machines from a different corner of the industry. It moves outward from familiar ground, apps, targeted advertising, the flood of data collected from everyday devices, toward the harder question of how much control stays in human hands as automated systems keep improving at learning on their own. There is no plot in the conventional sense; the structure trades a resolution for accumulation, letting one interview answer or complicate the last. Because it is a documentary rather than a scripted drama, nothing here needs to be kept secret to be worth watching. What carries the runtime is the density of ideas, not a twist ending.
About the cast
The film is built almost entirely from interview footage, drawing on figures including Elon Musk, Raymond Kurzweil, Jonathan Nolan, James Barrat, David Ferrucci, Christine Fox, Rana El Kaliouby, and Sean Gourley. Each brings a different vantage point, from research labs to entertainment writing to defense policy, and the film leans on that range rather than any one voice to carry its argument.
Context & significance
A joint production between Japan and the United States, the documentary arrived in 2018 as part of a wave of nonfiction filmmaking trying to make sense of artificial intelligence for a general audience, a period when the term was moving quickly from research conferences into everyday conversation. Its short runtime, under eighty minutes, keeps it closer to a long-form report than an exhaustive survey, which suits a subject that was still changing shape as the cameras rolled.
Watching Do You Trust this Computer? on Ktime
Streaming the film on K-Time requires a free account login, though this page itself is open to read without one. K-Time's library and interface are built around a Farsi-first experience for the Iranian diaspora, with search and recommendations tuned for that audience even on English-language titles like this one, which currently carries no Persian dub or subtitle track.