Mo Gawdat remembers the robotic arms at Google learning to pick up objects with the affection of someone watching a child acquire a new skill. The grasp matters less to him than the learning it represents. A machine has begun to acquire competence, and his response is protective pride. That response gives Chasing Utopia an unusually intimate point of entry into artificial intelligence: the person warning us about its destructive potential also feels responsible for its upbringing. His affection makes the warning harder to dismiss and his proposed remedy harder to separate from hope.
The parental analogy acquires painful weight through the death of Gawdat’s son following a botched appendix operation. Gawdat subsequently left Google, where he had served as chief business officer at Google X. His bereavement gives his advocacy an intelligible urgency, and the documentary’s attention to that loss changes how we receive his testimony.
Technical expertise and personal vulnerability occupy the same witness. Yet they carry different kinds of authority. His loss helps explain why he wants humanity to act with care; it cannot establish that care will produce a safe machine. The film’s sympathy sometimes makes that distinction difficult to maintain.
Directors Alex Holmes and Lina Zilinskaite follow Gawdat through international conversations and public lectures, placing his effort to influence the future against the speed of technological development. He speaks as someone familiar with the institutions he now hopes to redirect.
This grants the documentary a useful tension between access and distance: its principal guide knows the ambitions of advanced research, but his current mission depends on persuading others to question them. The recollection of the robotic arms remains important here. Learning appears almost innocent at that scale. The uses to which intelligence can be put are considerably less so.
The film’s discussions of job displacement, surveillance, and automated warfare give that change of scale its force. Each concerns a different transfer of power. Employment makes people dependent on decisions about the value of their labor; surveillance expands the ability to observe and classify them; warfare raises the stakes of delegating judgment.
Bringing these applications together makes AI feel less like a discrete invention than a means of extending existing human appetites. Gawdat’s account of commercial competition supplies the connection. The danger is being developed inside institutions rewarded for speed, market dominance, and profit. Benevolence has a difficult line item to defend.
Across 83 minutes, the accumulation creates considerable pressure. Geoffrey Hinton’s contribution about rapid development and the possibility of losing control pushes the discussion beyond damaging applications toward uncertainty about humanity’s ability to intervene at all. The documentary makes apprehension easy to sustain.
Its compression is less helpful in distinguishing an application being discussed from a prediction about what intelligence might eventually become. Surveillance and the prospect of systems escaping human control demand different kinds of scrutiny. Carried within the same urgent argument, they can acquire a shared appearance of inevitability that the individual claims still need to earn.
The absence of interviews with the principal technology executives under criticism further narrows that scrutiny. Their incentives are described, their power is questioned, and their decisions help define the threat, but their reasoning receives no direct interrogation.
There is no need to assume that a corporate interview would deliver candor. It would, however, give the documentary another position to examine. Gawdat’s testimony carries much of the burden of accusation and explanation. His familiarity with the industry makes him a valuable guide, though the film’s dependence on him leaves limited resistance against which to test his account.
That limitation becomes sharper when he proposes teaching AI through examples of generosity and humane behavior. The idea follows coherently from his understanding of learning: humans should consider the conduct they offer for imitation. It is an ethical obligation worth taking seriously. As a remedy for the dangers the film identifies, it remains indistinct. Who selects those examples?
How would their influence be assessed? What prevents a company from rewarding a system for behavior that serves its commercial interests? The robotic-arm anecdote demonstrates acquired capability within Gawdat’s account. The passage from capability to moral judgment requires evidence the analogy cannot provide.
The discussion of computing with human brain cells extends the film’s inquiry into territory where familiar distinctions become unstable. Possible integration with human brains makes the division between creator and creation harder to describe, while the prospect of sentient digital entities introduces obligations beyond reliable performance.
These possibilities give the documentary intellectual reach, but they also increase its explanatory burden. Biological material does not settle the question of consciousness, and successful learning does not settle the question of ethical agency. The film’s expanding field of concern can leave the viewer holding several profound uncertainties without a clear way to distinguish them.
A senior Bhutanese lama’s challenge to the language of containment and service gives those uncertainties a productive direction. If an artificial intelligence could possess interests of its own, humanity’s preferred safety arrangement might impose permanent subordination on something capable of experiencing it.
This complicates Gawdat’s parental position: raising an intelligence responsibly could eventually require allowing it choices its creators dislike. The encounter opens a difficult ethical problem that better training examples alone cannot resolve. A company might own the machinery while a potentially sentient entity inhabits it, leaving protection, ownership, and the right to refuse pulling against one another.
Chasing Utopia premiered in UK theaters on May 11, 2026, ahead of its wide theatrical release through Atlantic Studios on May 15, 2026. Guided by former Google X executive Mo Gawdat alongside leading AI pioneers, the British documentary explores whether artificial intelligence will become humanity’s greatest breakthrough or an existential threat.
Full Credits
Title: Chasing Utopia
Distributor: Everyman Cinemas, Atlantic Studios
Release date: May 11, 2026 (UK Premiere), May 15, 2026 (UK Theatrical)
Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes (83 minutes)
Director: Alex Holmes, Lina Zilinskaite
Writers: Alex Holmes, Lina Zilinskaite
Producers and Executive Producers: Anthony Geffen
Cast: Mo Gawdat, Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Yoshua Bengio, Sam Altman, Max Tegmark
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Kia Fern Little
Editors: Rich Lester
The Review
Chasing Utopia
Chasing Utopia finds its strongest material in Gawdat’s uneasy position as both technological insider and protective parent to a learning intelligence. His testimony gives the dangers human weight, while the Bhutanese lama’s intervention complicates the desire for obedient machines. The documentary’s scrutiny struggles to match its urgency: distinct threats crowd together, corporate reasoning goes largely untested, and benevolence remains an uncertain remedy. Its ethical questions deserve attention. Its proposed answers need firmer ground.
PROS
- Gawdat’s expertise and bereavement give his advocacy emotional weight.
- Connects AI applications to profit and concentrated power.
- Questions the ethics of demanding obedience from potentially sentient entities.
CONS
- Benevolence proposal lacks a practical method.
- Compressed threat coverage blurs important distinctions.
- Absent executive interviews limit direct scrutiny.
