AI In Our Lifetime

The Film

AI In Our Lifetime is a feature documentary about one of the largest changes of our time. AI is advancing at an unprecedented pace, and its effects on work, learning, health and human relationships are already being felt. Public discussion is often polarized between promise and peril. This film examines these changes without taking a side, through human stories and interviews with leading experts, who speak in their own words. It sits with a classroom of children who will grow up in this world, follows a doctor whose work AI is changing, and a man whose voice it gave back.

The film asks four questions. What is coming, and can it be steered? Will AI augment us, or replace us? Will our minds grow stronger, or weaker? And can we keep our purpose, and each other, as the world changes around us?

Intelligence beyond our own has begun to arrive in our lifetime.
This film is about how we, as humans, will meet the future.
At its core, this is a human story.

The Director

FAGUN THAKRAR

Fagun Thakrar trained in medicine, specialising in neuroscience, before she became a filmmaker. Her work as an actor and director spans Hollywood and international cinema, and she has been honoured on the Newcomers Program of BAFTA, the UK’s equivalent of the Oscars, and as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader.

She holds five degrees: Medicine and Neuroscience at University College London, an MA in Classical Acting from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, Film Directing, an MA in Arts from the University of the Arts London, and an MBA from the University of Cambridge. The Purpose Movie Studio, which makes films for positive impact, was born from her research at Cambridge.

Director’s Statement

We are living through a moment that may shape the rest of this century. How humanity meets more capable AI is being decided now, and stories are part of how that gets decided.

Much of what the world hears about AI arrives as either fear or promise. Both hold some truth, and neither is the whole story. I am making this film to look clearly at what is actually happening, and to let the people building it and the people living it speak for themselves.

My reason is personal. I am dyslexic. In my first year of medical school I bought Dragon, the dictation software. My hope was that it would help me write. But it could never understand me. The first version gave me one word, maybe. The next, two. There were always more mistakes than right words, and correcting them took longer than typing. So I threw it away. Then a new version would come out, and I’d buy it, because I hoped this would be the one. It never was. Every version bought, tried, abandoned. When the new AI arrived in 2022, I felt that hope again, and I kept checking each new model the way I always had. And then, one day in 2024, I spoke to it, and it wrote back to me, perfectly. The first time. I sat there in tears. I had waited all my life for a machine to understand me, and it finally had. After that I started seeing it everywhere: people whose lives were changing because a machine could finally meet them where they were. I wanted to find out how far that goes, and what we might lose along the way.

So this film goes inside, to the people building what comes next, and out into the lives already being changed. It asks what happens to work, to meaning, and to what makes us human as these systems grow more capable. It gives the risks and the benefits equal weight, and puts the hardest questions to the people best able to answer them. I trained in medicine and neuroscience before I became a filmmaker, and my job here is to follow the evidence honestly, wherever it leads.

None of this is decided yet. The choices being made now, by the people building these systems and by all of us who use them, will shape what comes next. I hope this film helps people understand those choices, and take part in them.

— Fagun Thakrar

Writer & Director · The Purpose Movie Studio