AI Hub - Transcendent Man: Film About Kurzweil - Artificial Intelligence, Chatbots, Robotics, Technology, Neural Networks

AI researcher Ben Goertzel peeks at the new Ray Kurzweil movie "Transcendent Man," and gives it 'two nano-enhanced cyberthumbs way, way up!' In an exchange with Kurzweil after the screening, Goertzel debates the post-human future, asking whether individuality can survive in a machine-augmented brain. The documentary covers radical futurism, but also includes alternate viewpoints. 'Would I build these machines, if I knew there was a strong chance they would destroy humanity?' asks evolvable hardware researcher Hugo de Garis. His answer? 'Yeah.'" Note, the movie is about Kurzweil and futurism, not by Kurzweil.

I can’t really give an objective review of Barry Ptolemy’s new documentary film Transcendent Man – a treatment of the life and futurist ideas of Ray Kurzweil – because I was in the movie myself, answering 4-5 minutes of questions about Ray’s visions of the future.

But I’ll give you my subjective impression: two nano-enhanced cyberthumbs way, way up!

On Tuesday April 29 I took the train from Washington DC, where I live, to New York City, to see the premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. The theater was packed and the audience was appreciative, and it was fascinating to see the film through their eyes. The two themes of the movie – Ray’s life as a futurist visionary, inventor and entrepreneur; and Ray’s vision of the near-future technological Singularity – are so familiar to me that, even if I hadn’t been in the movie, it would have been impossible for me to view it with a “beginner’s mind.” But a substantial percentage of the audience appeared unfamiliar with Ray or his thought, and based on the reactions I saw, it seemed the film did an excellent job of waking up its viewers to some radical new ideas.

Pulling no punches, the movie begins with the notion of the Singularity – a moment in time at which scientific and technological progress become so rapid as to defy human comprehension, with revolutionary developments occurring nearly instantaneously, and legacy human minds left in the dust by AI and cyborg intelligences. Kurzweil’s successes at technological and social forecasting are highlighted (he correctly predicted the rise of the Internet, the fall of the Soviet Union, the year that a computer would defeat a human champion at chess, and the list goes on and on), and the Singularity – which he forecasts for 2045 – is presented as his latest and greatest prediction, resulting from a painstaking process of data analysis covering technology trends in computer technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology, AI and other areas.

The film makes a powerful effort to ground the sometimes abstract-seeming and overly geekified Singularity concept in palpable human emotion and experience. Ray’s childhood gets significant screen time, as does his relationship with his deceased father – whose life he has documented and archived with incredible thoroughness, hoping to one day create advanced technology that can use this information to reconstitute a new incarnation, or at least an accurate simulation. His humanitarian motives are kept in focus, with moving scenes demonstrating the huge value delivered by the Kurzweil Reader for the blind. And when the theme of Ray’s quest for immortality comes up – as it does, again and again – one sees the heartfelt sentiment on Ray’s face and hears it in his voice. The urge to live forever is painted as it should be: not as some pathological act of psychic hubris, but rather as the most natural thing in the world ... a desire to avoid suffering and preserve life and knowledge.

I often think of Ray’s vision of the future as a “kinder, gentler Singularity,” and this comes across clearly in the film. Ray is portrayed as wanting the Singularity to help everyone, in the same way that he wanted the Kurzweil Reader to help blind people read. Vernor Vinge, who coined the term “Singularity” in its futurist sense, portrays the hypothesized event as a huge crazy leap into the incomprehensible unknown. While acknowledging there are massive surprises to come, Ray – with his dry, soothing businessman’s voice and demeanor -- projects a calm confidence that all will be well even as legacy humans become obsolete. In his vision, we will all one day merge into a massive global cyborg-mind, yet still retain our capacity for individual experience and joy.

More at:
http://hplusmagazine.com