“Well, some amazing changes that are fantastically big and fantastically fast are coming our way,” says noted futurist Alvin Toffler in the much-anticipated movie, The Singularity Is Near: a true story about the future, available today.

The Singularity Is Near stars Ramona, played by NCIS star Pauley Perrette, a superintelligent avatar (artificial-intelligence- based, human-like virtual person) created by AI wizard Ray Kurzweil (played by himself). Ramona desperately wants to be accepted legally as a human, but faces immediate shutdown by the authorities.

So she turns to (who else?) famous civil liberties lawyer Alan Dershowitz (played by himself) and seeks coaching by Tony Robbins (also played by himself) to discover what it means to be human.

These dramatic scenes punctuate an investigation of our amazing future by Kurzweil in dialogue with 19 “big thinkers,” who explore the impacts of the rapidly accelerating amazing technologies ahead, enriched with animations and graphics.

The movie is available exclusively through store.singularity.com via downloading, DVD, or deluxe box set (including the feature film and more than three hours of bonus material, behind-the-scenes footage, and extended interviews).

Director: Anthony Waller (Mute Witness, An American Werewolf In Paris, The Guilty)
Producers: Ray Kurzweil, Ehren Koepf, and Toshi Hoo
Executive Producer: Martine Rothblatt

A Terasem Motion Infoculture presentation in association with KurzweilAI.net, based on Ray Kurzweil’s New York Times best-selling book The Singularity Is Near.

As well as the X Prizes, Mr. Diamandis is cofounder and chairman of Singularity University, where the futurist Ray Kurzweil’s ideas of exponentially accelerating technology are explored. Despite being unusually optimistic myself about what lies ahead for humanity, I’m not yet convinced that we are about to see almost infinite rates of technological improvement — Mr. Kurzweil’s singularity — resulting, for example, in the indefinite extension of life. […]

The story of Stevie Wonder’s technical challenge to Ray Kurzweil that ultimately motivates the inception of Kurzweil Music Systems.

Related:
Kurzweil Music Systems

Myron McKinley, musical director for Earth, Wind & Fire discusses his long history and appreciation of Kurzweil musical instruments. Myron explains his method of alternative use of the PC3 K Series slider controls.

Ray Kurzweil and Joe Lamond, CEO of the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM), on stage at the NAMM Breakfast of Champions, January 19, 2012 in Anaheim, CA. (credit: National Association of Music Merchants, David Livingston)

At the 2012 NAMM show on January 19, 2012, National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) President and CEO Joe Lamond presented the Lifetime Achievement Award to Ray Kurzweil — best selling author, inventor and futurist in fields such as optical character recognition, text to speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments.

Lamond also presented NAMM’s Music for Life Award to Stevie Wonder, honoring him for his “brilliant musical contributions and talent that is cherished by people all over the world.”

Ray Kurzweil noted, “Stevie and I collaborated to create the first computerized musical instrument that could realistically recreate the piano and other orchestral instruments,” leading Kurzweil to found Kurzweil Music Systems in 1982.

“I have been blessed to have known two people — Ray Kurzweil and Steve Jobs,” said Wonder, and he cited the contribution of both to enriching our lives with technology.

(credit: National Association of Music Merchants)

The NAMM Show, one of the largest music products trade shows in the world, opened January 19 at the Anaheim Convention Center, welcoming an expected crowd of 90,000 musical instrument manufacturers, retailers, associates and their invited guests from all over the world to the industry’s annual gathering.

Founded in 1901, the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM), is the trade association for the $18 billion global music products industry.

NAMM | Ray Kurzweil and Joe Lammond at NAMM’s Breakfast of Champions

NAMM | In this video, Ray Kurzweil, CEO, Kurzweil Technologies, sits down with NAMM CEO & President Joe Lamond to explore the process of innovation. Ray shares his remarkable perspective and ideas with the audience, and in doing so, sparks NAMM members to think how these breakthroughs can be applied to improving their businesses and relate to their future chance of success and indeed their lives. During the Breakfast of Champions, Joe Lamond presented the Lifetime Achievement Award to Ray.

The National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) honored Ray Kurzweil with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2012 NAMM Breakfast of Champions on January 19, 2012 in Anaheim, CA. (credit: National Association of Music Manufacturers, David Livingston)

NAMM Lifetime Achievement Award previous recipients
previously named NAMM’s Hall of Fame

“Recognizing excellence and leadership in the music industry”

• Leo Fender — 1987
• Philip Werlein IV — 1987
• Hartley Peavey — 1988
• Manny Goldrich — 1988
• Vito Pascucci — 1988
• Armand Zildjian — 1989
• Henry Steinway — 1989
• Lee (Lawrence) Berk — 2004*
• Al Kowalenko (retirement from MIAC) — 2009 presented at MIAC Show
• Ray Kurzweil — 2012

* Presented to Lee Berk in January 2004 as he retired from Berklee College of Music. He was awarded the Music for Life Award in 1995.

related reading:
Ray Kurzweil videos | “The Kurzweil Music story: It all started with Ray”
The National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM)

Source: ABC

You can learn more about Blio here (Blio.com) and here (MeetBlio.com).

Perhaps this shouldn’t  be too surprising, many of us live in the mundane, harsh reality of the now. Day to day life, war, debt, unemployment, death and  taxes are difficult enough to grapple with without taking time out to contemplate the vast implications of a Technological Singularity predicted to emerge sometime between 2029 to 2050. Such a thing to the average man or woman can seem so distant, it may as well be ten thousand years away.

Despite the fact that many of the emergent technologies related to the Singularity hold the prospect to solve or (at the very least) reduce the severity of many of the major world problems we face; public interest in one of the most transformative ideas of our  time remains lackluster. […]

This LIVE broadcast panel discussion will focus on accelerating technologies, the future of humanity, and the Singularity. The star-studded panel includes powerhouses like futurist Michio Kaku, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, inventor Dean Kamen and many more. Barry Ptolemy, director of the Transcendent Man documentary will be on hand, as will the subject of that film, Ray Kurzweil.

There’s also a long list of “special guest appearances” including Bill Maher, Suzanne Somers, Al Gore, Quincy Jones, and Elon Musk. In other words, this is going to be a massive event, and a great debate on what the future should and will hold. Check the listings on Fathom Events for tickets in your area and watch the trailer for the August 3rd nationwide screening below. Transcendent Man has been gathering momentum since its premiere more than two years ago. Could this event propel the film, and the concept of the Singularity, into the mainstream? […]

Transcendent Man: A Conversation about the Future with Ray Kurzweil

To buy tickets to a screening near you, watch the trailer, or get more information, please visit NCM Fathom here.

Based on the critically acclaimed film documentary Transcendent Man — which explores the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil — the live event will feature exclusive, extended excerpts from the film and a celebrity discussion panel.

Ray Kurzweil will give a special presentation on accelerating technology and its impact on civilization, followed by an all-star panel discussing the future of humanity, the merger of man and machine, and the imminent end of aging and disease, ushering in an era of extreme longevity and human potential.

The event will feature Deepak Chopra (live via Teleportec), filmmaker Barry Ptolemy, Apple Inc. cofounder Steve Wozniak, physicist Michio Kaku, technology entrepreneur Tan Le, and inventor Dean Kamen. With pre-recorded remarks from former Vice President Al Gore, Suzanne Somers, Quincy Jones, Bill Maher, Elon Musk and others.

Viewers are invited to submit a question in advance (to be answered by participants on event night) on the Transcendent Man Facebook page or Twitter (hashtag: #tmlive).

“Ray Kurzweil’s theory that human life will be interconnected with machines and computers within the next several decades is fascinating people worldwide,” said Dan Diamond, vice president of Fathom. “This special live event will give audiences a chance to hear directly from the celebrated inventor and a world renowned panel about the theory of immortality and the progress being made in that regard right now.”

And the speed of this doubling is accelerating. (Kurzweil has pretty startling predictions about how powerful computers will be by 2020, 2029 and 2050.) By anticipating the future technology we can position ourselves to dominate its use once it’s widely adopted. Through Kurzweil we can see that the merging of TV with the internet is likely to happen much sooner (certainly within the decade) than most realize. […]

Transcendent Man, by director Barry Ptolemy, focuses on the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil. The film is available on DVD in stores nationwide (Best Buy and Barnes & Noble); for order at Amazon.com, WalMart.com, BestBuy.com, and BarnesandNoble.com; and on Netflix (DVD and “Watch Instantly”).

The DVD includes more than two hours of exclusive additional footage, with deleted scenes, extra interviews, and the Q&A with Kurzweil and Ptolemy after the film’s world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Transcendent Man is also available for downloading on iTunes and Movies On Demand (both without the extra two hours).

Ray Kurzweil is an interesting as hell fella. Imagine a practical William Gibson or Phillip K Dick. Now, he’s technically not a science fiction author… except that he kind of is. He predicts technology. Anticipates it. He’s one of the foremost futurists around, and has worked with countries around the globe, Presidents, Corporate minds. He pushes the people that create technology to create new technologies. And he’s been a leader in the field for about 40 or more years. And he believes that huge changes are coming in the next 15-20 years. Look at your cellphone. Think about what it does, now just think back 3 years ago. […]

Critics call him a crackpot, while he calmly makes his predictions based on past events. Don’t be scared, he urges, just be ready to become bionic or risk being left behind. […]

Transcendent Man is a documentary about innovations and revolutionary ideas based on Ray Kurzweil’s bestseller called The Singularity is Near. The movie is about the life, career and ideas of Kurzweil, who is well-known in America for being an inventor and futurologist. He invented many speech recognition systems. Kurzweil is known to have his own vision of future technologies. […]

Related:
Transcendent Man website

Ray Kurzweil is an inventor, author and futurist, who for years has provoked debate with his brilliant and, some might say, alarming vision of the future: namely, in 2045, humanity will hit the Singularity, a point of human technological development so swift and breathtaking that our minds (as they are) could never comprehend. Which is why, to stay in the game, humans are going to gradually upgrade by merging with machines, becoming a billion times more intelligent and potentially immortal in the process.

Such a vision wouldn’t seem out of place in a novel by William Gibson or Iain M. Banks. The main difference being, though, Kurzweil is not a science fiction author. He came to this point after measuring the rate of progress of information technology, which revealed consistent patterns of exponential growth.

And what’s more, it’s all extremely predictable. Hence why Kurzweil has been able to accurately predict such events as a super computer defeating a chess champion and the emergence of the Internet. He shows no signs of losing form: you can see it in the data, if you know how to look.

In recent years, Kurzweil’s ideas have attracted increased public attention, in a blend of enthusiasm and incredulity. This looks set to grow following the release of the highly anticipated documentary, The Transcendent Man, which takes a close look at the man behind the big ideas that drive him forward. I met with Ray and the documentary’s director, Barry Ptolemy, at the Dorchester on Park Lane (grand ideas require grand surroundings) on the London leg of their international tour, for a discussion about the impending Singularity.

“We are constantly changing who we are. We didn’t stay in the ground; we didn’t stay on the planet. We did not stick with the limitations of our biology. To change whom we are, is who we are.”

somethinkblue [STB]: What exactly makes the idea of Singularity powerful?

Ray Kurzweil: The idea is that informational technology — not everything — but information technology progresses in an exponential manner. That’s a very powerful idea, and it’s also very predictable. If you take the fundamental measures of information technology — there are a hundred of them — for example, the power of computation, instructions per second per dollar, you see a very smooth line of exponential progression that has been uninterrupted since the recording devices used in the 1890 American Census.

Nothing had any effect on it, not World War I, World War II, or the Great Depression, the Cold War, or anything. It goes through thick and thin, war and peace, boom times and recessions. It’s remarkably predictable. But it’s not intuitive. We have an intuition about the future, which is hardwired in our brains. That intuition is linear, not exponential. So there are some quite complex ideas here, but the core is simple. A lot of my explanation is about the difference between them.

STB: What’s significant about the difference?

Ray Kurzweil: Basically, if you take 30 steps linearly, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and so forth, at step 30 you’re at 30. If you take 30 exponential steps, doubling each time, 2, 4, 8, 16, at step 30, you’re at a billion. It makes a huge difference. And this is not an idle speculation about the future. This computer on my belt is a billion times more powerful, per dollar or per pound, than the one I used when I was a student at MIT. And that’ll happen again in 25 years.

STB: How does that affect humanity’s progress?

Ray Kurzweil: Well, for instance, the power of our biological technology is now progressing exponentially. When biologists who are not familiar with this idea look at health and medicine before it was an information technology — it wasn’t always and only became so recently with the collection of the genome — they look at how long things have taken in the past and use that as a model for the future. But the past was linear. The future of health and medicine and our longevity will be exponential, because health and medicine is now an information technology.

People often say, it can’t all be totally predictable, and I give them example after example of how for decades — over a century in the case of computers — this law of accelerating returns holds up. Its an outgrowth of what we see in evolution, because an evolutionally process evolves a capability and uses that capability to evolve a next stage, and that next stage is more powerful as it builds on the shoulders of the stage before. It goes more quickly, there’s an inherent acceleration. So there are many implications, but ultimately it will affect everything we care about, including our life spans.

STB: So what we’re effectively talking about here is the evolution of evolution via technology?

Ray Kurzweil: Exactly.

STB: Does that mean we’re actually on the verge of immortality?

Ray Kurzweil: The key idea there is radical life extension, to overcome the phenomena that results in short life spans, which I think are really quite tragic. The movie illustrates that with the example of my father. He really did die prematurely, but in my view everybody dies prematurely. By the time people actually get into their stride and have figured out how to be creative, and people start listening to them, they pass from the scene.

But then people say, we have to get rid of all these old people and make way for new people. [I believe that] We don’t need to get rid of older people, their wisdom and accumulated knowledge to make way for the new – now that we can actually reprogramme the software underlying our biology. Just in the same way we reprogramme our phones and computers.

Barry Ptolemy: I’d like to add one point. People criticize Ray’s ideas about longevity as being ridiculous, almost unnatural to live indefinitely. When people say, I don’t want to live forever, that’d be a form of Dante’s Hell, what they don’t understand is we’re also talking about radical life expansion. Life is going expand a billion fold in every direction in ways we can’t really imagine. The way we understand and enjoy the universe is expanding: we’re going to be able to travel at electronic speeds, we’re going to be able to have millions of friends who we can communicate with all at once. It’s going to be completely different to the life we’re used to right now.

STB: Why do you think people are sceptical about such predictions?

Ray Kurzweil: They’re sceptical because they often don’t bother to read what I’ve written; they just look at the conclusions and say, well that’s not intuitive. That’s not what I imagine will happen. And exponential growth, as I mentioned, is not intuitive. Our built-in predictions [as humans] are linear. So people assume our pace of progress will continue.

STB: Are there indisputable instances where your exponential view has clearly triumphed over our linear intuition?

Ray Kurzweil: I’ll give you an example: the genome project was announced around 1990, and mainstream critics were quite sceptical. I fully expected it would finish on time, which was 15 years. People thought that was ridiculous, because in 1989 we’d only collected one-ten-thousandth of the genome. Halfway through the project, only 1% had been finished. People said, I told you this was going to take centuries. Here we are, 7 years and we’ve only finished 1%. 100 times 7 years is 700 years, but it’ll speed up a little bit: it’ll be 100 years.

It was actually finished 7 years later, because it was doubling every year and 1% is only 7 doublings till 100%. The project was actually finished early. So unless you’ve really studied the implications of this exponential growth, it’s very surprising. In the 1980s, I talked about a worldwide web of communication emerging in the mid-1990s, when the entire U.S. defense budget could only tie together a few thousand scientists with the ARPANET. And people said, that’ll happen some day, hundreds of millions of people connected, but it’ll take centuries. It happened right on schedule, because that’s the power of exponential growth.

STB: Is there going to be a need for us to reconsider and redefine our concept of the future and the human in it?

Ray Kurzweil: I don’t have to change my concept of human, because my concept of human is we’re the species that transcends. We are constantly changing who we are. We didn’t stay in the ground; we didn’t stay on the planet. We did not stick with the limitations of our biology. To change whom we are, is who we are.

We can talk about some things. We’re entering a stage where we’re going to merge with our technology. We are quite merged already. I mean, my phone is not literally inside my body and brain, but it might as well be a part of who I am. Quite intuitively now, I use this as my memory. I’ll think, who was that actress again? and in a few seconds I’ll have that information. We don’t bother remembering things anymore.

Some people have already put computers in their bodies and brains: computerised pancreases, patients with Parkinson’s disease, implants for the deaf. Today they require surgery, because they’re not blood cell sized, yet. Another exponential is in terms of shrinking technology; I’ve measured that, and it’s a factor of a 100 in 3D volume per decade. At the moment these implants are pea sized, but they’ll be the size of blood cells in 20 years, and they’ll make their way into our bodies and brains.

STB: Sounds like we’re talking about cyborgs here.

Ray Kurzweil: We’ll become a hybrid. You’ll still talk to a biological human, your biological parents etc. But nonetheless you’ll be talking to cyborgs — somebody who has biological and non-biological processes mixed-up together. It won’t just be a case that we’ll have computers in our brains, they’ll be out in the cloud. Just as when I use this phone, I’m just using stuff inside this box, it’s out in the cloud accessing all of Google and lots of other services. So our brains will be out in the cloud. It’s going to be a smooth transition, where we’ll be a merger of biological and non-biological intelligence.

STB: Some people might say that this sounds like a future that doesn’t really require the human species. This is an automatic technological development quite indifferent to what we think or do.

Ray Kurzweil: It kind of depends on what you mean by the human species: in my mind this (emphatically points at phone) is a part of us right now. This didn’t come from Mars. This isn’t some kind of alien invasion. We created these tools. It’s who we are. These future humans who will ultimately become predominately non-biological are a continuation of the human species.

If you want to talk about what’s lost, nothing is lost. We are adding to our capability. We’re not going to do things if there is a loss.

Barry Ptolemy: People see technology as something square and mechanical like a computer. They don’t see technology as being a table, or a cup, or a footpath in the forest. When you view technology like that, you realise that technology has always been with us from the very beginning, and more importantly, it makes us more human. It’s amplified who we are, so the question that we should be posing is, who do we want to be?

STB: Isn’t there the potential that unsavoury forces, like oppressive governments or individuals, will use these new technologies?

Barry Ptolemy: The opposite is happening. We’re seeing that these technologies are having a democratising and decentralising effect, and when I say that, I mean more people have these technologies in their hands and in their belts, than ever before. So we’re taking power away from monopoles and putting into more hands.

Ray Kurzweil: There are dangers. Hugo De Garis says in the movie that I don’t like to hear about the downsides. That’s not really true, because I’ve written extensively about it. Of course, nobody likes to hear about it. But a lot of the material about the downsides and dangers comes from my writings.

Technology has always been a double-edged sword. I think you can make a strong case that we’ve benefited more than we’ve been harmed, but we have felt pain. Fire cooked our food, kept us warm, also burned down our villages, either accidentally or intentionally. Look at the 20th century, we had a 180 million people die in the wars during that period.

If you have enough intelligence you can solve problems, any problem, but it could also be very damaging if you have an entity that is smarter than you are, a thousand times smarter, and also happens to be bent for your destruction. Well, if that happens, you really shouldn’t have gotten into that situation in the first place.

STB: How do we avoid getting into that situation?

Ray Kurzweil: There are many ways, for instance, we can develop rapid response systems to prevent abuse. I’ve actually worked with the US army on developing a response system for new biological viruses that bio terrorists might create. This is analogous to software viruses. If we sat back and said, who would ever want to create a software virus, there aren’t destructive people like that. That’d be a mistake and the Internet wouldn’t last very long.

In fact, we have developed a technological immune system that quickly detects them, helps to reverse engineer them, disable them, and virally spreads an antidote. We can do something comparable in biological viruses, which are already being put in place.

STB: Are we effectively heading towards a civilisation as a hive mind?

Ray Kurzweil: There are steps in that direction already. You can see how it’s politically democratising. Places that were once considered third world are just as sophisticated as we are in terms of social networking. Mathematicians getting together as “hive minds” doing communal problem solving have solved mathematical theorems that were previously thought impossible, because they were able to tap five thousand mathematicians using cooperative problem solving techniques with their computers. Actually part of the solutions were done by computer, some done through collective decision-making. Not in the old communist sense, but as a way of actually getting to the wisdom of crowds.

STB: You mention the word communist — will the old ideologies and political discourses have any relevance in this conception?

(credit: The Economist Newspaper Limited )

Ray Kurzweil: I have written that we’ll actually achieve the original goals of communism through a combination of free enterprise and the Open Source movement. Because we’ll ultimately be able to meet all our needs with information technology, including for physical products.

Recently on the cover of The Economist magazine was a picture of a violin that was printed out by a 3D printer. There’s this emerging industry of printers that print out objects from an information file.

And the precision and scale is getting finer and finer, where we’ll soon be at the molecular level within 20 years.

So, we’ll be able to print out a blouse or a meal, and all the physical things we need. There will be propriety forms of this information just as there are today: music, software, and movies.

And there’ll be Open Source versions, just as there are today.

We’ll achieve the goals of communism, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” without the forced collectivism, which has always been the mistake.

This sort of collective decision-making today, is never forced, it’s spontaneous, people coming together to share and build on each other’s ideas.

Barry Ptolemy: You’ll have technologies that allow for people to communicate in ways they haven’t yet found possible. There are communities in Africa that are going to bypass the industrial revolution and go right from an agrarian economy straight into an ideas economy. And they’ll be hooked into the Internet in a decentralised fashion, and they’re going to provide new arts and ideas ways of communicating that we haven’t even thought about: self-actualising and creative, a fundamental part of this hive-mind you describe.

 Ray Kurzweil: The old axiom that democracies don’t go to war with each other is largely true. Churchill said it was the worst possible system, except for all the others. It is messy, where everybody gets in on the act, but it does ultimately lead to wiser decisions. It’s just another form of collective decision-making.

STB: Is there a space in this new world for people who you describe, Ray, as “concerned and constructive luddites”? The sort of people who aren’t yet convinced that print publishing will fall in the path of digital publishing? In other words, intellectual technophobes?

Ray Kurzweil: You do have this reflexive anti-technology stance that there is something sacred, unspeakably sacred, about the natural human being, or the natural tomato. We should make no changes to the tomato, because it’s from nature, it’s perfect. But the anti-genome movement, for instance, is giving way because the benefits are so overwhelming. Look, they blocked golden rice for five years, and probably a million African children went blind as a result of the delays.

I call it fundamentalist humanism, and fundamentalist naturalism, which has been the most potent opposing position. That it’s just not natural to change our biology and so on. But biology is inherently very limited. And our changing it is not a new story. The Luddites have been around for centuries; actually they started here in England.

STB: We’re sorry about that.

 Ray Kurzweil: There’s a general fear of change, which isn’t new. A feeling that the way things are, is the way things should always be. But that really belies the general inclination of human beings towards progress.

Barry Ptolemy: The modern Luddite movement finds its home in the halls of academia, more than anywhere else. And they play an important purpose, because we need scepticism. If an idea has any merit it’ll certainly be able to endure that. There was scepticism over Darwin, Einstein, and a lot of great thinkers who had great ideas, and they certainly prevailed. I’m sure that Ray and his ideas are going to prevail once people start to truly appreciate what he’s talking about.

Cinetalk Reviews YouTube channel | A review of the documentary about the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil.

Related:
Cinetalk Reviews YouTube channel

How do you get everyone to sit up and pay attention to the idea of the Singularity? Make it entertaining. No doubt about it, Transcendent Man is that and more. Barry Ptolemy’s documentary on Ray Kurzweil explores the philosophy, personal history, and predictions of one of the world’s most prominent futurists.

It’s a great film, and a wonderful look at the potential forces that may decide the fate of humanity. I recently had a chance to speak with Ptolemy about Transcendent Man, how making this movie has shaped his life, and his future projects. […]

If the idea of scientifically-created immortality (as opposed to the philosophical or Pearly Gate variety) seems outlandish, it’s only one of several put forth by Kurzweil in the film. Fortunately, it’s a movie about much more than just his predictions. It would be the dullest mind-blowing experience if it were, but instead of focusing too much on the science, the documentary creates a portrait of the man making the claims — complete with his failings and warmth.

One version is a genius inventor who created a way for the blind to read. The other is a man haunted by the spectre of his father and debilitated by the thought of his own end.

Having read Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines, the detail gaps were filled in a bit, but knowing his work seems markedly unnecessary to following the movie. At a certain point, the information is meaningless. The list of hopes and prophesies for the future are a pure distillation of humanity, but it’s far more interesting to watch Kurzweil standing over his father’s grave or perusing the storage unit of his father’s effects to see the true personal anchor to that ever-elongating list.

As far as objectivity, this is firmly Kurzweil’s movie. He’s the main talking head, and his words are even blown up as kinetic typography to drive home the point (and to make the talking head element a bit more dynamic). There are counterpoints offered from brilliant minds, but not quite enough to bring things back to an even keel. Fortunately, it’s not nearly as one-sided as documentaries seem to have been since Michael Moore proved you could make money from sensationalism. […]

Kooky sounding indeed. Last week, however, at the D.C. premiere of Transcendent Man, hundreds of people gathered to hear Ray Kurzweil and see a documentary about him and his theories. While this may sound more like science fiction than actual science, the man did invent the musical synthesizer, created a device that uses optical character recognition to help blind people read, predicted the year and month in which a computer would defeat a human at chess, and has 17 Ph.Ds. Kurzweil has even received the National Medal of Technology, the highest medal the president can bestow for pioneering new technologies, from three separate U.S. presidents. So let’s not dismiss him just yet. […]

Lisbeth Kaufman caught up with futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil at the Washington, D.C. premier of his film Transcendent Man. You can listen to the short interview here.

Transcendent Man

Transcendent Man is also listed in the top 20 in customer ratings among all movies on iTunes in the United States, as of March 5. The film was rated five stars by 86 percent of customers.

Kurzweil and Ptolemy are scheduled for an interview Monday on CNN Newsroom at 1:45 p.m. EST.

Film screenings are scheduled for March 10 in Washington, D.C. (at Sixth and I Historic Synagogue), March 21 in Boston (Coolidge Corner Theater), April 5 in London (The Science Museum IMAX Theater), and April 14 in San Francisco (Palace of Fine Arts).  DVD release date is May 24.

More info: Transcendent Man website, related KurzweilAI news.

Transcendent Man introduces the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil, the renowned futurist who journeys the world offering his vision of a future in which we will merge with our machines, can live forever, and are billions of times more intelligent…all within the next thirty years.

Visit the film’s official website here for more information, and for current screening times and digital downloads.

The crowd Thursday night filled with a range of young and middle age viewers, who were treated to a opening monologue and extensive Q&A after the screening. Kurzweil said the film closely represents his ideals and does not blur his intentions in ways that can be perceived by outside media.

Kurzweil has been compared to Nostradamus for his spot-on predictions of technology and the future, as well as been likened to a lunatic. The theory of singularity suggests a complete merger of human and machine that will create super intelligent, immortal beings. The philosophical and spiritual ramifications are great as viewers contemplate what it means to be human and our role on this planet.

Audience members lined up half way down two isles to get their chance to ask questions— he is known for catering to fans and does not skimp on his answers. When asked about the ramifications of longer life span and greater population if life spans are extended towards infinity, he rebuked the illusion that resources are limited. Food sources will only continue to be produced more efficiently and “unfortunate” practices such as factory farming will be eliminated.

“The reason that space seems limited is because people live in these inventions called cities,” he said. “Anyone that has taken a train lately knows there is plenty of space.”

The documentary is cinematically thoughtful with sweeping shots of the stars and visual graphs that track the technological timeline onscreen are thanks to work of director Barry Ptolemy. The film captures the optimism of Kurzweils’s views about the benefits technology will have for the human race, as well as featuring more than a few voices who are all too aware of how higher intelligence may not look kindly on its inferior creators. Everyone can agree that the outcome of singularity by definition is unknown.

The Science

On its surface, The Transcendent Man explores the science behind Kurzweil’s prediction of a Singularity event, as Kurzweil authored in The Singularity Is Near. Kurzweil has observed that new technologies – ranging from the printing press to Google – themselves enable us to develop newer technologies even faster. So the pace of innovation is always accelerating, yielding an exponential curve of discovery. Kurzweil produces data that extends Moore’s Law to bits shipped, social connections made, and many other metrics of information technology. Extrapolating from historical trends, we will within two decades manufacture the powerful computers we carry today in sizes no larger than a blood cell. […]

Director Barry Ptolemy, Raymond Kurzweil, actress Heather Graham, Jason Silva. (Image: The Imaginary Foundation)

About the Imaginary Foundation

The Imaginary Foundation is a think tank from Switzerland that does experimental research on new ways of thinking and the power of the imagination. They hold dear a belief in human potential and seek progress in all directions. The small clandestine team is headed up by the mysterious “Director,” a 70-something Uber-intellectual whose father founded the Dadaist movement. Avoiding direct publicity, the team has sought clothing as an unlikely vehicle for bringing their ideas beyond the academic realm and into popular culture.

In his vision for the Imaginary Foundation, the Director knew that the human mind has more than one mode, that indeed it has an “ecology” of being. He knew that imagination, intuition, inspiration are basic to psyche. . . . A philosophy of research began to form: imagination as fundamental to all learning; artistic making as a model of integrating vision, materials, structure, and imagery. “What makes true vision is the poetry of life and the richness of nature.” The Foundation’s basis has been a strong sense of community, free inquiry, creativity, and the experimental spirit. Over the years the Foundation has generated a critical mass of creative people in many different fields, for whom it’s been a catalyst for experimentation and innovation. “The Imaginary Foundation is a crazy and magical place, and the electricity of it’s members seems to make for a wonderfully charged atmosphere, so that sometimes before sessions one becomes excited and a little anxious, as though a thunderstorm were sweeping in.”

Also see:
The Imaginary Foundation website

Transcendent Man explores the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil the inventor of the first CCD flat bed scanner and the author behind the best-selling book, The Singularity is Near. He has been compared to Nostradamus for his predictions of technology and the future or likened to a lunatic.

The theory of singularity doesn’t merely blur the line between human and machine, but incites the complete unity of the two that will create superintelligent, immortal beings. To a more ominous point, technology will advance at such a rapid rate that humans will have no choice but to merge with the same advanced technology we have created. By the 2030s, he furthers there will be no clear difference between man and machine intelligence. Death will be a distant memory. […]

That opening sequence of Transcendent Man, the new documentary by director Barry Ptolemy that profiles Kurzweil and his ideas, neatly distills the sometimes jarring predictions and preoccupations of its subject. The film is about Kurzweil’s belief that within just a few decades technology will allow human beings to transcend the physical and intellectual limitations of their biology. It also paints Kurzweil as a brilliant man who has personally always risen above the skepticism and misunderstanding of his doubters.

Cleverly edited and entertaining, Transcendent Man is unfortunately also too starstruck and reverent toward Kurzweil for its own good. It wants in part to be a movie about ideas, but frustratingly, it refuses to truly challenge any of those it raises — whether supportive or critical of him. Given that the film’s theme is the salvation or destruction of the human race, its lack of commitment to a perspective other than innocent wonder is unsatisfying.

(Image: Robbins Research International, Inc.)

World-renowned and respected self-help, organizational, and peak-performance guru Tony Robbins Tweets Transcendent Man, the movie. 

Thought leaders like Robbins from all fields are seeing the power of ever-accelerating advances in technology and science, and planning for the profound impact of that quickening on human society today and tomorrow. 

Tony Robbins is on the lookout for game-changing ideas and tracking the trends that will affect society — Follow Tony Robbins on Twitter, Facebook, and his website. 

Visit the Transcendent Man website for screening dates and to purchase tickets. 

@tonyrobbins: Ray Kurzweil’s documentary selected one of top 10 of the year: http://transcendentman.com/

@tonyrobbins: My friend Ray Kurzweil’s Transcendent Man selected one of top 10 documentaries of the year. LA. Screening 2-16&17 must see! he is the world greatest futurist-pure genius – sold out in NY, SJ, Boston.

@tonyrobbins: Check out my friend Ray Kurzweil on the cover of Time. His film has it’s LA premier feb 16 & 17th

@tonyrobbins: What does the future hold for us? check out trailer from the man who has been most accurate predictor in our lifetimes.

For updates: http://twitter.com/#search?q=%40tonyrobbins%20kurzweil%20 

About Tony Robbins, from www.TonyRobbins.com | Life on your terms: peak performance, turnaround & maximum results. For over 30 years, Anthony Robbins has dedicated his life to modeling the most successful people in the world. Through access to their experience, he has discovered and simplified the core distinctions and strategies that can be applied immediately to measurably improve the quality of your life. We invite you to take the first step now.

Click here for tickets to the February 16, 2011 screening, at 8:00pm, followed by a Q&A with director Barry Ptolemy and Ray Kurzweil.

Click here for tickets to the February 17, 2011 screening, at 8:00pm, followed by a Q&A with director Barry Ptolemy and Ray Kurzweil.

Transcendent Man, the critically acclaimed documentary by director Barry Ptolemy, explores the life and ideas of renowned futurist Ray Kurzweil. The film follows Kurzweil as he travels the world, sharing his incredible vision of a future in which we merge with machines and vastly extend human longevity and intelligence… all within the next 30 years.

The event will include an 8:00pm presentation by Ray Kurzweil, followed by the screening of the film, and post-film Q&A with director Barry Ptolemy and Ray Kurzweil. For more information please visit: TranscendentMan.com.

The scenario of super-intelligent robots as a part of our everyday life (and even ourselves) is not just a thing for the sci-fi books and movies according to the theory of singularity, the subject of a documentary called the Transcendent Man, which explores the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil.

Inventor of the first CCD flat bed scanner and the author behind the best-selling book, The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil has been compared to Nostradamus for his predictions of technology and the future — or dismissed as a lunatic. But the documentary illustrates that his predictions aren’t so far fetched. The theory of singularity doesn’t merely blur the line between human and machine, it forecasts the complete unity of the two.

By the 2030s, Kurzweil predicts we will have the technology to synthetically recreate all functions of the human brain. He furthers that eventually, this synthetic intelligence will advance at such a rapid rate that humans will have no choice but to merge with the same technology we have created. These merged, super-intelligent beings will be able to store and “backup” their consciousness (much like a computer today) and in doing so will become immortal entities, leaving death as a distant memory.

Ptolemaic Productions recently announced that the film will be making a tour through major markets starting February 3rd, with a return to New York City.

From there the movie will proceed to San Jose, LA, DC, Boston, London and Toronto. Kurzweil will be on hand at each destination, giving a talk about his belief in the Law of Accelerating Returns. While a seven city tour isn’t shabby, it’s too bad the movie won’t receive widespread theatrical release. For most of us the first chance we’ll have to see the film is its digital distribution on iTunes and OnDemand starting March 1st, or its eventual DVD release on March 24th. It’s unclear if Transcendent Man is the vehicle that will bring the concept of the Singularity to the mainstream, but it’s still a great film that’s well worth watching. […]

In the latest push for alternate distribution, indie docu Transcendent Man is slated for a multi­city global tour beginning Feb. 3, followed by a digital release March 1.

The tour, which begins in New York and ends in London on April 5, will include a Q&A with author Ray Kurzweil, whose tome The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology provides source material for the docu.

Directed by Barry Ptolemy, Transcendent chronicles the life and ideas of Kurzweil, whose book focuses on technological change in society and the idea of humans transcending biological limitations.

Docu is produced through Ptolemy’s shingle Ptolemaic Prods., along with Therapy Studios, which provided editorial, design and post-production services.

“I reached two powerful conclusions after reading The Singularity Is Near,” Ptolemy said. “The first was that this was the most profound book I had ever read, and the second was that as a filmmaker I had to turn these ideas into film.”

Transcendent, which had its world preem at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, will use a social media marketing campaign in conjunction with the tour. Pic’s digital distribution will go through partners iTunes and Media-on-Demand, followed by a DVD release on May 24.

WME Global and Music departments brokered the distrib pacts on behalf of the filmmakers, in addition to booking the U.S. tour. Other cities include L.A., Boston, Washington, D.C., and San Jose, CA.

© Copyright 2011 , a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. (reprinted with permission)

Education Many of the world’s critical problems have a common root in ignorance, and educational technologies provide an unprecedented opportunity to reach billions of people, and build a future characterized by informed dialog, foresight, and systems that work. How can technology be used to provide personalized education to the world’s developing areas?

Security In a world plagued by wars, terrorism, and crime, nations seek many different kinds of security for their citizens, as well as freedom from fear and corruption. How can exponential technology be used to address and improve global security issues?

Energy Our civilization fundamentally depends on energy, and we need to make a rapid transition from low-efficiency systems and high dependence on fossil fuels, to high efficiency systems and cost-effective renewable fuels. How can exponential technologies be used to provide humanity with low-cost and abundant energy to meet their needs for prosperity?

Global Health There are large and growing discontinuities between current knowledge of public health and medicine and its effective application around the world – millions suffer and die from preventable diseases, and the entire world remains at risk of pandemics. How can technology be used to provide billions with low-cost, ubiquitous healthcare, and help to identify and prevent pandemics?

Poverty Living standards have increased significantly in the past two centuries, but more than 20% of the world today lives in extreme poverty —  unable to access resources that address their problems. How can exponential technologies be leveraged to create new jobs and wealth to alleviate poverty?

Space The grand challenge of space includes abundant energy and material resources, a planetary-scale network of sensors and systems measuring global conditions, and a vast, open frontier for exploration – but humans haven’t yet built industrial-strength solutions to realize these opportunities rapidly and cost effectively. How can the vast and abundant energy and material resources of space be used to address many of humanity’s grand challenges?

These areas were chosen because they are among the most pressing global grand challenges. And, based on the caliber of applications we’ve reviewed and students already selected, the class of GSP11 will be some of the most ready to develop the future-focused and innovative solutions required to effectively address each area. As always, we look forward to working with GSP11 to addressing these areas, and to help shape a more positive future!

Also see:
NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” official website
Video of Paul McCartney’s “Saturday Night Live” performance on Hulu

Paul McCartney on stage with a Kurzweil synthesizer, on “Saturday Night Live” in December 2010. (Image: NBC Universal, Inc.)

Click here to view the new Kurzweil PC3K8 brochure, which opens as an Adobe pdf.

Lyman sees SkyShelf and browser-based reading as a complementary option to other e-reading market segments. Amazon’s Kindle serves one segment well, he says. Blio is good for art books, cookbooks, and other books with many graphics and for consumers willing to download the software. While LibreDigital is currently targeting consumers with a “read now experience,” he says the company is also having discussions with education and scholarly publishers. […]

In 1982, while giving me a tour of his new ‘Wonderland’ music studio, Stevie asked if it would be possible to build a bridge between the powerful control methods of computer music (in which a broad variety of input devices could be used to control any available sound) with the beautiful sounds of acoustic instruments such as the piano and guitar.

I thought about it, and concluded that it would be feasible. Kurzweil Music Systems was born in 1982 with Stevie Wonder as musical advisor. We showed a prototype of the Kurzweil 250 at the June 1983 NAMM show and people were amazed that both the look and feel of a grand piano was realistically captured in an electronic instrument for the first time. We started shipping the product in 1984 and it quickly became recognized as the first computerized instrument to faithfully capture the grand piano, which we confirmed in A-B tests with pianists.
 

Over the next quarter century we developed a succession of digital keyboards that maintained this leadership in realism while also providing a broad new palette of sounds and sound modification techniques that are only possible in the electronic world.

This was the vision that Stevie Wonder had articulated in 1982 and I was personally gratified that he felt satisfied that we had achieved it. Many other high profile artists (Paul McCartney, Billy Joel, The Who, Earth, Wind and Fire, the Boston Pops, Andrew Lloyd Webber to name a few) around the world seemed to agree.

A traditional reaction of musicians to our Kurzweil keyboards has often been “if only I could afford one.” That’s why am personally excited by the recent PC3 line ranging from the very affordable PC3LE to the top-of-the-line (but still very affordable)  PC3K. With the ability to load K2000/2500/2600 series sounds, the new PC3K demonstrates KMS’s commitment to non-obsolescence by design. Nearly twenty years worth of sound libraries, representing untold hours of work, can be utilized alongside the PC3K’s current 1000+ presets.

I have always felt that the type of technology that Kurzweil Music represents is highly democratizing. Years ago only the top studios and academic laboratories could afford technology that allowed flexible shaping of new sounds. Now these tools can be afforded by everyone from music students to weekend musicians. As technological advances continue to ramp up at an exponential pace, KMS will continue to push the boundaries of what is possible, further blurring the line between music and machine.”

 — Ray Kurzweil
Founder and Chief Strategy Officer
Kurzweil Music Systems

Film Synopsis

Panel Sponsor | Terasem Motion Infoculture

Panel Synopsis | We live in an era of exponentially increasing advances in artificial intelligence, nano technology, robotics, designer drugs, bionics, and techniques to defeat—and perhaps even reverse—cellular aging. Scientific optimists look forward to a transhuman future when our life expectancy will be dramatically, if not infinitely, extended; when people no longer suffer from disability or disease; when super-intelligent machines will “reproduce” by designing and building their own successors; when the line between humans and computers will increasingly blur, as we “download” our memories and minds into machines and become bionic ourselves. What promises and challenges does this vision of the future hold?

Moderator | Paul Hoffman is the editorial chairman of BigThink.com, a storyteller at The Moth, and an award-winning science writer. His website is www.thepHtest.com.

Panelists | Martine Rothblatt: Ph.D, MBA, lawyer, author and entrepreneur. Ray Kurzweil: One of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers and futurists, with a twenty-year track record of accurate predictions.

My Take | Much of the audience, myself included, who had just watched the quasi-documentary/sci-fi narrative feature film, The Singularity Is Near (based on Kurzweil’s book of the same name), headed over from the Bearsville Theater across the way to Utopia Studios for a panel discussion with the scientific and creative mind behind the film and co-director, Ray Kurzweil, and producer Martine Rothblatt (founder of Sirius Satellite Radio) for a panel discussion moderated by Paul Hoffman. The panel somewhat continued the discussion where last year’s Redesigning Humanity: The New Frontier panel left off. I found both the film and the discussion to be quite fascinating. What if there were technologies to extend our lives, cure certain diseases, artificial intelligence with feelings, and so on? Well it seems as if scientists and technology pioneers are making this happen as analyzed in the film. I didn’t think I would like the hybrid element of mixing a narrative with documentary, but in this case, it really made the topic even more interesting and relatable. The narrative, involving a bot named Ramona with artificial intelligence that is trying to become more conscious and human, pumped a lot of energy into the film, making it very fun and entertaining, despite some hokey acting. What I also learned is that some of this technology can be used for solar panels to create a source of renewable energy, a topic that perhaps we can try to address at the Environmentally Speaking: Improving Our Planet with the Power of Film panel discussion this Sunday at 2:00 P.M. (shameless plug). Below are some highlights of The Singularity Is Near panel discussion.

Notes | Before getting into some of the broader questions the panel would address — Kurzweil’s and Rothblatt’s visions of the future, what society needs to do to get there, and what obstacles they might encounter – Hoffman asked Kurzweil to define Singularity. Kurzweil said the core idea behind Singularity is the exponential growth of Information Technology. Computer growth has doubled by a billion in 25 years. It is not intuitive, the only thing that is constant is change, but change is not a constant. Our intuition about the future is that it is linear, not exponential. He has debated with other scientists whether Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) will pass the turn test in 20 years. His view is that the view of exponential growth is underestimated. The other key point is that it is not just gadgets, but biology, the premise of biotechnology. The reason to be concerned about this is it holds the key to solving the major challenges in humanity: energy, the environment, disease, longevity, and poverty. On the other hand, biotechnologies can be abused, for example biological weapons for terrorism.

Hoffman said Singularity is the point in which A.I. reaches and surpasses human intelligence, but when will this happen. According to Rothblatt, this is a misleading question to answer, because intelligence isn’t something that’s concrete. She alludes to Kurzweil’s point in the film and his book that there are hundreds of A.I. applications that come into existence year after year, and the film begins that the Singularity has already begun. The question really is, when will non-flesh-based intelligence demonstrate consciousness (such as the character of Ramona in the film) and when will this artificial person care about its existence, and we as human should really care about this artificial person? She thinks it will happen in a few decades. Kurzweil said it’s a philosophical matter of personal belief about the consciousness of A.I., his being that “if it seems conscious, it is.” If it passes the turn test, we will come to believe that they conscious, and he believes we’ll get to that threshold in about 20 years.

There’s the future, and then there’s now, 2010. Hoffman asked the panel what they feel the most amazing things are happening now in these fields, such as biomedicine. Rothblatt said she thinks the most incredible thing going on now is stem cell research. She referred to an Australian company taking a male baby’s foreskin and using it to grow in a laboratory environment to grow fresh tissue that can be transplanted on burn victims [Side Note: I actually knew a little bit about this fact through the documentary, Partly Private, which deals with circumcision. I handled publicity for this film and it won the award for Best New York Documentary at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival J]. Rothblatt’s company focuses on the lungs for people dying of lung cancer, and they’re working on growing fresh air sacks to be re-planted back into the patient.

Of nanotechnology, what is an example of something that has worked in a lab, Hoffman asked. Kurzweil said an application of nanotechnology are new solar panels that have been created that have resulted in the price per watt coming down. There’s also an emerging field of creating three-dimensional objects by re-organizing molecules.

How do these new technologies change human relations, Hoffman asked. Rothblatt said it will bring people closer together. Her point of view is that we’ve moved two steps forward and one step back. There is an emerging global consciousness. More than half the people in the world now have means to communicate with everyone via cell phones. Kurzweil added that decentralized communication has a positive democratizing effect.

Hoffman looked back on the turn of the 19th to 20th Century when there seemed to be a sense of technological optimism. Is there that same sense now? Kurzweil articulated what the key thesis is — if you measure the underlying properties of Information Technology, it was an amazingly smooth exponential. It’s not an erratic curve. Hoffman interjected to say that it wasn’t his point to examine the growth of I.T., but how it is handled. Kurzweil said there will always be plusses and minuses, and things have come a long way. There are things we could be doing, and we’re not. That’s why it is important to understand the potential of today’s technology.

Hoffman said he learned from one of the interview subjects in the film, that as people live longer, there will be no murder, because it will be so morally reprehensible to take someone’s life. How will that vanish? Rothblatt said no one’s arguing that evil deeds are going to vanish, but that the ratio of good versus bad in the world is continuing to increase. In the future, everyone will routinely back up his or her brain, which could possibly federally mandated. One reason there wouldn’t be murder, is that everyone would come back as his or her virtual selves.

Why are there so many smart people at the top of their fields who think that Kurzweil’s vision in the film is inaccurate, Hoffman asked. Kurzweil said these skeptics are linear thinkers. He questioned why people stick to this perspective. No one had ever really adopted exponential growth emotional, but the acceptance of exponential growth and its implications is growing. Rothblatt said it’s just human nature, not about the technological change. Now matter how intelligent you are, humans will be naturally threatened.

Hoffman asked the panel to discuss more about what they think is going to happen in the future. Rothblatt said it comes to a concept of being able to operate across multiple bodies. We’re accustomed to having one mind and one body. Once we’re able to abstract our consciousness outside of our body, you can then operate your mind across multiple bodies. Because of this exponential intelligence, you’ll be able to be aware of you multiple selves at the same time. Kurzweil said a trend to look at is virtual reality, Second Life for example, even in its brief existence so far, it is moving toward greater realism. Imagine how illicit and compelling these virtual environments will be in 20 or 50 years.

One question asked from the audience to Martine was will there be an end to racism, and will machines have a sense of social belonging? She said the thesis of her foundation that helped fund this film is that that race is fiction, but racism is real. Trying to define the human species as separate races is just a mental construct, but racism is totally real. What she is concerned about is this mapping over into non-fleshed race. A concept brought up in the film is fleshism. We have to be able to accept people whatever their appearance or virtual appearance and think about the behavior and their nature, but not their physical manifestations.

The film will soon be made publicly available in 2011 in the U.S. and internationally.