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 

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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)

The titular transcendent man refers not to Kurzweil but to one of his most famous theories, though one imagines “Unreasonable Man” would have served him better as a title, were it not already taken. A child prodigy who built a computer while still in high school in the ’60s, Kurzweil has since attained patents for such diverse inventions as print-to-speech reading machines for the blind and high-powered music synthesizers. Yet he’s attracted the most attention with his theories of singularity, which combine technological insight with an amorphous spirituality (as well as, allegedly, some very classically Freudian wish fulfillment). […]

All four movies have the same general topic and largely similar casts of characters, but each views the future through a different lens. Not very comforting for those curious about the potentially greatest change humanity may ever face. Check out the trailers after the break.

So what’s the Singularity: crackpot idea, oncoming danger, Pinocchio story, or humanity’s hope? Each film chooses a different angle. What’s really amazing is that these movies are all spontaneously coming from different producers/directors. There’s a developing trend to discuss the issues of technology and intelligence even if most of the world has no idea what the Singularity means. I guess that whether you’re a technophile or a technophobe, there’s something to debate when you bring up the future. Even if you think the whole thing is one giant hair-brained notion you’ll at least get a kick out of the enthusiasm through which these films approach the subject.

Four movies about the Singularity, clockwise from top left: Transcendent Man, We Are the Singularity, The Singularity Is Near, The Singularity Film (Image: Singularity Hub)

The special program, An Evening with Ray Kurzweil, is part of the Coolidge Corner Theatre’s acclaimed “Science on Screen” series.

Based on the book of the same title, the The Singularity Is Near film combines a documentary featuring Kurzweil interacting with leading thinkers on the impact of exponentially expanding technologies on the nature of human life in the next half century, and a drama featuring Ramona, an avatar created by Kurzweil, as she becomes increasingly humanlike and independent. She hires Alan Dershowitz (who plays himself) to press for her legal rights as a person, and receives coaching from Tony Robbins, who also plays himself, to learn the secret of what it means to be human.

Kurzweil will also show the trailer of director Barry Ptolemy’s Transcendent Man documentary film, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last week, charting Kurzweil’s journey to bring his ideas about the Singularity to a worldwide audience. Kurzweil will discuss these films and give a presentation on their implications for the future, and will lead a question-and-answer session following his talk.

With “Science on Screen,” the Coolidge showcases a feature film, documentary, or preview based in science, paired with exciting presentations by notable figures from the worlds of science, technology and medicine. Created by Richard Anders and launched in 2005, this monthly series is co-presented by the Museum of Science, Boston and New Scientist magazine. Tickets available online or at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, 290 Harvard Street, Brookline, Mass, 617.734.2500.

[SOUND UP AND UNDER/END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: He predicted, far in advance, that the Soviet Union would crumble, that a computer would beat a human at chess and that a computer communications network would span the earth. He even predicted when.

[MOVIE CLIP]: NARRATOR: Bill Gates has called him the best in the world at predicting the future. [END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Transcendent Man, a new film about Kurzweil, debuts later this month. It ponders the dilemma he poses. We cannot simply dismiss so respected, so prescient a scientist, nor can we easily embrace his mindboggling vision of the future. Kurzweil believes that before the century is half over, humans will merge with their technology, our mental capacities will seem limitless, compared to today, and we will not have to die. He says it’s a pretty simple calculation, once you factor in the rate at which technology advances.

RAY KURZWEIL: A key issue to understand is that information technology grows exponentially, basically doubling every year. What used to fit in a building now fits in your pocket, and what fits in your pocket today will fit inside a blood cell in 25 years. And that gives you some idea of what will be feasible.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You’ve said that the year 2045 is the year of the singularity. Can you explain what that is?

RAY KURZWEIL: By 2029, we’ll have finished the reverse engineering of the human brain. There’s already 20 regions of the brain we’ve modeled and simulated and tested. We’ll have very powerful and very small computers by that time. Most of the computers in the world are not yet in our bodies and brains, but some of them are in our brains. If you’re a Parkinson’s patient you can put a computer in your brain. It’s not blood cell-sized today, it’s pea-sized.

And if you take what we can do today and realize these technologies will be a billion times more powerful per dollar in 25 years, a hundred thousand times smaller, you get some idea of what we’ll be able to do.

And one thing we’ll be able to do is send millions of nanobots, blood cell-sized devices, inside our bloodstream. They’ll keep us healthy from inside. They’ll go inside our brains and interact with our biological neurons, just the way neural implants do today, and put our brains on the Internet, make us smarter, provide full-immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system. And so, we will become a hybrid of biological and non-biological intelligence.

So over time, the non-biological portion of our intelligence will predominate, and that’s basically what we mean by the singularity. When you get out to 2045, we’ll have multiplied the overall intelligence of the human/machine civilization a billionfold, and that’s such a profound transformation that we call it a singularity.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You’ve just breezed by some extraordinary predictions, that our brains and personalities someday will be basically downloadable, that we’ll have full body virtual reality. How will the Internet look and function, how will we interact with it when we reach the singularity?

RAY KURZWEIL: Well, let’s take some scenarios from, say, the 2030s. The nanobots in our brain would, if you want to go in virtual reality, will shut down the signals coming from our real senses, so to our brain it feels like we’re in that virtual environment. And these virtual environments will be very realistic, a counterpart to real reality, and will also mix up real and virtual reality. We’ll have augmented real reality. So if you look at somebody in real reality there’ll be little popups telling you information about that person, and so on.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You know, when people write about you, there’s often this tone of, I know this sounds absolutely insane, but this Kurzweil guy is really, really smart and he’s created a lot of revolutionary things, so maybe we shouldn’t dismiss him out of hand.

RAY KURZWEIL: Well, first of all, I’ve been making predictions for 30 years. They’ve tracked very well. It actually is pretty remarkable how predictable the trajectory of these information technologies is.

I predicted a World Wide Web tying together hundreds of millions of people emerging starting in the mid-1990s. And I said that in the ’80s, and that seemed ridiculous when the entire U.S. defense budget could only tie together a few thousand scientists with an unreliable network. But it grew exponentially, and it happened right on schedule.

And we’re going to get from here to the world of 2035 or 2045 one step at a time, and it’s going to be thousands of little steps, and each little step will be some new product announcement, some new technology. It starts out not working that well, then it works a little better. And we get from here to there through many of these benign steps, but you put them all together and it reflects a pretty profound transformation.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay, let’s say your predictions come true. Our brains will essentially be computers, and we’ll live in a virtual world. Will we cease being human?

RAY KURZWEIL: We will be very much human. Scientists are very fond of saying, oh, there’s nothing special about humans. We didn’t descend from the gods. We descended from worms. And there’s nothing special about the Earth. It’s just a humble planet around a routine star.

But there is something unique about humans in that we’re the only species that we know about that actually extends our reach with our tools, ever since we picked up a stick to reach a higher branch. We’re already a human/machine civilization. Our tools are part of who we are. They always have been. And that’s what unique about human beings.

[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thank you very much.

RAY KURZWEIL: My pleasure. I enjoyed it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Ray Kurzweil is an inventor and the author of several books, including Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, and The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.

Transcendent Man

Filmmakers Barry and Felicia Ptolemy (Ptolemaic Productions) documented Kurzweil’s life for two years in 25 cities in five countries, as he explored the social and philosophical implications of the coming profound changes and the potential threats they pose to human civilization in presentations and dialogues with 22 noted luminaries such as Colin Powell, Peter Diamandis, Dean Kamen, William Shatner, Stevie Wonder, and Kevin Warwick.

“My ideas [in the film] challenge people’s most basic assumptions about life, death, and what it means to be human,” said Kurzweil. In his post-biological world, there will be no clear distinction between human and machine and real reality and virtual reality, human aging and illness will be reversed, world hunger and poverty will be solved, and we will ultimately cure death, he says, revealing in the film that he intends to bring back his father, composer Fredric Kurzweil.

The Tuesday, April 28 screening was followed by a panel discussion with Director Barry Ptolemy and Ray Kurzweil, moderated by NPR and ABC correspondent Robert Krulwich.

Tribeca is one of the four leading film festivals in the world. Only 24 movies (12 documentaries and 12 narrative movies) are selected to premiere and compete at Tribeca, out of more than 2,200 movies submitted for consideration. Transcendent Man was one of only two documentaries discussed by the New York Times in its coverage of the upcoming Tribeca festival.

Original theme music is by noted American composer Philip Glass.

Related: read the press release here