‘Turning Into Gods’ – Jason Silva’s Documentary on the Singularity (Trailer)
Jason Silva
Jason Silva is an apostle of the future and he's looking to make converts. The young host on Al Gore's cable channel, Current TV, is also a burgeoning filmmaker. His upcoming documentary, Turning Into Gods aims to get its audience believing in the promise of technology, to spread a sense of techno-optimism. The documentary will follow Silva as he interviews the leading minds of our day, and seeks to understand (and revel) in the vast potential of the near future. I had a chance to talk with Silva and get the inside track on the vision behind Turning Into Gods. Check out the trailer for the film below.
Turning Into Gods is the latest in a recent string of movies that seeks to bring the concepts behind the Technological Singularity into the mainstream conscious. Earlier we saw Barry Ptolemy's take on futurist Ray Kurzweil in Transcendent Man, and Kurzweil presented his own vision in the recent film based on his best selling book The Singularity Is Near. Each of those documentaries was packed with amazing interviews with the top minds in the fields of AI, robotics, genetics, and longevity. What will make Turning Into Gods any different, or even better?
The biggest selling point behind Silva's film seems to be Silva himself. He has what few other Singularity-minded film makers possess: pop-culture credentials. Current TV has increased his mainstream exposure, he's signed with CAA (the top talent agency in LA), and he's been featured in GAP campaigns, news segments, and countless interviews. Silva sees the upcoming film as a journey, and wants the audience to piggy back on his experience, learning as he learns. His youthful exuberance for the future is sure to draw many in:
There should be no doubt, however, that Silva is making this film for a reason. As he told me, "I may represent the audience on occasion, but I have an agenda." That agenda seems to be to awaken humanity's hope and optimism for a future that will be shaped by ever accelerating technologies. He wants to "appeal to the little child inside all of us that says, 'wow!"
And what pushes Silva to his own "wow" moments? From our conversation I would mostly say genetics. Craig Venter, with his recent successes in writing the genetic code of living organisms, tops Silva's list of necessary interviewees. He quotes Freeman Dyson: "In the future...a new generation of artists will be writing genomes the way that Blake and Byron wrote verses." In fact, it is the idea that new technologies may allow for the convergence of art and science that seems to most easily open the flood gates of Silva's flowing optimism. He has written about it in Vanity Fair and the Huffington Post, and presented on the power of art direction at Humanity+.
Contrasting Silva's techno-optimism are what he calls the "bio-luddites", those that seek to oppose the advance of (biological) science in the name of fundamentalism. Silva calls the reactionary response to the promise of technology the "anti-viagara of the human-mind". Even the title of the film, Turning Into Gods, can be seen as a defiance of this opposition of technology born out of religiosity or fear.
Of course, not everyone who is uncomfortable with the idea of shaping our DNA like poetry is a bio-luddite. Like so many documentarians seeking to explain the Singularity, Silva is hoping to make more friends than enemies. He wants to pull in those on the cusp, those are wavering between believing in the positive aspects of technology and giving into fear. To help us all "get over our cosmic inferiority complex," and look towards the limitless potential of humanity.
Despite Silva's well-formed vision about the future, Turning Into Gods is still very much a work in progress. He plans to continue shooting through the end of this summer and possibly beyond. While he has "hours of footage" of time with Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey de Gray from his previous short film The Immortalists (see below), his list of possible upcoming interviewees is still very long: Craig Venter, Peter Diamandis, Andrew Hessel, Barry Ptolemy, Chris Anderson...and so on. Funding for Turning Into Gods comes from related projects on Current TV, The Immortalists, and Silva himself. To leverage his limited budget for all its worth, Silva will be looking for collaborators, finding ways to crowd-source the work as needed. The pop-savvy Silva also has plans for generating audience interest by releasing a string of teasers to promote viral marketing.
There are days when I don't believe the Technological Singularity will ever happen, and days when I think it's just around the corner. Yet since I first encountered the concept a few years ago I have been unable to completely dismiss it from my thoughts. The Singularity, like Silva's optimism, is infectious, and movies are the ideal carriers. Whether or not Turning Into Gods succeeds, I'm growing confident that more and more filmmakers will be willing to try to bring the concept of the Singularity into the mainstream. Will Silva be the ambassador that delivers techno-optimism into pop culture? Too early to tell, but he certainly has the potential to make it happen.
Those who want to get a taste of Jason Silva's filmmaking style should check out The Immortalists, a micro-documentary on the end to aging. It's here for you in its entirety:
[image and video via Jason Silva]
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Discussion — 22 Responses
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One of my favorite subjects ! 🙂 Always fun to hear what other people think about all this !
Thx for this post !
One of my favorite subjects ! 🙂 Always fun to hear what other people think about all this !
Thx for this post !
I have great hope for the future once we make it through the next ten years. The next decade is going to be one hell of a roller coaster ride.
I have great hope for the future once we make it through the next ten years. The next decade is going to be one hell of a roller coaster ride.
Very enthusiastic and optimistic, I likes 🙂 … my only concern with the concepts of the Singularity seeping into the mainstream is that it will inevitably be taken-up as a religion with all the typical dogma and ignorance. I understand there are a lot of spiritual concepts that come along when thinking about what will happen and how it will feel to achieve god-like abilities, but I hope the discussion remains in the realm of science and rationality.
I’m an Atheist – and I don’t mind a religious fervor surrounding the singularity. My issue is one of underlying truth. The reason religions are popular is that in years past we had no system for explaining things, and religion filled that roll. The difference between the hope, transcendence, and awe that the singularity inspires when contrasted with the offerings of religion is simply that one is reality based and one is not. It is ok to worship the awe inspiring – as long as it is real or at least likely by an intelligent approximation of the trends and patterns at hand.
When I think of the intellectual freedoms and personal experiences that the singularity offers – I am emotionally moved, and I enjoy the anticipation on a daily basis. My thoughts often wander to what might be. As I am only 30, I am quite sure that the immortality promised by religion will be a reality for me barring catastrophic accidents on my part. I can no longer die from most things that killed people in years past – the list of things that are fatal to me is shrinking every day. My entire heart could fail, and I could carry a replacement around in a box while I do exercise. Very soon we will tell the body to lose weight and build muscle, to be healthy as a command – not a lifestyle.
The ability to live a lifetime in a moment, to experience life through the eyes of another, to bear witness to historical events and to experience the farthest concepts available in a virual world, and upon your death be made whole again with all your thoughts and experiences. The singularity should evoke the same feeling as a sunrise or the sense an astronaut has when they first see the Earth from space.
It is a matter of faith over fact, and the facts are being chronicled daily on this site. I take solace that as time goes on, the singularity will loom closer and closer on the horizon, and our corner of the galaxy will increasingly become a better place to live in.
This is an awesome time to live, it is only going to happen once, and most of us have front row seats.
Very enthusiastic and optimistic, I likes 🙂 … my only concern with the concepts of the Singularity seeping into the mainstream is that it will inevitably be taken-up as a religion with all the typical dogma and ignorance. I understand there are a lot of spiritual concepts that come along when thinking about what will happen and how it will feel to achieve god-like abilities, but I hope the discussion remains in the realm of science and rationality.
I’m an Atheist – and I don’t mind a religious fervor surrounding the singularity. My issue is one of underlying truth. The reason religions are popular is that in years past we had no system for explaining things, and religion filled that roll. The difference between the hope, transcendence, and awe that the singularity inspires when contrasted with the offerings of religion is simply that one is reality based and one is not. It is ok to worship the awe inspiring – as long as it is real or at least likely by an intelligent approximation of the trends and patterns at hand.
When I think of the intellectual freedoms and personal experiences that the singularity offers – I am emotionally moved, and I enjoy the anticipation on a daily basis. My thoughts often wander to what might be. As I am only 30, I am quite sure that the immortality promised by religion will be a reality for me barring catastrophic accidents on my part. I can no longer die from most things that killed people in years past – the list of things that are fatal to me is shrinking every day. My entire heart could fail, and I could carry a replacement around in a box while I do exercise. Very soon we will tell the body to lose weight and build muscle, to be healthy as a command – not a lifestyle.
The ability to live a lifetime in a moment, to experience life through the eyes of another, to bear witness to historical events and to experience the farthest concepts available in a virual world, and upon your death be made whole again with all your thoughts and experiences. The singularity should evoke the same feeling as a sunrise or the sense an astronaut has when they first see the Earth from space.
It is a matter of faith over fact, and the facts are being chronicled daily on this site. I take solace that as time goes on, the singularity will loom closer and closer on the horizon, and our corner of the galaxy will increasingly become a better place to live in.
This is an awesome time to live, it is only going to happen once, and most of us have front row seats.
My favorite book by Kurzweil is “In The Age of Spiritual Machines” His newest volume “The Singularity Is Near) is very good as well. I suppose I am truly a futurist at heart and I believe we will one day overcome death However, I also believe these technologies will be a luxury enjoyed, sequestered and abused by a largely brutal and wealthy upper class. This is my greatest worry: that rich cretins and buffoons will benefit from immortality and along class lines they will keep the technology from those they (for whatever socioeconomic, religious, or nationalistic reason) don’t favor – effectively enslaving the majority of humanity.
Although it is true that the wealthy will be the first to enjoy some things early on, by and large the cost savings and the benefits offered will make your dystopian scenario unlikely. I just got a EVO 4G to replace my old phone, and it’s basically the best phone that anyone can buy. You can get one that is gold plated and diamond studded, but at it’s core – it would function the same.
Fears like the ones you described can pop up in a resource scarce scenario, but the singularity is, by it’s nature efficient and devoid of most trapping of previous human endeavors. Properly done VR mostly negates the concept of ownership, people can have anything they want and the nominal price is 0. Once we start using the sun’s energy to produce our power, and eventually migrate past our own bodies, a person could simply choose to move their consciousness into space and have a small ship created atom by atom by fully automated nanites and launch themselves to the rim of the galaxy where they could found a new society of their own making. Or they could just do the same virtually and have the experience without having actually done it in the real world.
I think the earth of the future will return to a pre-industrial design by the looks of it, but the appearance will not match the technology that is in play. Small villages of people who want to spend time in regular reality, eating just for pleasure, food nano-assembled and nano-disassembled back into the environment at will. Alternatively, the entire planet could be turned into a solid element of computing, but I think it’s more likely that we will want to preserve the nature of earth and instead spread to the uninhabited areas of our solar system, possibly to a Dyson sphere.
The future is not Star Trek. Star Trek is the Navy with transporters, food replicators, and Warp Drive. More likely, the level of complexity will be hard to fathom by most current unmodified humans. When you look at a grain of sand, you don’t imagine the atoms spinning, the quarks popping and the neutrinos streaking by, but that complexity is there.
I doubt the trapping that we currently have to deal with are going to be an issue when resources become effectively unlimited, general human cognition, memory, and logic move orders of magnitude higher, and we begin to be limited only by our imaginations (which will also be expanding).
My favorite book by Kurzweil is “In The Age of Spiritual Machines” His newest volume “The Singularity Is Near) is very good as well. I suppose I am truly a futurist at heart and I believe we will one day overcome death However, I also believe these technologies will be a luxury enjoyed, sequestered and abused by a largely brutal and wealthy upper class. This is my greatest worry: that rich cretins and buffoons will benefit from immortality and along class lines they will keep the technology from those they (for whatever socioeconomic, religious, or nationalistic reason) don’t favor – effectively enslaving the majority of humanity.
Although it is true that the wealthy will be the first to enjoy some things early on, by and large the cost savings and the benefits offered will make your dystopian scenario unlikely. I just got a EVO 4G to replace my old phone, and it’s basically the best phone that anyone can buy. You can get one that is gold plated and diamond studded, but at it’s core – it would function the same.
Fears like the ones you described can pop up in a resource scarce scenario, but the singularity is, by it’s nature efficient and devoid of most trapping of previous human endeavors. Properly done VR mostly negates the concept of ownership, people can have anything they want and the nominal price is 0. Once we start using the sun’s energy to produce our power, and eventually migrate past our own bodies, a person could simply choose to move their consciousness into space and have a small ship created atom by atom by fully automated nanites and launch themselves to the rim of the galaxy where they could found a new society of their own making. Or they could just do the same virtually and have the experience without having actually done it in the real world.
I think the earth of the future will return to a pre-industrial design by the looks of it, but the appearance will not match the technology that is in play. Small villages of people who want to spend time in regular reality, eating just for pleasure, food nano-assembled and nano-disassembled back into the environment at will. Alternatively, the entire planet could be turned into a solid element of computing, but I think it’s more likely that we will want to preserve the nature of earth and instead spread to the uninhabited areas of our solar system, possibly to a Dyson sphere.
The future is not Star Trek. Star Trek is the Navy with transporters, food replicators, and Warp Drive. More likely, the level of complexity will be hard to fathom by most current unmodified humans. When you look at a grain of sand, you don’t imagine the atoms spinning, the quarks popping and the neutrinos streaking by, but that complexity is there.
I doubt the trapping that we currently have to deal with are going to be an issue when resources become effectively unlimited, general human cognition, memory, and logic move orders of magnitude higher, and we begin to be limited only by our imaginations (which will also be expanding).
Was “Building Gods” by Ken Gumbs the inspiration for this? The title similarity is too much of a coincidence.
But the difference between the titles is actually a good arguing point, will we build Them or will we become Them?
I actually don’t agree with that approach for the title, brings out the religion part of the discussion too much to the forefront. It distracts from the objective of what I think the documentary is trying to do. I would even stay away from the “Singularity” part of the discussion until later in a documentary that is trying to extol the virtues of technology. The Singularity, by definition has no virtues – it is unknow what will happen after. Anything after is just belief which is equivalent to religion. Focus on “relatively” short term expected benefits, leave the Singularity possibilities for later.
Anyway, good to get the word out..
Was “Building Gods” by Ken Gumbs the inspiration for this? The title similarity is too much of a coincidence.
But the difference between the titles is actually a good arguing point, will we build Them or will we become Them?
I actually don’t agree with that approach for the title, brings out the religion part of the discussion too much to the forefront. It distracts from the objective of what I think the documentary is trying to do. I would even stay away from the “Singularity” part of the discussion until later in a documentary that is trying to extol the virtues of technology. The Singularity, by definition has no virtues – it is unknow what will happen after. Anything after is just belief which is equivalent to religion. Focus on “relatively” short term expected benefits, leave the Singularity possibilities for later.
Anyway, good to get the word out..
Who was the guy in the black and white interview that said ” In order to use your head, you have to go out of your mind”?
Who was the guy in the black and white interview that said ” In order to use your head, you have to go out of your mind”?
does anyone know Jason Silva’s e-mail address?!
there is a website: maxandjason.org you can email jason there!
does anyone know Jason Silva’s e-mail address?!
there is a website: maxandjason.org you can email jason there!
Yeah, what are we going on three years now of hype for “Turning into Gods” and still nothing. I would have liked the film and I do like Jason’s ideas but it has become apparent that this was nothing but self promotion.
“You’re euphoric for the amount of insight that is simultaneously pouring into your consciousness”
Yes , Jason , yes I am