While this event looks to be a general discussion about the Singularity, it’s based on the film Transcendent Man now available on DVD and digital download. For those unfamiliar with the film, Transcendent Man is a documentary on futurist Ray Kurzweil. The movie explores the idea that technology may be compounding upon itself, that the innovations of today lead to even larger innovations tomorrow. The most famous case of this growth is Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. Kurzweil has found the same general exponential trends apply to many other technological fields. In general, he calls this kind of compounding change (not limited to technology) his Law of Accelerating Returns. If you accept that such exponential growth is likely to continue the possibilities of the future are truly miraculous. Human level artificial intelligence in the next twenty years, widespread nanotechnology, man merging with machines, the Technological Singularity…it’s a lot of change for the mainstream public to accept.

Which is why this panel discussion is so amazing. You’ve got a killer list of celebrities and visionaries looking to debate the most nebulous and yet important subject: the future.  With guests like Bill Maher, Deepak Chopra, and Michio Kaku you know it’s going to be an interesting conversation. Hopefully that will attract thousands of people and introduce them to the concepts of accelerating technology and exponential growth.

I’m also pretty impressed with how easy and ubiquitous simulcasting is now. We can’t all attend the event live at the Lincoln Center in New York City, but for $15 or less (prices will vary by location) we can all attend Transcendent Man: A Conversation on the Future. That’s a level of accessibility that could really push the discussion about the Singularity from blogs and cable TV into mainstream consideration. Once we take the idea of the Singularity seriously, we may just be able to control how and when the rise of these advanced technologies occurs.

I can’t wait to see what happens when some of the biggest names in technology go head to head in a nationwide event. It’s going to be amazing.

[image and video credits: Fathom Events]
[source: Fathom Events, Transcendent Man]

The San Francisco screening of Transcendent Man was a great event, thanks to everyone who came out and said hi.

Even a great film is better when played in front of the right crowd. Transcendent Man, Barry Ptolemy’s documentary on the life and ideas of futurist Ray Kurzweil, had a special screening at the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts on Thursday. The event gathered an audience of several hundred people, many of which had seen the film previously in some form. It wasn’t much of a surprise then that Transcendent Man received a very warm reception. Kurzweil and Ptolemy were both in attendance and garnered loud applause when they appeared on stage before the screening began and again when they answered questions after the movie finished. As always with these types of events, the Q&A was really the best part of the evening. I’ve written up those questions and their answers for you below. While he is still working on bringing his vision into the mainstream, thanks to Transcendent Man it seems like Kurzweil has already convinced San Fransisco about the importance of the Singularity.

I’ve covered the plot and philosophy of Transcendent Man extensively in the past, from its premiere in Tribeca in 2009, to my recent interview with Barry Ptolemy this month. As such, I’m just going to jump to the good stuff. Here’s Kurzweil and Ptolemy’s Q&A session from Thursday night, as hosted by Peter Diamandis. (Questions are paraphrased as needed):

Question: In your predictive models, how do you account for politics?

Ray Kurzweil: There are political things that happened, like WWI and WWII, the Cold War – those were political – that’s part of the model. It’s really amazing how predictable these events are. They go through politics and they go through wars and different economic conditions. You might wonder how you can get such a predictable results. What is it that we’re measuring? We’re actually measuring creativity, innovation, competition. Exactly what you would think would be the least predictable. And indeed specific projects are indeed unpredictable. The fact is that Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s project [Google] succeeded and 20 others failed in creating a search engine. That was not so easy to predict. But the overall effects turn out to be remarkably predictable. And we see other examples in science of that phenomena – were you have a lot of random events and out of that chaotic activity is an emergent property that is very predictable. Take the Law of Thermodynamics, you look at the mathematics of Thermodynamics it’s actually modeling all these different particles that follow random paths, so I can’t predict where one particle will be in 10 seconds. It’s random, but the result of all that chaotic behavior is very predictable in terms of the properties of the whole gas. You can predict to a very high degree of accuracy from the Laws of Thermondynamics. It’s an emergent property. An emergent property of this chaotic activity given we have millions of people involved in creating computers and all the other aspects of information technology follow very predictable trajectories. It’s withing this political model. You go back to where Gutenberg had his invention there wasn’t the communication methods for people to even learn about these phenomena and things moved very very slowly. Somebody took the boat over and people heard about it in another part of the world. Information moved very very slowly. Think about how quickly it flows today. That’s really part of the process. We see politics being transformed today. In places in the world – there really is no third world anymore – places we used to think were undeveloped – Egypt and so on – have very modern technology. And very capable hackers who have very revolutionary ideas like democracy and it spreads very quickly. It really is very democratizing. It really is creating one world culture. The competition between nations is far less significant than the world wide competition in markeplaces for ideas.

Question: (from Peter Diamandis) What was the inspiration for this movie?

Barry Ptolemy: It was chapter 1 of Singularity is Near. Maybe it was chapter 2, maybe it was chapter 3. It was somewhere very early in the book. When the ideas were resonating with me. As you pointed out in the movie, it seemed obvious to me. I knew if we took these ideas and combined them with the power of cinema, we would have something I thought would be special. So it happened upon reading the book.

Question: (from Diamandis) Ray, when Barry and Felicia brought this idea to you, you decided on this fairly quickly?

Ray Kurzweil: Pretty much. I got an email. I actually do go through all my emails. It’s seemed sincere and earnest so I agreed to meet them.

Peter Diamandis: Actually you didn’t answer the first five of MY emails.

Ray Kurzweil: Well actually you made a suggestion to me over dinner. You said, you know it really is time for a new university built around these ideas. And I said yeah, let’s do that. That was actually the first event that Barry filmed.

Peter Diamandis: He filmed us eating pills together over dinner.

Barry Ptolemy: [Laughs]

Ray Kurzweil: Eating pills and hatching universities. But if you remember I agreed to that project very quickly. And we’ve had hundreds of meetings about that since. That’s a real phenomenon sitting not very far from where we’re sitting here. And the same thing happened with Barry. We got together in a hotel lobby, had some drinks, and it was within minutes that I said okay.

Peter Diamandis: Well thank you for doing that, it was a great film.

Question: Do you think it will be a problem that people see the Singularity as in conflict with Religion?

Ray Kurzweil: I don’t think there’s much resistance from religion. I think since the Protestant Reformation the Christian church has supported the idea of applying science and technology to overcome human suffering. The church is pro-life, remember, and that applies to both ends of life. Pretty much applying science and technology is supported by all the major religions. Where there is resistance is what I call fundamentalist human-ism. Fundamentalist nature-ism. That we should make no change, at all, to biology, that biology is sacred. That we should not change the nature of a tomato…or a human. That is actually part of the environmental movement. The anti-GMO movement in Europe for example has been very strong. It’s now fading…There is a strong reflexive anti-technology stance.
…I’ve actually written extensively about the downsides [of Technology]. Bill Joyce famous article: Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us – all about the dangers – he’s getting most of the material from my books which he cites. Technology is a double edged sword and I acknowledge that…Peter and I founded Singularity University and the major theme there is on the one hand let’s apply these exponentially growing information technologies to overcoming the major challenges of humanity and it’s only these technologies that will have the power to do so. But on the other hand lets be aware that these technologies bring on new dangers and new exponential risks.

Question: Since the universe is such a large place, isn’t likely that the Singularity has already happened somewhere? If that’s the case, why are we not aware of it? Or are we just the product of someone else’s Singularity?

[Applause from the crowd]

Ray Kurzweil: That’s a great question. It’s called the Fermi Paradox. There’s this formula called the Drake formula where you can estimate how many intelligent (defined as radio and computer capable) civilizations there are in our galaxy. It has lots of imponderable variables. In The Singularity Is Near I propose a set of reasonable sounding parameters and you come out with several thousand. The general estimate by SETI is there’s somewhere between a thousand and a million. I then have another analysis where I give another set of reasonable sounding hypotheses for these variables and you come out with 1.25 such civilizations and we already know of one [crowd laughter]. So it’s not clear how many there are, but the common SETI assumption is that there must be thousands or millions in each galaxy and of course we have hundreds of billions of galaxies. Now the common assumption among the SETI philosophy is a linear one. These civilizations aren’t going to be spread out over a few years, they occur over cosmological time, so many of these are going to be millions (if not billions) of years ahead of us. The assumption is that really doesn’t matter that not much is going to change, that they’re going to be kind of like us. But if you consider the exponential growth, once a civilization gets to our point it’s not very far away from really transcendent technology. It certainly wouldn’t take more than a few centuries, at most, to do galaxy wide engineering. If there are millions of such civilizations and a substantial fraction of them are doing galaxy wide engineering, how can we not notice them? So my conclusion, and I write about this in the end of chapter six in The Singularity Is Near is that they don’t exist. You can say, ‘maybe they destroyed themselves, maybe they decided to take the Star Trek ethical commitment not to disturb primitive civilizations like us until they were more sophisticated.’ And if there was just one such civilization you could say they took that ethical stance or destroyed themselves, but if there were thousands of them, millions of them, it’s very unlikely that all of them have had the same outcome. So my conclusion is that we’re the first. That may seem very unlikely, but a lot of things are unlikely. It’s very unlikely that any of us would exist. Because our parents had to conceive us, and their parents had to conceive them and so on. It’s very unlikely that the universe would exist with a set of 50 parameters in the standard model calibrated so perfectly to allow evolution to take place. Yet, by the anthropic principle if it weren’t the case we wouldn’t be here to talk about it. So these are the kind of —

Peter Diamandis: You and I disagree about this because I think life is ubiquitous in the universe.

Ray Kurzweil: So where are they all? [crowd laughter]

Peter Diamandis: In another plane of dimension, my friend.

Question: How do we solve the problems of scarcity and hierarchy?

Ray Kurzweil: That’s a great point, and let’s look at how we’re doing on that. We’ve gone from an era of scarcity to an era of abundance. As is alluded to briefly in the movie, we have 10,000x more energy than we need just from the sun. Of course we can’t plug our refrigerators into the sun. Unless we convert it to electricity but that’s where nanotech comes in. Larry Page and I did this analysis for the National Academy of Engineering. The costs are coming down dramatically per watt. We’re very close with parity with other forms of energy. The total amount of solar energy is doubling every two years, it has been for over twenty years. It’s only eight doublings away from meeting 100% of the world’s energy needs. When I discussed this with the Prime Minister of Israel he said, ‘but Ray do we have enough sunlight to do that with?’ And I said, yes we have 10,000x more than we need. We have plenty of water it just happens to be dirty and salinated, but when we have inexpensive energy we can have inexpensive clean water. There are new food technologies applying AI to produce food very inexpensively with no ecological impact. These are long discussions but we are changing from an era of scarcity to an era of abundance. Making these kinds of resources, things that you don’t think of as information technologies, subject to this law of accelerating returns. When people say that these technologies (life extension and so and so) are only going to be available to the rich. I say, yeah, like cell phones. Where indeed, you saw that 15 year old cell phone in the movie, only the wealthy could afford that and it didn’t work very well. There are now about 6 billion cell phones, according to Google there will be about 6 billion smart phones in a couple of years…
…it’s a very powerful, democratizing phenomenon. I think the way the technology is going, it’s being very widely distributed, because ultimately it’s extremely inexpensive. That’s why I think we will merge with it. I think this idea of a war between those who enhance themselves with those technologies and those who don’t is unlikely. I’ve actually written that would be a very short war [laughter]. Sort of like a war between our military industrial complex and the Amish [laughter]. It’s not going to be one thing, “here sign here, I want to be enhanced. Yes/No” There’s going to be a million choices. There’ll be some that are extremely conservative that everyone does that are very well tested. There will be some experimental ones. We have half a million choices now just in iPhone apps. It’s going to be the same thing in the future.

Question: Will we split ourselves into different people simultaneously?

Ray Kurzweil: …We can see that today. You can have one computer and it can run a thousand different processes and so it splits itself into a thousand different personalities. And each of these processes can be doing something completely different. Conversely we can have a thousand or a million computers become one supercomputer that works on one thing and has one set of thoughts. So there is a flexibility in terms of identity. A physical computer can become many computers or many computers can become one. I think we’ll have those choices in the future. People have said ‘well, in the future if we can all sort of meld our minds this way we’ll all become one mind, we’re going to lose our identity.’ We’ll have it both ways. We’ll be able to be individuals. As individuals we’ll be able to do the things you just described. Conversely we can bring our minds together to create a global mind. We do that today with social networks to create a community that has a mind. An audience like this has a mind, has a personality. We have ways of becoming one. We’re going to be able to increase the power of that.

Question: Will curiosity continue after we reach the Singularity?

Ray Kurzweil: The Singularity is a point…the metaphor we’re borrowing from physics has to do with the event horizon. It’s very hard to see beyond the event horizon because it’s so transformative. However we do have enough intelligence to see beyond that event horizon in some ways both in physics and in this future historical event. We can do mind experiements: what if we actually fell into a blackhole what would happen as we fell past the event horizon. I remember that was actually a question in my physics undergraduate course in the final exam —

Peter Diamandis: How did you do?

[laughter]

Ray Kurzweil: I did okay. [laughter] It was open book open end. So you could stay as long as you wanted to answer the question.

Peter Diamandis: Three days later…

[laughter]

Ray Kurzweil: Similarly we have enough intelligence now to actually imagine and talk about what life will be like after the Singularity, after we enhance our intelligence many fold. I attempt to do that in The Singularity is Near and other things I’ve written, and many other people do as well. So I do think we have the ability to contemplate that. …When we are a billion times smarter, people say ‘well, we’ll know everything so life will be boring because there will be nothing left to discover.’ But that’s not true. The more we know the more we know we don’t know. Our knowledge expands but there’s still a horizon of our knowledge and at that edge is ignorance and things we haven’t figured out yet, problems we don’t know how to solve. The more we know the greater is the known ignorance. If you got back a thousand years, man and woman didn’t think there was much they didn’t know. There were people who knew all of science three or four hundred years ago. Now we have a thousand fields of science, even within one field people can’t keep up. I think curiosity and creating more knowledge will continue to be the hard work it is today. Most new employment today is in that area, creating new knowledge, whether it’s graphic arts or library science. That’s continue to be the case.

Question: How do you reconcile the difference between information and knowledge in your timeline for the Singularity?

Ray Kurzweil: There are different aspects to that. One is the sort of software challenge…in my book I talk about many examples of how software is progressing, ways of measuring that increase in complexity. That was just presented to Obama a few weeks ago by his science advisory board. They examined this question and found that improvements in software (sophistication, efficiency of algorithms, and complexity of algorithms) was progressing in an exponential rate and faster than hardware. Over the last 10-12 years hardware has progressed by a factor of a thousand and software has progressed by sixteen thousands according to various ways of measuring it. For a total of 16 million because they are independent. You can see this viscerally – look at Watson. Yes, some of those algorithms look similar to what was done many years ago but they are much more sophisticated. They’re actually hundred of different algorithms in Watson, none of the scientists can predict what it will do because there are so many different algorithms competing and influencing decisions. Just like the human mind, part of why we are so unpredictable is we have a lot of things going on simultaneously. …Google has cars that are driven a 140,000 miles through the cities and towns of California without human drivers…there’s many examples where computers are doing things that we viscerally recognize as being intelligent. ..Software, no matter how you measure it, just in terms of visceral reaction, is getting more sophisticated.

Question: [Why do we focus on immortality when super intelligence is such a more impacting goal?]

Ray Kurzweil: Depends on who you talk to

Peter Diamandis: How many folks would like to live forever? [Show of hands] How many of you would like to be intelligent and not live forever? [Show of hands, laughter]

Peter Diamandis: Okay, a marketplace for both.

Barry Ptolemy: How many of you would like to live to see tomorrow? That’s the real question. Because ultimately we’re going to get older and older, and no matter how old you get, you’re going to want to live to see the next day.

Audience member: No! [Laughter]

Ray Kurzweil: That is the question. Because people say ‘I only want to live to 100…okay 120.’ It’s very easy to put that out there because it kind of far away and you don’t have to worry about. …Okay you get to 120 and say you look like you do now, then what? …If you do ask people who are 100, ‘do you want to die tomorrow?’ They say no.

Barry Ptolemy: I think any system of intelligence, whether it’s flora or fauna, wants to continue to preserve it’s life. I think that’s going to continue, we’re going to want to preserve our lives more in the future, not less.

Question: In regards to human intelligence and other forms of intelligence…where would you put tool use, language, and sentience on a timeline?

Ray Kurzweil: Well, language was our first tool. Verbal language was the first invention, the first technology, then written language. They were very enabling, they enabled the social network, you could communicate with other people, even verbally, to create strategies. Something that animals do, in a limited way, but not with the sophistication not with the hiearchical structure of human language, that’s the key. Sentience is a whole different thing. I think it’s an emergent property of a complex system. Not only humans are conscious. The whole issue underlying animal rights is ‘is an animal conscious?’ Some people actually think that they’re not. The animal rights movement is based on the fact that they are, yes they are capable of suffering and there’s somebody there who is experiencing that. In terms of technology, language really was key. We see now that the heart of artificial intelligence is to understand language. Turing was very prescient to base his Turing test on language.

Question: For all practical purposes (with the arrival of the Singularity being so fast) are we alone in the Universe?

Ray Kurzweil: I agree. One hundred fifty years ago the fastest way to send a message was a pony. [Laughter] By my calculations we’re only fifty years away from transcendent technologies where we greatly expand our intelligence. We’ll ultimately go out into the rest of the universe with intelligent swarms of nanobots. So it happens very quickly, that’s the part of the calculation that was left out of the SETI analysis. I presented it at SETI and had this debate with them. I nevertheless feel that it’s a very important project. I think it will be a negative finding. But that negative finding is important, too.

[At this point Peter Diamandis took a moment to plug Singularity University. You can read our previous coverage on the institution or you can visit their site to learn more.]

Question: In regards to the project of resurrecting your father, what is your purpose in doing so, and how will you know you succeeded?

Ray Kurzweil: …I have this desire and inclination to preserve the knowledge and skill he represented. How do you present that? You could present it as a big database of information – that’s not how we interact with people. The best way to interact with that would be an avatar that represented his personality and skills. That’s something I would find personally gratifying. I’ve discussed it with many people and surprisingly people who aren’t into the Singularity find this idea appealing. Especially if they are struggling with dealing with the loss of someone they care about it. They way they I would know if I had succeeded would be if it passes a Frederick Kurzweil Turing Test. That’s getting to be an easier test as time goes by because my memories are fading. I would argue that this avatar would be more like my father than would be if he had lived. That’s not impossible, he would be 98 now. If he were 98 he’d be much less like he was when I remember him at 58. [pause] So, that’s how I would tell.

Question: With regards to humans who will be unable to afford transhumanist advancements and machines that will be viewed as resources and whose sentience will be difficult to verify, how do you think class systems will develop in the future?

Ray Kurzweil: Well that would happen if we still lived in an era of scarcity. By the time these technologies work well they’re extremely inexpensive. The cell phone is a great example. Because it’s become so ubiquitous. It’s so necessary to have this ability to communicate with others. To communicate with billions of people around the world and all of human knowledge. As it’s become extremely capable and really works well it’s become extremely inexpensive. There are almost 6 billion of them today for 7 billion people. The same thing’s happened with drugs. AIDS drugs – they’re also an information technology. 30,000 dollars per patient per year 15 years ago and didn’t work very well. The cocktail drugs work pretty well now, not perfect, they’re $100 per person per year in Sub-Saharan Africa. The law of accelerating returns implies a 50% deflation rate.

Question: [There seems to be an inverse relationship between textual coincidence and internet usage]

Ray Kurzweil: Interesting. [Laughter]. There are a lot of coincidences – things that seem very unusual. Because there are so many combination of events that could occur that what actually occurs seem very unlikely. The fact that I was born – just think of how unlikely that was. Not only did my parents have to meet but that particular sperm and egg had to meet. And the same thing for my grandparents, and so on…

Question: People say that ‘Ray’s not a scientist’. As someone who shares your optimism, can we take the critique seriously and ask, ‘are there some areas of knowledge that would help you refine your predictions?’

Barry Ptolemy: Real quickly, I want to point out that when you know Ray, and you’ve spent as much time with him as I have. Ray is not only a scientist, he’s a scientist’s scientist. He’s a biologist’s biologist. He’s forgotten more about biology than many biologists have in their brains today. So I personally take issue with people that suggest that Ray Kurzweil isn’t a scientist. All the predictions that Ray is making come from empirical evidence. He is, in fact, a scientist, who happens to also be a futurist. Ray, please go ahead and answer the question.

Ray Kurzweil: I had something I was going to say…

[laughter]

Ray Kurzweil: Oh, I was going to take issue with the characterization of me as an optimist. [Laughter] A lot of the dystopian scenarios that have been written are based on what I’ve written about the perils of these technologies. It’s really not true that I’ve ignored the downside. Technology is a double edged sword. Fire cooked our meals and kept us warm, but it’s also destructive, both accidentally and intentionally. That’s been true of every technology since. I guess I am optimistic in that I do think the benefits will outweigh the dangers. I would make the case that it has happened already. Read Thomas Hobbes or Dickens – how incredibly harsh and difficult life was hundreds of years ago when life expectancy was in the 30s. I think you have to be optimistic to an entrepreneur and inventor. But optimism is not just an idle speculation of the future. I think you do have to be mindful of the downsides. Singularity University, which Peter talked about, is actually devoted to thinking about the downsides and what we can do about it.

Question: How important are the limits of the human brain for your predictions, and how good are we at measuring that?

Ray Kurzweil: I’ve outsourced that myself [points to phone] largely with this…So I don’t have to remember things. That’s why we created these tools, we’ve already expanded our minds. I’ve had work groups that I worked with that used to take 100 people for several years. Now they can be done by ten or twenty people in a month or two. There’s no question that we’re smarter more productive, able to take on tasks that would have been impossible before because of these technologies. We are understanding the limits of human knowledge and intelligence. I think we actually understand more than people people realize about how the brain works. There are a billion little modules in the neocortex each which could store a pattern. That’s very impressive but it’s not a trillion modules. It’s more than a thousand. We are understanding the limits. You can experience that yourself when you run up against the limits of your unaided memory which is not hard to do. Our brains are slow but when we can master certain techniques we can offload them to devices that we can operate very quickly. …That’s why we create these tools, to overcome these limitations. …We did pass a threshold with our brains: to be able to actually advance complex symbolic hiearchical thoughts so that we can create tools. Then we had an opposable appendage so we can turn those thoughts into reality. …That resulted in the whole evolution of knowledge and tools and capability.

[image credits: Transcendent Man, Aaron Saenz/Singularity Hub]

2 for 1 tickets? Talk about accelerating returns...

Want to watch a movie with me? The Transcendent Man documentary is coming to San Francisco tomorrow night, and I have a sweet deal to offer those who attend. Barry Ptolemy‘s film about the life and philosophies of Ray Kurzweil is screening Thursday April 14th at the Palace of Fine Arts. Among the many attendees will be Ptolemy, Kurzweil, and yours truly. If that wasn’t enough to entice you maybe this will be: the first five people to purchase tickets through THIS LINK can purchase two for the price of one. (Thanks to Ptolemaic Productions and Another Planet for giving us the opportunity to offer this discount to our loyal readers!) It’s first come first served, so act fast. Make sure to use the discount code KURZWEIL during the check out process. This documentary screening promises to be the Singularity event of the spring, so you don’t want to miss it. See you there!

[image credit: Transcendent Man]

Barry Ptolemy (left) took years of his life to create Transcendent Man, the documentary about Ray Kurzweil (right). It was worth the time.

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. Check it out below.

[If reading about Transcendent Man isn't enough for you, don't worry. The film has been on tour for the past few weeks and was recently released for digital download. On April 14th it will be arriving at the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts for a special screening. Tickets are still available starting at $45. Keith and I will be there in the audience, and we'd love to see you there, too. Of course, you may want to take the chance to ask Ptolemy questions yourself.

Singularity Hub: What is Transcendent Man about?

Barry Ptolemy:

"Ray Kurzweil's ideas, which in my view are the most profound ideas that we've ever had to grapple with as a civilization."

SH: What was your inspiration for making Transcendent Man?

BP:

"   The first chapter [of The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil, 2005] blew me away, and I was into the second chapter probably when I looked over to Felicia [Ptolemy's wife and production partner] and said, ‘We need to make a movie.’ I was so inspired, I was so moved, I was so enraptured, it felt to me like I had I come home to ideas that were obvious to me my whole life.

When I was 17 years old, I used to walk around and tell anyone who would listen that we had the opportunity to live indefinitely. I used that exact same language, I would say ‘indefinitely’ I wouldn’t say ‘forever’, and I would use the bridge to a bridge to a bridge metaphor. Almost exactly like Ray did. To me it was obvious then that technology was speeding up. Perhaps it was because my father had me use computers at a very early age, and had computers around and I could see the price performance increasing constantly. Obviously it was still subconscious back then, but for whatever reason I was able to tell people, listen, we’re going to be able to live indefinitely.

When I read the Singularity is Near, later in January of 2006, it was like every idea I came across felt so good…my ideas were finally being ratified, and they were being articulated by a genius who was able to do it in a way I could never have done and he was backing it up with so much empirical evidence and he was taking his time to go through the entire gamut of how these ideas would come to be and what the ramifications would be and it just absolutely took my breath away. And for the next several days I would wake up literally like it was Christmas morning – I cannot even describe to you – I was alive, because I enjoyed these ideas so much. I looked around the world and saw what was happening and saw what the world was going to be like twenty, twenty-five, thirty years and it just tickled me. So that was the inspiration.”

Part of what strikes me about Transcendent Man is how balanced the documentary feels. Advocates for Kurzweil will watch the film and see it as a bulwark for his beliefs. Opponents will think it exposes his greatest weaknesses. Outside of the film, however, it’s clear that Ptolemy is firmly supportive of the Singularity and Kurzweil’s take on it.

SH: How has your personal relationship with Ray Kurzweil shaped the attitudes and outlooks of Transcendent Man. Are you still an impartial observer?

BP:

”   That’s a great question and this is the first time I’ve answered it in a public way. It’s one I’ve wanted to answer for a long time. Many people out there think this is Ray’s film. First of all let me dispel that inaccuracy. Transcendent Man is an independent film, produced by myself and my wife and executive produced by our partners, it has no relationship with Ray Kurzweil other than that he is the subject of the film. It’s important to note that Ray did not see the film, not one frame or one clip of the film, until three weeks prior to the world premiere of the film at Tribeca (after it was already finalized for the event). He had no creative input whatsoever. …Up to that point my relationship with Ray personally was completely different than my relationship [with him] after Tribeca. When I first met him, he was the subject of my film, I was his biographer. Ray was a subject.

…After it was in the can and closed, our relationship changed almost overnight. Now that we are touring together, we see each other a lot. We communicate a lot. So of course when you spend a lot of time with someone, someone you respect, of course you befriend them…I’m proud to say that Ray Kurzweil is my friend. But that did not color the making of the film in any way.

You know, Transcendent Man, any film, is sort of an institution. There’s many hands touching the film. Even as powerful as I am as a director, in the editing room, there’s many voices coming in and out of there. Even if I had said something like ‘let’s not hit Ray so hard there’ it wouldn’t happen. On the contrary, we were hitting Ray with everything we got! Is Ray ‘a prophet that is wrong’ as Kevin Kelly says? Bam! Let’s take him down! Let’s take Ray down. Anything I got as a filmmaker that can destroy the man and rebuild him back up that’s what I wanted to throw at him. …If we lived in a different universe and I was able to destroy his ideas, if I was able to overcome his arguments then the film would have turned out differently. …I was not holding back, I assure you.”

SH: Could you make a film about the Singularity that doesn’t include Ray Kurzweil or vice versa?

”   Certainly. But if you were to do that it would be like making a peanut and jelly sandwich without the peanut butter and jelly. …The Singularity is a profound idea that when separated from Ray Kurzweil is still profound. …Ray deserves credit however, for articulating these ideas in a way no one has before. Ray is a special figure. He came around at the right time at the right place. He is a baby boomer baby who had computers in his life at a very very early age. …He saw what other people were probably seeing – this exponential growth in technology. …For the first time in an empirical way looking at data we can forecast what the world will be like in 10 or 20 years. So for that reason, because Ray has done that before really anybody else in the way that he has, and given a voice to it in a way that nobody else has, and because of the power that Singularity represents, yes he will be represented as a prophet. As a Christ-like figure. He will embody that. I don’t think Ray is shy, he may be uncomfortable talking about it, but I don’t Ray is shy of taking on that responsibility. …He can articulate [the Singularity] like no one else. “

Ptolemy was able to get Kurzweil to discuss some of his deepest hopes about reviving his father. Here, Kurzweil visits his father's grave for the first time in decades.

As those who have seen the film will attest, a great part of the narrative focuses on how Ray Kurzweil hopes to use accelerating technologies to one day help him revive, or recreate, his dead father.

SH: How did that topic of the film arise?

BP:

”   It was my choice to make a story about Ray and his father. I was the one who asked the questions regarding his father. No one had gotten that out of him before. He had never gone back to his father’s cemetery in forty years. He is not as prone to bereave over his father every day as he does in the film.”

Why the focus on this deeply personal aspect of Kurzweil’s motivation? In a word: accessibility. The father-son narrative is a universal theme, a clear way for viewers to understand and identify with Kurzweil. Would the futurist still explore the scientific and philosophical ramifications of accelerating technology without the personal goal of saving his father? Maybe so, but as Ptolemy pointed out to me, the audience probably wouldn’t.

SH: How did you approach creating a balanced film about something you believed in?

BP:

”   I went into the film as an advocate for these ideas – exponential growth, radical life expansion, etc – but I knew that I had to bring in some contrarian thinkers. …Here’s what I attempted to do: I wanted to see if I could prove Ray wrong. I wanted to throw everything I could against his ideas knowing that if his ideas were as good as I thought they were that they would prevail. So we set out to interview 70 to 80 thought leaders – scientists, academics, entertainers, anybody was tangentially exposed to these ideas, or knew who Ray was, or was against these ideas – we would go and interview them.”

These Kurzweil ‘contrarians’ are some of the best parts of Transcendent Man, because they really push you to think about a wide assortment of possible futures, not all of which would be happy for humanity. Ptolemy tells me that while not all of these interviews were able to make it into the film, he’s making many of them available via deleted scenes on the DVD (release date: May 24th), and others may appear via Facebook.

SH: What’s your goal here as a filmmaker?

BP:

“I want to create works that could touch people and transcend you and create a transcendent experience within you, something that gives you a peak experience so that you are able to see just a little bit beyond the valleys of your ordinary life.”

SH: Yet Transcendent Man isn’t an art house project. It’s very watchable, and Kurzweil comes off as someone you can really relate to.

BP:

”   One of my objectives was to create a film with a lot of momentum, a film that’s to entertain ultimately, because these messages are powerful, these ideas are powerful. But if you have a bitter fruit hanging on a tree, no animal is going to eat it to disperse those seeds, just the same as these seeds of knowledge won’t be dispersed from a film that is lacking in entertainment value. Entertainment is often dismissed but it’s very very important. “

SH: How do you want Transcendent Man to impact your audience:

BP:

”  I feel that it’s important for us right now at this juncture, as Ray says, to talk about important things. …There’s a lot that’s going in the world that’s actually very good. …The reality is that if you look at the world exponentially, things aren’t static. …I think it’s important for people to understand that going forward that just because we have a front row seat on all the things that ail us in the world, it doesn’t mean the world is becoming a worse place. The inverse is true. It’s becoming a greater place because we have a front row seat with 24 hour cable news outlets and sites like SingularityHub that let us know what’s going on anywhere in the world. A movie like Transcendent Man just reaffirms what we actually know as a species – that the sun’s coming up tomorrow and we can put another foot forward. We’ve been doing that since the dawn of time. [Quoting Kurzweil]: ‘We are the species that has transcended our limitations and broken boundaries. We do it all the time.’ We think of technology just being your iPad or Facebook but the truth is that technology goes way way back. Our society itself is a technology.

Animal husbandry is a technology. Agriculture. A Shakespeare poem is a form of technology. And when you see it that way you understand that this has been the human-machine civilization for a long long time. There’s no where you can go in the world that’s separated from technology. …This is our technology here to benefit us.

When we have a front row seat to problems all over the world – like the Gulf oil spill – we focus our minds on these challenges to overcome them as fast as we can. …We focus insanely, immediately, and we want to solve them. Nothing has the scalability like technology to solve these problems.

…I’m very very hopeful for our future in just 25 to 30 years from now. I think that all of us will have the ability to rise up in our hierarchy of needs and become more creative and self actualizing. That is our destiny as a human species – all of us to become creative together, not to worry where our next meal is coming from. …What’s the ultimate message of Transcendant Man? To install that kind of hope.”

SH: How has creating Transcendent Man and promoting it for the past few years affected your views on the future?

BP:

”   It has only strengthened my convictions. Not only are we on track to see the Singularity happen, but that Ray is the MOST intelligent, wisest sage that we can possibly have on our planet right at this moment. And I’m not exaggerating. You know all his accomplishments but if you spend time with him – his emotional intelligence, the wisdom is so powerful – and he has someone who has given a lot of thought to these ideas. I just can’t think, in all of human history (and I know I’m being ridiculously effusive) going all the way back to Aristotle, who has articulated, given a universality, to our species more than Ray Kurzweil?”

With Transcendent Man wrapping up its tour this year, and seeing widespread digital and DVD release, Ptolemy will soon move on to future projects.

SH: Are there any more documentaries about futurists on the docket?

BP:

” [Laughs] No…However, I will make films that touch upon Singularity, and technology, and what the world will be like in the next few decades. I would rather paint a more hopeful picture rather than a dystopian picture. …One [of the upcoming projects] is a metaphor about the Singularity but it’s a narrative feature film, and I can’t say anything more than that.”

I first saw Transcendent Man at its world premier in the Tribeca Film Festival in 2009. Before I spoke with Barry Ptolemy a few weeks ago, I had a chance to watch the slightly revised final cut that is now on tour. Honestly, I couldn’t tell you that I even noticed the seven minutes that had been removed. The changes of the film are slight, but the changes in the world are pretty profound. We have Watson winning on Jeopardy!, Google showing off its robot car, and Kurzweil is starting to get some major press from the likes of Time and USA Today. He and Ptolemy were recently on Charlie Rose talking about Transcendent Man as well. Watching the film in 2011, the vision Kurzweil presents for the Singularity seems less like science fiction and more like a weather forecast.

Transcendent Man is becoming one of the defining films about the Technological Singularity and the man who stands at the center of the community that discusses it. I highly encourage you to watch it, either with a download (starting at $5), with a DVD ($20), or by coming out to the April 14th screening in San Francisco. The world may still be deciding if Ray Kurzweil is a genius or a nutcase, but Transcendent Man is good evidence that Barry Ptolemy is almost assuredly the former.

I’ll leave you with the trailer…looks pretty cool doesn’t it?

[image and video credits: Transcendent Man/Ptolemaic Productions]
[source: Barry Ptolemy]

Almost two years after it premiered, Transcendent Man is finally making its way to widespread distribution, though maybe not in the way we expected. Barry Ptolemy’s look at the life and beliefs of Ray Kurzweil is a documentary film that explores concepts of digital reincarnation, personal hubris, and most importantly, the Technological Singularity. 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. Check out the trailer below.

I reviewed Transcendent Man in detail when it was first premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in the spring of 2009, so I won’t do a formal review here. Suffice to say the documentary takes a fairly balanced look at Ray Kurzweil, his espoused beliefs, his life, and his detractors. The man not only has made exciting predictions about the future, he’s drawn the lion’s share of the criticism from those who dismiss continued exponential growth in technology as a childish dream. We cover his predictions, and their critiques, fairly regularly on this blog. Often I lament the role that Kurzweil has adopted (or been forced to play) as the figurehead for the Singularity, but watching Transcendent Man the first time filled me with a great sympathy for his steadfast adherence to his futurist convictions. It will be interesting to see if I feel the same after I buy the DVD and watch it a few times more. Even if you have zero interest in the Singularity, I recommend you check out Transcendent Man on its tour, or through its digital distribution. Whether or not you believe in Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns, his life story makes for satisfying cinema.

For those who live in the tour destinations, here is the current listing for the dates and locations:

• February 3, 2011 (Thursday) — New York: TIME/Life Building, 1271 Avenue of the Americas (at Sixth Avenue), New York, NY 10020
• February 13, 2011 (Sunday) — San Jose: The Tech Museum, The Hackworth IMAX Dome Theater, 201 South Market Street, San Jose, CA 95113
• February 16 -17, 2011 (Wednesday-Thursday) — Los Angeles: Laemmle Royal, 11523 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90025
• March 10, 2011 (Thursday) — Washington, D.C.: Sixth and I Historic Synagogue, 600 I Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20001
• March 21, 2011 (Monday) — Boston: The Coolidge Corner Theater, 290 Harvard Street, Brookline, MA 02446
• April 4-5, 2011 (Monday-Tuesday) — London: London Science Museum IMAX Theater, Exhibition Road, London SW7 2DD, United Kingdom
• Toronto, Canada: Dates TBA

And some posters too!

[image credits: Transcendent Man]
[video credits: Transcendent Man]
[source: Ptolemaic Productions press release, Transcendent Man Facebook page]

Transcendent Man explores Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity.

AFI Fest hails itself as the definitive survey of the year’s most significant films. I’m not sure if that makes AFI a little conceited but it certainly gives an ego boost to those films that get screened there. So I’m happy to announce that Transcendent Man, Barry Ptolemy’s documentary exploring Ray Kurzweil and his ideas about the future, will be shown on November 5 in Los Angeles at the 23rd AFI Fest. If you haven’t yet seen the trailer for the movie, check it out below. And if you’re going to be in the LA area, check out the AFI Fest website to see how you can score free tickets to the show.

When we talk about the Singularity, we often mean the predicted future event wherein the growth of intelligence will exceed our current ability to comprehend it. In other words, humans (or human like beings) will be able to achieve things that would seem almost mythical to us now. Of course, when we talk about the Singularity we also tend to talk to a very small audience as it is a relatively obscure concept to most of the world. That’s why movies discussing the Singularity are big news for futurists. Once people see it on the big screen, will they care more? We know of at least four movies that are discussing the Singularity, and Transcendent Man is the first one to debut. There are over 65,000 film professionals attending AFI Fest. It’s the place where distribution deals are born…or die. If TM can do well in LA it may signal that the other Singularity movies have a chance to succeed and that people may be interested in learning more about this possible scenario of our future.

I’ve been impressed with Transcendent Man since I attended its debut at the Tribeca Film Festival in April. Ptolemy deftly dodges among fans and detractors of Kurzweil’s theories while simultaneously explaining those ideas to the audience. Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity is Near, is one of the definitive texts on how the exponential growth of technology will lead to a runaway phenomenon in the level of intelligence on Earth. Ptolemy’s direction allows the viewer to decide whether or not to buy into Kurweil’s predictions and spends a good time exploring the motivations behind the man. It’s a very interesting film and I encourage you to watch it. I should also note that Phillip Glass‘ music is wonderful, and I didn’t adequately praise it enough in my first review.

I’m not sure if I’ll be able to attend the AFI screening, so if you live in LA or plan to be there for the week long AFI Fest (Oct 30 – Nov 7), let Singularity Hub know. We’d certainly love to have your comments on what you think of Transcendent Man. Now that AFI has decided TM is one of the year’s most significant films, it would be nice to know if people think the Singularity is one of the year’s most interesting concepts.

[photo credit: Transcendent Man]
[video credit: Transcendent Man]

Tribeca Film Festival video gives insight into Barry Ptolemy's direction of Transcendent Man

The Tribeca Film Festival releases daily videos to help viewers get an idea of what happens during their screenings. For those of you who couldn’t make the TFF premier of Transcendent Man, check out the brief promo video below that stars director Barry Ptolemy. It doesn’t cover the entire depth of the film, but it’s still a pretty cool chance to hear what Ptolemy thinks of his work.

Most of the video is comprised of clips from the film, which focuses on Ray Kurzweil and his quest to discuss the Singularity with almost anyone. You get to see a short segment of the part of the film with William Shatner, which was a favorite of mine when I saw Transcendent Man at TFF. Celebrities abound (Stevie Wonder, Mic Jagger and others) but its really Ptolemy that makes this clip worth watching.

Barry Ptolemy is fairly new to the documentary world, Transcendent Man is his first full length. So it was interesting to hear his approach: follow Kurzweil around until he trusts you. Simple but effective. Apparently his angle on Kurzweil’s beliefs (is he a prophet or a nut?) arose dynamically while filming the movie.  We knew some of that from our earlier interview with Barry Ptolemy. While it’s still too early to know when Transcendent Man will hit wide release, I’m looking forward to the eventual DVD premiere. Hopefully it will include more interviews with Ptolemy, a copy of the TFF discussion panel, and lots more behind-the-scenes information. Hint, Hint.