“Does God exist? Well, I would say, ‘Not yet.” —Ray Kurzweil, Transcendent Man, 2009
It’s not every documentary that predicts humanity will someday create and become God. Transcendent Man says it will happen in the next twenty years. A bold statement for a movie about a bold man. Barry Ptolemy’s Transcendent Man is a biopic of famed inventor, writer, and futurist Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil is author of The Singularity is Near, a best-selling book describing humanity’s journey to becoming non-biological life.
Singularity Hub was at the Tribeca Film Festival debut of Transcendent Man, and the revealing panel discussion that followed. Whether you are new to the concept of ‘the singularity’, or whether you are a well-known authority on the subject, you will want to see this film.
Scene from Transcendent Man
Kurzweil, his family, his friends, his colleagues, and his detractors all appear in filmed interviews to discuss his most famous predictions: intelligence is following an exponential growth curve, as technology increases the differences between technology and humanity will shrink, and eventually the human-machine civilization will be advancing so quickly that no one can truly understand what it will be like. The last concept is known as the singularity. Borrowed from physics, Kurzweil and others use the term to describe the inability to comprehend the seemingly limitless intelligence that will arise past this point in our future. This intelligence will have amazing powers of perception, communication, and understanding, and could seem in our eyes to be God-like.
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