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.

Transcendent Man does a good job of describing this concept to its viewers. Flashing diagrams and evolving graphs are interposed with images of current robotic technology. Ptolemy pushes ideas into the audience with repetition and visual support. Words from Kurzweil and other interviewees are captured and reappear as flowing, growing subtitles. Data and statements swirl around faces as they talk about them. It’s like watching an interactive holographic projection of their thoughts and it works beautifully.

Revealing the Wizard behind the Curtain

More than just an explanation of the singularity, this film sets out to help explain the transcendent man, Ray Kurzweil himself. The very first scene is a forty old year clip of the classic TV game show I’ve Got a Secret. Here we see a seventeen year old Kurzweil play the piano and answer the panelists’ questions. The big secret? Kurzweil’s music was composed by a computer he built in his own home. That’s right, in 1965, while still a teenager, Kurzweil was using computers to perform tasks as ephemeral and promising as composing music. It’s a sucker punch that welcomes you to the entire film.

But the blows keep landing. Kurzweil invented the flatbed scanner, a piano synthesizer, a book reader for the blind, and the list goes on. He’s predicted the Internet, the success of the Human Genome Project, and the fall of the Soviet Union. This is a man with so many awards that he values them about as much as his cat-figurine collection (both are given their own huge tables in his home). It’s like Transcendent Man gets up, walks to your seat, and shouts “He’s an amazing genius! Believe it. But we have other things to talk about.”

If you know Kurzweil’s work, you know those “other things” are likely to be the singularity, but that’s not the only subject Transcendent Man explores. Ptolemy explains the theories, clobbers you with Kurzweil’s genius, but then just as quickly exposes the man for what he really is: human. More than I ever could have expected, Transcendent Man reveals Ray Kurzweil as a vulnerable, extraordinarily gifted, loving, worrying, wonderful human being. And Ptolemy uses death to do so.

Ray Kurzweil’s father, Fredric, passed away due to heart failure while Ray was in his 20s. From that launching point we are shown Kurzweil’s perhaps obsessive rejection of death. He takes over 200 health supplement pills a day, he says people who accept death are in a kind of denial, and he even wants to use future technology to revive his father. We are shown a warehouse where Kurzweil keeps his fathers belongings, a considerable collection, in anticipation of that day.

“Death is a great tragedy…a profound loss…I don’t accept it…I think people are kidding themselves when they say they are comfortable with death.” —Ray Kurzweil in Transcendent Man, 2009

With this seeming vulnerability, this rejection of death, Ptolemy opens the flood gates for a wave of interviews that qualify, argue, or flat out refute Kurzweil’s predictions. To some degree, the optimism and hope of the singularity is washed away in this flood. In fact, the end product is so inundated with contrary opinion that you wonder what the director actually believes.

And that question shows how wonderfully made this documentary really is. This is not a propaganda piece for the futurists or the singularity lovers. It’s not a diatribe designed to pull down or belittle those beliefs either. Transcendent Man is a balanced and insightful look into the man behind the philosophy, and an open call for discussion.

“The end of the film is the beginning of the conversation.” —Tribeca Film Festival, Behind the Screens

Which is why the panel that followed the movie was so amazing. NPR’s Robert Krulwich asked questions and moderated for Ray Kurzweil and Barry Ptolemy. Krulwich’s questions were fairly predictable at first: do you really believe that the singularity will happen, are you afraid of death, aren’t you being too optimistic, will you really bring your father back? And Kurzweil’s answers followed suit: yes the singularity will happen because intelligence is following exponential growth, I’ve seen the data, I think death is a loss, I think bringing my father back is a reasonable thing to do, etc.

Things really heated up, however, when the audience got a chance to jump in. First, Ben Goertzel and Hugo DeGaris, famous in their fields and interviewed in the movie, were actually in attendance. The applause they received was almost on par with that for Kurzweil himself. Goertzel asked how far we could expand our intelligence and still remain ourselves. Kurzweil’s opinion is that we will always be ourselves, that we can never not be ourselves. We are in part defined by our limitations, but we will always have limitations of some kind.

The concept of the singularity seems almost designed to evoke this type of philosophical pondering. Goertzel’s question speaks to a wider fear that many have: does the singularity mean the effectual death of humanity? For myself, I can only assert that adulthood means the death of childhood, not the death of the child.

Yet, many may not see the singularity as such a natural step of humanity’s growth. Hugo DeGaris, in an echo of his time on the screen, told the panel that many people exist who would rather shoot scientists than allow them to build the machines that would bring about the singularity. How can Kurzweil be certain that a war isn’t brewing between technological acceptance and technological rejection? Transcendent Man already raised this concern, highlighting the manner in which fundamentalist religions will respond to perceived threats.

Even while accepting the possibilities raised by DeGaris, Kurzweil is quick to point out the problems with such a war. There can be no Us vs. Them over technology when we are all using the same technology. Already, cell phones and other modern day necessities have become common place all over the world. Even if a war between the technological haves and technological have-nots did occur, the haves would when easily. Technology is power. In Kurzweil’s words, “It would be like the U.S. fighting the Amish.”

So the question begs itself, if there’s not going to be a war, and if Kurzweil is so optimistic about the singularity, why does he even bother talking to us about it? Why write a book? Why go on tours speaking at conventions as diverse as video gaming and Brazilian business?

Perhaps Kurzweil realizes that so many of the promises of intelligence and technology come with risks of tragedy. He was quick to point out during the panel discussion that he is helping design the rapid response system for bio-technological terrorist attacks. The dangers of our own technological process loom heavily in these years leading up to the singularity. So Kurzweil is taking precautions, I think. He’s seeding us with the hope for a grander future.

If there is a choice to be made, a decision about whether or not we will use technology to destroy us or to change us, I think Kurzweil is urging us to decide to change rather than fall to calamity. In that way, Kurzweil is no different than many other successful modern day rainmakers. He’s asking us to move from fear to hope, to push beyond our current childhood and embrace a greater destiny. In philosophy, at least, Ray Kurzweil has already become the transcendent man.

See also:

Hub Exclusive – Interview With Transcendent Man Producer Barry Ptolemy (video)

Official Website for Transcendent Man

Official Trailer:

Transcendent Man is a major professional work, the culmination of Ptolemy’s more than 2 year effort to follow Kurzweil around the world, including interviews with Kurzweil’s closest friends and family and countless discussions directly with the man himself.  The trailer for the movie is a must see if you haven’t seen it yet.  Although the movie is premiering at Tribeca this week, we won’t have word on when/how the movie will be available to the public as this will be decided based on the movie’s success at the Festival.  We will keep you updated of course, but in the meantime enjoy our video interview with Ptolemy below, followed by the full transcript:

Singularity Hub: Can you tell us in your own words briefly what’s this whole movie about?

Barry Ptolemy: Transcendent Man is a movie about the life and ideas of Ray Kurzwiel, and you know, although you and I might understand what his ideas are, what we’re really doing here with cinema is we’re gonna reveal for the first time to the world we hope, um, what’s about to take place….and what Ray talks about which is the merging of man and machine and what the implications are for our civilization.  When you understand the rammifications of that it will change the nature of your life I believe, or thats what we hope, thats in a nutshell what we’re trying to accomplish.  We’ve talked about how the film is one man’s quest to reveal our destiny and I think Ray is playing that part of, you know, for lack of a better word, an evangelical person going out and getting his message out to the world.  He’s compelled to do it, we don’t know exactly why, but we try to get into that in the film where we reveal for example his late father and his passing and how that affects Ray’s judgement and his decisions.

Singularity Hub: How did you go about contacting Kurzweil and getting him to want to do this movie with you?

Barry Ptolemy: Well he was very rather easy to contact.  As huge as Ray is, he’s actually very forward about, for example, his email address…he puts it right there in his book.  So he was accessible and we contacted him and he got back to us and we setup a phone call with him within a week and we introduced ourselves and told him what our ideas were and he thought they sounded good.  He wanted to meet us in person so we met him a week later and things moved very quickly.  At the same time we had some financing coming together for the film idea which we had been developing for a year, but when we got Ray onboard things really got into high gear and at the same time we were meeting with him almost to the day we had completely gotten our financing in to place so that we could start shooting in the next month and we started almost immediately.  We met with him in San Francisco and he seemed to take to us, and obviously we liked him, and we agreed to make the film.  He agreed to give us complete and total access which was one of the things we really asked of him, is to make sure that we could really do this properly and you know he obliged us by letting us talk to him in plains and trains, on sidewalks, or alleyways, and hotel rooms, and he took us into his room.  We could interview his mother, or his wife, his children, and all his colleagues and all his peers.  So he really allowed us an amazing amount of access.

Singularity Hub: So can you tell me a little about how much content and information you were able to acquire during this whole process?

Barry Ptolemy: So over 2 years we accumulated over 200 hours with Ray in every conceiveable location, you know whether its a train, or a plane, or the back of a towncar or a sidewalk or an alleyway, or a restaurant or a hotel room or in his house.  We also interviewed about 70 luminaries of different disciplines, some of the greatest minds from all over the world, from scientists, to those in politics and the arts, and so we did accumulate a couple hundred hours of footage and of course that’s been reduced down to just a little over an hour…right now the film is running at about 85 minutes, so its quite a reduction down to that.  Just that in and of itself I feel is an achievement.  Its equivalent of taking something like a room of full of rock and just whittling it down to like the size of a broomstick, so uh, but we were able to do it.

Singularity Hub: So after having read Ray Kurzweil’s book and also having basically been with him and documented his life for several years now, I’m curious how this has impacted your lifestyle in terms of health and all sorts of other ways.

Barry Ptolemy: That’s a good question Keith.  I asked Ray once, obviously one of the thousands of questions I asked him over the last few years, “is life more valuable as we approach the singularity.”   Meaning that if you had a finite time in which to live your life is there less value in that life if their wasn’t this expansion of mind and soul that would come after that. In other words, if we are on the onset of expanding ourselves by billions and trillions of times should we not now obviously be very careful with our health?  And of course the answer is yes, I mean he’s a very strong advocate of using whatever technology we have currently to help our health process so if we know today that certain things are bad for us obvously we shouldn’t consume them.  We know smoking’s not good for us, we should wear our seatbelt.  Ray’s for example very stringent on how his driving goes.  If you drive with Ray he won’t want you to tailgate for example.  That’s one of his golden rules.  Don’t tailgate when you’re driving Ray Kurzweil around (laughing).  So he takes precautions like that and so you do start to get into a mode where you realize that life is very precious, life is always precious, but if you start to think about it in terms of the singularity, what can come beyond it, what will happen to us and our families, you want to be around to experience it.  And so you start to think like that.

Singularity Hub: So what do you think, singularity in the next 50 years, yes or no?

Barry Ptolemy: Oh, absolutely.  And if I can extend my answer beyond just yes or no, I think Ray is conservative in his estimates.  You know we’ve talked about this a lot.  I think that we’re 30 years under from a true singularity happening you know, a historical singularity

Singularity Hub: Very cool