The future is coming to the 49 out of 50 of the United States (sorry, Wyoming). On August 3rd, Transcendent Man: A Conversation About the Future will be appearing in 500+ theaters across the country. 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?

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]

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]

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.

How do I summarize Kurzweil’s thesis? Predictable exponential growth. While humans tend to think of their world on a linear scale (where’s that baseball going to be in two seconds? …better duck!), information technology develops at an exponential pace. This leads us to misunderstand how large trends develop: the Cold War seemed like it would go on forever, the popularity of the Internet seems to come out of nowhere, etc. Kurzweil predicted these developments, and many others, and wants to talk to you about the future. It’s coming a lot sooner than you think: we could have machines with human level intelligence by 2029.

For those of you who have watched Transcendent Man, or read the Singularity is Near, you may want to skip the first half of the Google presentation. There’s not a lot that is new there. Kurzweil’s latest book, The Web Within Us: When Minds and Machines Become One, is mentioned but only in passing.

If I could offer a highlight reel:

• Skip ahead to around 29:22, Kurzweil demonstrates his handheld mobile reader, part of knfb Reading Technology. With just a single picture, the tiny device can read a page of text in any of 16 languages. Very cool.
• 33:03 Kurzweil addresses complaints that his exponential graphs don’t include data points that would offset his proposed exponential growth curve. Here we see a wide collection of points added in to his graph without a huge variance. He goes on to explain how individual paradigms may end, but larger trends continue steadily and support his claims.
• Around 35:00 – Many different fields are becoming information technology. Medicine (with DNA), art, literature, and even physical objects may one day be transferred through emails.
• 44:00 – A discussion on nanotechnology and respirocytes.
• Artificial intelligence is a big theme when discussing the Singularity. Kurzweil explores the strengths and weaknesses of the human brain starting around 46:50. Humans, he says, are very good at pattern recognition and hierarchical structure. In the next 20 years, brain scans into the neocortex and cerebellum will enhance our understanding of how we accomplish these feats.
• There’s a great translation demonstration at 54:00 that leads directly into the presentation summary at 54:35.

All of the presentation slides are available as a download by following this link.

While many of the concepts Ray Kurzweil discussed at Google have been repeated in other settings, this presentation does a great job of summarizing. As always, I’m impressed by his track record, but not completely willing to accept his future predictions. That’s a sentiment shared in some of the recent and upcoming movies about the Singularity. Maybe it’s just our linear brains rejecting the concept of exponential growth? I’d like to hear more about how you view Kurzweil’s futurist thoughts, so make sure to add a comment below.

“Will we survive our technology?” – The Singularity Film, 2009

With four films coming out less than a year apart, it’s a pretty cool time to be interested in the future and the growth of intelligence. That’s right, four movies on the Singularity! In a year’s span. It’s kind of nuts: Transcendent Man debuted earlier this year, The Singularity Film and The Singularity is Near will both premier before year’s end, and We Are The Singularity is still in production. 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.

Four movies about the Singularity (clockwise from top left):Transcendent Man still shot, We Are The Singularity promotional pic, The Singularity is Near promotional pic, The Singularity Film tag line

So what’s the Singularity: crackpot idea, oncoming danger, Pinnochio 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.

The Singularity Film seems to focus on the monumental dangers and promises that the future holds, without really saying for certain how the Singularity may fit in. The trailer begins just by giving differing definitions of what Singularity means. Are we talking about the rise of artificial intelligence? Perhaps the Singularity marks the merging of man and technology. Maybe it’s just a point in history beyond which our predictions are meaningless.

While we won’t know for certain what director Doug Wolens believes until the movie premiers, the marketing campaign has already made its choice. The tag line is obviously a nod towards oncoming dangers. Heck, even the way they announce the premier date, “coming at the end of 2009″ seems pretty ominous. Still, Wolens previous topics, the Cannabis Cup, and a tree-hugger named Butterfly, probably mean that the film will be more even handed than the tag line.

We Are The Singularity, or WATS for short, is a totally different kind of animal. Director Chris Williamson, who runs his own blog about the Singularity, is actively pursuing potential viewers to donate to the film. Give Williamson $25 and he’ll put you in the credits, give you a free copy of the film, and let you enter a discussion group just for donors.

The $25,000 he hopes to raise isn’t the lion’s share of the funding, it’s more of a push to get people vested in the film. He wants the documentary to be community guided to some extent, and the donor group will choose the film’s title as well as have other input. Is Williamson, enthusiastic? Definitely, and the film is likely to be the same. It’s unclear how far along the shooting has progressed (he only has $1225 of the donations he hopes to raise), but we’ll keep you posted as it continues.

As I mentioned after watching the Tribeca Film Festival premier of Transcendent Man and the amazing panel discussion after, the film is as much about Ray Kurzweil as it is about the Singularity. In fact, much of the film is concerned with whether or not Kurzweil’s predictions stem from psychological pressures in his life. We’ve included the trailer here again for completeness.

Kurzweil gets a chance to guide his own response as writer, co-director, and co-producer of the movie version of his pivotal book The Singularity is Near. That’s a lot of input from one man, so expect the film to really express Kurzweil’s opinions first and foremost. Along side the main discussion of what the Singularity may mean for humanity, Kurzweil will provide a b-story line about Ramona, a robot billed as Ray’s female alter ego. What better way to understand Kurzweil’s vision of the Singularity than by walking you through the proposed steps of a person/thing that will experience it? No trailers yet, but we’ll keep you up to date as we get closer to the premier.

Do four documentaries mean that the public is starting to believe in the Singularity? Probably not. Most people wouldn’t even know what you were talking about if you asked. Most experts don’t agree on a definition, as The Singularity Film is quick to point out. What we do know is that those people who are concerned with this possible future want to get the word out. Whether that word is think, fear, observe, or hope depends on which movie you’re watching.

Will the world of Surrogates come true?

Well, a new micro-documentary on Wired.com is questioning just how much fiction there is in this science. With commentary from the director and some key experts in the field, The Science-Fact Behind Surrogates is out to show that the technology we have today is laying the foundation for the reality of the film. Watch the micro-documentary video after the break.

Surrogates is set in the year 2054, when everyone stays at home and sends beautiful android versions of themselves out into the world. It’s the ultimate form of telepresence, and futurist Dr. James Canton believes it could happen in the next decade or so. Canton isn’t the only expert weighing in during the documentary. Anybots, which the hub covered previously, make robots that operate through telepresence and demonstrate that humans can already interact through their artificial minions.

So we have remote controlled robots, but what about the rest of the technology promised in Surrogates? Singularity Hub has already told you about haptics, feeling what your robot feels, and Braingate, the technology of reading your mind in order to control computers and machines. This stuff is here today. Super good looking and super strong robots obeying our every command? Well, Hanson robotics and Cyberdyne technologies have you covered there as well. We’re so close people, so close.

Question is, do we want to be? The Surrogates comics series isn’t a wholesale endorsement of the telepresence lifestyle. Far from it. Vendetti wrote Surrogates after reading about relationships that failed when someone became obsessed with online gaming and social networking. In the series, the writer lampoons the American obsession with idealized looks, surrogates come with mouth-watering physiques, and our willingness to trade safety with freedom. Or rather, our belief that safety is freedom. The whole comic (and movie, I presume) revolves around a plot by a terrorist to destroy all surrogates everywhere. It’s a technophobe versus technophile conflict that futurists have been worried about for a while. It got brought up at the debut of the Transcendent Man documentary, and it reflects the real doubt some have about whether or not humans are losing their humanity in the technological ether.

Forget the heavy stuff for a while, though, and just enjoy the smash-’em bash-’em romp that I’m sure Surrogates will be. The trailer looks fun and the movie website even has a place where you can design your own virtual stand-in. Heck, we can start taking bets on whether or not Surrogates or AVATAR will be the biggest blockbuster starring remote controlled androids this year. The future may hold impressive decisions about the nature of human interaction but for now the biggest choice you have to make is if you want to go out and see the movie. I might just send someone in my stead.

SURROGATES trailer in HD

Is Ray Kurzweil a visionary...or a man desparate for computer-based immortality?

For those of you just joining the debate, let me say that it centers around two key issues: how fast the technology of intelligence (computers, biotechnology, etc) is growing, and whether or not Ray Kurzweil is a nut. A large part of Lyons’ Newsweek article, and Kurzweil’s response, focused on whether or not Kurzweil’s earlier predictions about technology were accurate. Lyons posits that most of Kurzweil’s predictions were easily forseeable (like the success of the Internet) or wrong. Kurzweil defends the originality of his insights and their accuracy.

These predictions, from Kurzweil’s books and speeches, ranged from the Internet to the Human Genome project. In the mid to late 80s, Kurzweil predicted that the Internet would grow exponentially and enjoy widespread use. Lyons says this was an easy prediction. Kurzweil also predicted, a decade later, that most computers used wouldn’t have keyboards, and would be part of someone’s apparel. Lyons claims this hasn’t happened, while Kurzweil points to iPhones, mp3 players, and computerized hearing aids. Kurzweil predicted the success of the Human Genome project in 15 years (predicting exponential growth in the rate of return). Lyons concedes that prediction but points to Kurzweil’s belief that the economy would keep growing between 1999 and 2009. The list goes on and on.

Figuring out who’s right isn’t easy. What kind of metric do we apply to futurists? How often do they have to be right, and how right do they have to be? If Kurzweil was wrong about everything else, but is correct in predicting that artificial intelligence will be indistinguishable from human intelligence in 20 years, that alone would make him a visionary. In the end, it’s up to each reader to evaluate the predictions Kurzweil made and decide whether they collectively prove he’s a technological seer, or just another dreamer.

One area in which Kurzweil certainly won is his preparedness. While Lyons might have you think that Kurzweil is a pie-eyed optimist, too certain in his beliefs to even consider other possibilities, the truth is far from it. As was evident in the panel-discussion after the Transcendent Man premier, Kurzweil is actively working on projects designed to prevent some of the worst case scenarios new technologies present. He is part of the national security team working on bio-terrorism response in the United States. His books warn against technological perils as well as predicting benefits. Whether or not he is wrong about the Singularity, Kurzweil is preparing for all outcomes.

If Lyons had just focused on Kurzweil’s predictions and left it at that, I may not be writing my own article. However, Lyons brings up several sensationalist themes prominent in the movie about Kurzweil’s life, Transcendent Man. As Singularity Hub mentioned before, Kurzweil wants to live forever, and takes a wide-range of dietary supplements to keep him going. Eventually he wants to download, or upgrade himself, into an immortal intelligence (most likely in the form of a computer). Using a similar process, Kurzweil wants to reanimate the intelligence of his dead father, remaking him from data collected in journal’s and Ray’s own memories. He proposes that the rest of us could do the same for ourselves and our loved ones.

It’s a story ripe for pity, horror, or disdain depending on your outlook. Lyons explores all three emotions. Even when attacking Kurzweil’s predictions on their own merit, Lyons is constantly returning to the futurist’s motivations. The optimism Kurzweil feels is really just a fear of death. His predictions are really just hopes to bring back his dead daddy. His continuous speaking tour around the world is just a public display of a mid-life crisis. Am I the only one who finds the focus on these suppositions offensive to my intelligence?

Maybe I’m just tired of someone’s “story” getting more press coverage than their work. You notice it most during the Olympics, but it’s pretty ubiquitous in the media as a whole. No matter who is discussed — politician, scientist, or athlete — the story of their life, the motivations for their actions, are taking up more of the discussion than the actual meaning of the actions themselves. We’re big on narrative but short on analysis, and that’s just silly.

I can’t speak much for politicians or athletes, but I know scientists. Sir Isaac Newton was into alchemy. Einstein wrote his miraculous 1905 papers while slaving away in a dead-end job. Many top scientists have been racists, sexists, drug-addicts, or just general pricks. Many have also been loving, caring men and women who’ve overcome great obstacles in life. Great. I’m enough of a post-modernist to understand that someone’s character and work are not two separate entities, but intertwining states that support one another. Still, I’m tired of being sold the story of someone’s life, when it’s their work that will impact mine.

Ray Kurzweil may be a nut, he may be going through the biggest mid-life crisis ever. I don’t know. I honestly don’t care much. I want to evaluate his predictions, and his actions, on their own merit. It would be nice if the major media outlets focused on the same.

Will we have AI that passes the Turing test in 20 years? Is the Singularity a pipe-dream or an upcoming reality? Can the average person affect the outcome (through voting, buying, or protesting)? These questions need answers, or at least, discussion. As interesting as Kurzweil may be, it’s the what, when, and how, not the who or why, that I’m dying to know about. If Newsweek really wants to focus on whether or not someone wants to become a robot, they should interview seven years olds outside the Transformer’s movie premier. For compelling science articles, I want something that’s more than meets the eye.

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