Trailer now available for Ray Kurzweil's movie, "Transcendent Man"

by gourneau • 17 years ago

75 56 17 years ago

endtime3• 17 years ago

Does anyone know more about this movie? The trailer isn't especially informative (nor is the press kit), but it seems like the movie will be low on content (excluding stuff that Kurzweil and others have been saying for years) and high on self promotion. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it would just mean that I'm not the target audience.

barredo2• 17 years ago

I guess the film will be to spread the Singularity ideas and theory for the masses and get some news/press coverage similar to Michael Moore's films.

goodgoblin• 17 years ago

Hopefully the movie will contain a subliminal message which implants itself into the brain's of all its viewers. The viewers then will then go out and simultaneously engage in activities that serve to bring us closer to the Singularity.

endtime3• 17 years ago

Yeah, I guess. A kind of intro to the Singularity for your mom. I suppose that's worth knowing about.

Alex3917• 17 years ago

I'm sure the actual movie will be much better than the trailer. 95% of the the content of the book can be summed up in about 10 line graphs. They probably just haven't hired someone to take those and make them pretty yet.

Tichy• 17 years ago

It's horrible. I like Kurzweil and singularity doesn't seem so unlikely - just the trailer is unbearable for me, for too many reasons to count (like cutting from Captain Kirk to "The Singularity Is Near" lieing on a desk).

gord4• 17 years ago

agreed.. but thankfully captain kirk gets to speak and thus his dignity is preserved.. as befits his stature as ambassador for all humanity.

jksmith4• 17 years ago

HAH. Well said. Plus, if any aliens get out of hand he can kick ass with the tonfa training he got on TJ Hooker.

vinutheraj• 17 years ago

Those pills those guys were taking ... they think that they will make 'em live forever ?

barredo2• 17 years ago

No, but the pills are supposed to give them better ods to live until 2040-2050 where they think the Singularity will allow them to transcend their human bodies.

Other people prefer go and live in Florida or Spain :-)

gourneau• 17 years ago

This article in Wired goes into a little detail about his pill regiment: http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/16-04/ff_kurzwei...

scott_s4• 17 years ago

Too bad no medical studies support the idea that taking vitamins improves health: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/news-keeps-getting-...

snowbird1222• 17 years ago

More information about the movie here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1117394/

The book (The singularity is near), which serves as the basis for the movie is one of the most thought provoking reads I have had in a long time.

He looks at various trends throughout history (like Moore's Law) which follow an exponential curve, and he extrapolates the curve into the future.

There may be some arm waving here and there, but there is definitely something to his theories.

Summary: "Most people overestimate what can be accomplished in the short term and underestimate what can be accomplished in the long term".

jodrellblank3• 17 years ago

The most compelling counter is one throwaway comment I saw here - that things are just going to get so complex we will be overwhelmed with complexity and leaky abstractions and progress will crash into a wall before intelligence amplification helps us pass said wall.

I prefer the ideas of Aubrey De Gray, because while they require future-technology and future-developments, they don't require intelligence amplification or AI or thought-to-be-impossible technology, and if done successfully would give us longer lives which might be the equivalent of amplified intelligence allowing a way round said wall (i.e. work at the same level of smartness, but for longer).

snowbird1222• 17 years ago

Ray's argument against things getting complex would probably be something like: Why would things suddenly get "so complex" when the trend has been going on for millions of years.

Douglas Hofstadler (Godel Escher Bach author) says that perhaps humans aren't smart enough to understand and recreate consciousness.

Thanks for the Aubrey De Gray reference. Found a video interview of him here: http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/16508

biohacker42• 17 years ago

Every sigmoid looks like an exponential curve early on.

thepanister4• 17 years ago

Whatever this guy thinks he can do, I am sure he won't be able to make humans live forever, or even "get his father back to life".

Maybe he can make a machine that lives forever, but he can't make a human to live forever. There are things that god forced in this world, and it will continue regardless if you believe in god or not. And I think that god forced humans to die, and this won't change in the future.

gord4• 17 years ago

Well one can always ask just how long did god intend humans to live? Was it 30, 60, 90, 120, 150 or 180 yrs?

I think well see all of those as possible answers, given the advance of medicine and engineering.

If by god you mean "stochastic calculus".. then yes, I do believe in god, and he has mysterious ways indeed :]

thepanister4• 17 years ago

About God, he has created you, me, and the whole world [the world of creatures]. And even if some people try to deny God, he is there and we need him.

Well, advance of medicine and engineering?

Did medicine help prevent people die at age 5 or 6 yrs old? There is something called "fate", and I guess you don't believe in it too.

brightscreamer• 17 years ago

Serious question--how does the struggling global economy factor into all of this? I'd think it would, at the very least, postpone a technological singularity.

ivankirigin4• 17 years ago

Cycles of peaks and troughs in growth rates are normal.

time_management• 17 years ago

Right, but let's consider the difference between a recession and a depression. A recession is a contraction in a healthy economy. It's normal, and probably necessary. A depression is something worse. We don't know yet if this is a recession or a depression.

FiReaNG3L• 17 years ago

The singularity prediction relies on a trend of technological advances that is ever increasing. The only thing it forgets is that resources are not infinite. Hey, bacteria on a plate grow exponentially, but eventually they run out of resources and just die.

jksmith4• 17 years ago

Maybe the universe is a closed system, but reaching the "Singularity" before we reach maximum entropy is probably more likely.

scott_s4• 17 years ago

Our "plate" is probably not all of the known universe. We may never leave this solar system.

xenophanes2• 17 years ago

How are we going to educate the AIs?

Hopefully not at our existing schools, which would bore them to tears.

xenophanes2• 17 years ago

What's objectionable about this comment? I don't know. Fill me in?

discojesus2• 17 years ago

"[Kurzweil] says computers will have human consciousness in 25 years."

Wait is this one of those 1980s AI-in-25-years predictions or is this a new 2009 We're Really Serious This Time, Guys prediction?

ivankirigin4• 17 years ago

Actually, he's said the year 2029 for a long time now.

discojesus2• 17 years ago

I think Kurzweil should be more explicit in step two.

mixmax• 17 years ago

Personally I think it's one of those predictions.

I explain why here: http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2008/11/why-singularity-may-neve...

sgk284• 17 years ago

Kurzweil is one of the few guys whose predictions I take serious, simply because his track record is solid... in fact quite a few of is predictions he's directly made happen. If you look at the claims made in "The Age of Intelligent Machines", and the follow up a decade later in "The Age of Spiritual Machines", you realize the guy is pretty on the ball. Not 100% of the time, but even when he's wrong he usually got some part of it right.

bitwize• 17 years ago

Hey, the best way to predict the future is to (in|pre)vent it.

jksmith4• 17 years ago

"God is who he is, and our challenge should be to know Him, not try to create Him."

That's the tough thing. Maybe the only way to know God is to become God, at which point we just take it all for granted, like any other technology we integrate into our lives.

ivankirigin4• 17 years ago

This doesn't look very good, as it focuses on Ray, and not on the issue. I'd rather hear what Kevin Kelly and others shown have to say about the tech. I don't care what they think about each other personally or politically.

I think Kelly is right by the way (he's the guy with white hair and a chin strap beard). There has been too much focus on this guy, and the hope he brings to people. It should motivate people, but only enough to learn or tech more engineering to get there faster with practical, immediate action.

peregrine• 17 years ago

The nice thing about being Ray Kurzweil is that he can keep making predictions on the most simple things and get them right. So much that if hes wrong on any he can easily push them aside.

Technology won't slow down, it can't, not even a depression could slow it down. The information is too available and the school numbers are still high.

gord4• 17 years ago

I found this just hilarious after having read Michael Lewis' book "The Future Just Happened".

On the one hand hes totally right.. on the other hand hes totally missing the point, completely obsessed with blatant self promotion. ugh.

Then we see Tony Robbins propping up Rays rep as a 'serious human being'.. omg, my arse hurts from laughing so much.

This and "W" {dubya} are my must sees for comedy movies of '09.

Trailer now available for Ray Kurzweil's movie, "Transcendent Man"

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