Transcendent Man

Ray Kurzweil has known he wanted to be an inventor from the age of 5, and has now been at it for all those years. Along the way he realized that the timing of inventions was critical to their success, otherwise most inventions fail. Think e-readers 10 years ago, tablet PC's 7 years ago, and the Apple Newton – all bombs then, but now the timing is right. So he started analyzing technology trends and discovered the "law of accelerating returns"; in summary that technology grows in a predictable and exponential patterns and that amazing things our in our future. Ray has had amazing success with his publicly made predictions. For instance, in the book "The Age of Spirtual Machines", he made 147 predictions for the year 2009, of which 86% are correct or essentially correct. (Reference: "How My Predictions are Faring, Ray Kurzweil, Oct. 2010; http://c0068172.cdn2.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/predictions.pdf ) In other words when Ray Kurzweil speaks, people listen and you should too. I will admit, when I first heard is ideas of how man will evolve with technology, I was quite skeptical. But as I dug deeper into why he was saying this would happen, I began to see the trends are in his favor. Think about it; have you noticed that technology has been moving at a quickening pace lately?

The film follows Ray over several years, catching him on his lecture circuit, at his company, his home, and traveling about. Throughout the film Ray explains the "law of accelerating returns" and where it will lead to. Also Ray's critics and supporters give their opinions throughout. Ray himself seems to be an incredibly calm individual who rarely strays from his relaxed tone of speaking. Ray's trends predict that technology trends are crossing over into health-care and that if you can live for another 15 years you have the chance of living a very long time. Ray's predictions give us hope in a time when so much around us seems gloomy. The documentary is a fascinating look at Ray and his ideas, and I highly recommend it.

....but this whole film seems to be based on the foundation that every prediction Raymond Kurzweil has made so far has been correct, and that every invention he's created has been successful. I find this to be disingenuous at best. The handful of correct predictions presented as evidence merely serves to make me wonder : Did Kurzweil only make this small list of correct predictions, and shut up the rest of the time? Was his plethora of correct predictions so overwhelming that severe editing was required for brevity? I find this impossible to accept. If you want me to be impressed with your successes, Ray, you must admit your defeats. Kurzweil's claim that man's lifespan used to be 25 years is a blatant misuse of statistics. His claim of rapidly multiplying information ignores that much new information disproves old information. I'll stop now.

I'm somewhat familiar with the work of futurist Ray Kurzweil having read and reviewed his book The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999). He has since written several other books. He's won a lot of prizes and several honorary doctorates. He's a brilliant and original man.

As this documentary film makes clear, he is also a man afraid of dying and a man who very much misses his father and dreams of somehow bringing his father back to "life." Yes, quotation marks around "life." Kurzweil thinks that it will someday be possible to down load our brains onto some kind of software and in such form we will live forever.

I probably should read some more Kurzweil because I am sure he has an answer to my main critique of this fantastic idea, which can be illustrated by this consideration: Suppose your brain is downloaded. Which of you is you? The one in the software whose experiences are virtual or the one in the flesh and blood whose experiences are very human-like with all the ups and downs? The lives that can be downloaded onto software will be interesting, incredible really, but only to other people.

Another thing to ask when thinking about this is "How do you program a computer to feel pain? Or joy for that matter. Human beings are evolved beings that are subject to pleasure and pain. Software and AI machines not only don't feel any pain, they couldn't even if they wanted to. They can be programmed to act as though they feel pain but that is all. It is not even clear how animals came to develop the pleasure/pain reward/punishment system. What came first the mechanism to deliver pain or the ability to recognize the experience as pain? Nobody knows.

I wonder if Kurzweil realizes that death is part of life. Without death biological creatures such as us would experience an unbearable stasis and would of course die anyway eventually through accident, suicide, nearby supernova, etc. And as machines without biological urgings we would have no reason to go on living unless the urge is programmed into us by biological creatures. Machines don't care whether they are "alive" or dead. They are not afraid of the plug being pulled.

Naturally he has his critics other than me. And in this film director Robert Barry Ptolemy introduces a few and lets them have their say. The give and take is interesting. But what I think most people who are familiar with Kurzweil's work will find interesting is the portrait of the very human man himself.

The film begins with Kurzweil's appearance on TV's "I've Got a Secret" when he was 17-years-old and ends with his latest invention, a device that reads text aloud for the blind, and his ideas for new inventions using nanobots. In between we learn of his open heart surgery and his overriding idea that the singularity is near and that we will be able to comprehend the world of the singularity only if we are augmented with artificial intelligence. In other words we will become cyborgs, part biological creatures and part machine.

In this last prediction I think Kurzweil is right. We will meld with our machines—that is, if we don't send ourselves back to the Stone Age first.

Kurzweil gets the last say. He asks "Does God exist?" His very clever answer: "I would say not yet." —Dennis Littrell, author of "The World Is Not as We Think It Is"

Seldom do technologists gain prominence for their prophesies. Our field, you see, values doing over thinking. You believe we'll be Tom Cruising over our Minority Report-esque holograms in 2020? Great. Now build it.

But Ray Kurzweil is an exception. He's a man whose words do indeed speak louder than his actions. He famously predicted the year a computer will finally beat the best human chess players, among many other things (89 of his 109 predictions from 1999 have so far been proved right.) His actions haven't been too unimpressive either — he built a computer at age 17 (in 1965 no less) and invented a reading machine for the blind.

So we've established he's an Important Man. Now let's see what makes him Transcendent.

In Transcendent Man, Mr. Kurzweil gives us a lowdown of what we are to expect from the next couple decades. Namely: robots will take over us, we'll start planting chips made of nanotechnology into our bodies, genetic modification will make us immortal, and soon enough, singularity. Whatever that means.

The documentary follows Kurzweil in his daily life as he meets with smart people in lab courts, and William Shatner, to whom he successfully sells the idea of taking 150 pills a day (after all, we do want to see Captain Kirk witness the launch of the real Enterprise someday, no?)

We get a glimpse of the labs and institutions where the apparent future of mankind (or the beginning of the apocalypse to some) is being initiated. They all utter the same phrases, and even the naysers appear to be cheer leaders of human triumph. Did I mention? Robots. Genetics. Nanotech. Immortality. Singularity.

BOOM.

If you ask me, he's being optimistic. But then again, he knows something the rest of us don't — the true power of the exponential curve. All technology, you see, advances exponentially. Moore's Law told us the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years. Thirty two years after the first personal computer, we had one that sits in our pocket and lets us FaceTime our grandparents. Mark Zuckerberg recently made the claim that we're individually sharing double of everything year after year. I don't want to think about what this means for the pornography industry in 2020.

And lest you forget? Four years ago, Twitter was a seven letter word in the dictionary. Three years before that, "Facebook" referred to a book with pictures you wouldn't want your kids to see. Today, these terms are something most of us live and die by everyday.

Keeping this in mind, I guess it's possible that Mr. Kurzweil's predictions may not end up too far from the truth. Who knows what we'll be verbing in 2020?

Ask Ray Kurzweil.

The subject of this documentary, Ray Kurzweil, is an accomplished inventor and futurist whose creations include a reading machine for the blind. The film focuses on Kurzweil's ideas about "The Singularity" an event in which humans will be able to incorporate machines into their bodies, including their brains, and augment their intelligence. Kurzweil sees a great deal of promise in this, including the potential for immortality.

The film provides an interesting portrait of the man and his ideas, but it suffers from a relative lack of questioning of his optimism. Kurzweil has an at times deterministic vision of technological progress that fails to account for human foibles, and the double-edged sword of technology itself.

For example,Kurzweil dismisses the issue of class totally as it applies to who can benefit from technological advancement. Kurzweil argues that the costs of new technology are only prohibitive during its early stages. He points to the fact that his reading machines for the blind have become more affordable. This ignores the fact that even in a wealthy society like the United States, many people cannot afford even basics like health care. The benefits of Kurzweil's techno-utopia are likely to fall on the wealthy alone.

Furthermore, the law of accelerating returns that Kurzweil relies on seems deterministic, and ignores variables such as declining natural resources. At times, his faith in technological progress has an almost religious quality, particularly given the fact that he places so much hope on technology for achieving immortality.