Trancendent Man

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There was a Tribeca Film Festival screening and after-party last night for Barry Ptolemy's Transcendent Man, a proflle of futurist and "singularity" proponent Ray Kurzweil. He's been projecting that singularity -- the creation of super-intelligent, long-lived beings via the fusing of humans and computers -- will happen within 30 years. Ptolemy profiles Kurzweil as well as followers -- including Steve Wonder and William Shatner -- of his regimen, which he says will bestow eternal life.

Transcendent Man director Barry Ptolemy, producer Felicia Ptolemy.

Ptolemy "also interviews evangelists who believe that Kurzweil is challenging God, especially by his ongoing endeavor to bring his father back from the dead," says a Popular Mechancis summary. "Ultimately, Ptolemy asks if singularity is the theory of a genius or a sci-fi idea taken too seriously."

I missed last night's screening due to being at IFC's Fear Me Not dinner near Rivington and Bowery, but I wanted to very much to meet Transcendant Man composer Phillip Glass, whom I've admired for decades. I was told when I got to the party, however, that Glass was unable to attend due to a concert he was performing. This "concert," I later found out, was a private party that Glass was hosting at his home near the intersection of 2nd Avenue and 3rd Street. He did perform there, I'm told.

"In the year 2050, if Ray Kurzweil is right, nanoscopic robots will be zooming throughout our capillaries, transforming us into nonbiological humans," an article reads. "We will be able to absorb and retain the entirety of the universe's knowledge, eat as much as we want without gaining weight, shape-shift into just about any physical form imaginable, live free from disease, and die at the time of our choosing.

"All of this will be thrust on us by something that Kurzweil calls the Singularity, a theorized point in time in the not-so-distant future when machines become vastly superior to humans in every way, aka the emergence of true artificial intelligence. Computers will be able to improve their own source codes and hardware in ways we puny humans could never conceive. This will result in a paradigm shift that sees mankind coalescing with its own creations: man and machine, merging into one.

"These grand-scale premonitions are largely based on Kurzweil's law of accelerating returns, which states that the development of technology has been increasing exponentially since the beginning of time. That concept isn't really compelling to anyone but science nerds until you focus on the 'knee' of this exponential curve -- the point where the perpetual doubling of technological growth skyrockets and negates the linear models of progress that people like economists have relied on for so long.

"Kurzweil says we're just about to start rounding this bend and that the rate of progress will be so great it will 'appear to rupture the fabric of human history.' In other words, we will trump nature and take control of our own evolution."

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Posted by Jeffrey Wells on April 26, 2009 at 10:50 AM

comment #1

George Prager says ...

That's pretty awesome. I was dreaming of a future where you could buy a self-replicating Snickers bar that you could eat forever, but this sounds even better!

Posted by George Prager at April 26, 2009 11:47 AM

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Marty Melville says ...

So girls of the future will be able to morph at will into, say, Stella Stevens circa The Nutty Professor? Sold!

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Posted by Marty Melville at April 26, 2009 12:09 PM

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Glenn Kenny says ...

This is the sort of thing that makes Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds believe that he's going to be able to live forever, which is really the most compelling reason to hope none of it ever happens.

Posted by Glenn Kenny at April 26, 2009 12:43 PM

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Bob Violence says ...

Good news! The Singularity is actually a load of geek wank fodder with as much relevance to real-world science and technology as Star Trek Technical Manuals, so chances are you'll still be able to gloat.

Posted by Bob Violence at April 27, 2009 3:42 AM

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Why bother "eating as much as you wanted"? If this type of being ever became possible, I imagine that vast numbers of people would just go straight for direct pleasure stimulation, all the time.

Or some internet troll / virus programmer would get hold of it and make himself into the ultimate weapon, just because he could, just for the attention.

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