Kurzweil is one of those wannabe prophets of technology that, in their own deluded way, sickly mirror religious prophets in their doom and/or wonder. In Kurzweil's case, his vision of tomorrow is all wonder, but a wonder based on information with no ability to process it. In short, Kurzweil is glaringly void of wisdom (after all, sans trials, intellect cannot advance). He bases this on what he claims (as well his acolytes) to be his near flawless prediction history. Being naturally wary of such claims, it took a less than 60 second Google search to find out that Kurzweil's predictive abilities were far less than perfect, and often so nebulous that one wonders if he secretly made much of his fortune as a carnival seer. Yes, he does solidly in technological predictions, but rather abysmally on softer predictions involving society ad things human centered.Yes, Kurzweil has invented many useful gadgets, but none of this qualifies him to speak with any authority on any subjects outside his narrow purview. However, Kurzweil is a multimillionaire, which in America means he is a 'genius' of the highest order, even if his mind is almost painfully Functionary as it flails about in its own idees fixe. In one of the film's grand moments of irony, the hypochondriacal Kurzweil discourses about how he once had diabetes, and, through a regimen of taking over 200 pills a day, he has successfully 'reprogrammed' his body into being a lean and healthy machine. Then we hear that the man suffered a heart attack, due to a faulty heart valve, during filming. Does this chasten the man? No. In fact, we get an even deeper delve into what can only be fairly described as the man's obsessive compulsion for his life's work- and that is cybernetically somehow resurrecting his father, who died when Kurzweil was young. Now, one might think such a revelation would add a patina of pathos to the film. It does not, for Kurzweil is just so stupid in his pursuit (as example, to get the most accurate simulacrum of daddy he has saved decades old receipts and financial notations from his father, as if these will, when worked into some magical future algorithm, have any bearing on making as HAL 9000 of his old man). Lunacy unfettered. Instead of praise for Kurzweil, the film actually engenders pity for his delusive pursuit.Balancing out the man's all too rosy optimism is a panel of gloomy counterparts who revel in their own sci fi fantasies and clichés of the bleak cyberpunk future that awaits us, replete with Terminators, human bondage, cyborgs, ultimate wars between AI true believers and fanatical Luddites, etc. It's all quite laughable, for predictions of the future almost always get some things right and most wrong. As example, in the 1960s of my youth, the 21st Century was to be a Jetsons-like propelled time of flying cars with no idea of the Internet. What these wannabe Nostradami miss is that, in twenty or ten thousand years, people will still be people (bitching of taxes or bad bosses or life's general futility), cybernetically enhanced or not, and technology has always served human needs, and adapted to them, not supplanted them, nor made us adapt to them. Like the two prior films, this one features stellar technical work by cinematographer Shawn Dufraine and editor Meg Decker, as well as one of the better film scores of his hit and miss career by Philip Glass.Naturally, Kurzweil's claim to fame rests on his idea of The Singularity- the time wherein humans and machines merge, thus allowing immortality to be achieved. Kurzweil claims this will occur before mid-century. One of the few non-extremist talking heads- a medical doctor, William B. Hurlbut, finds the claim absurd, given how little we currently know of the human genome, body, and, especially, the brain. Other than Kurzweil, the oddest of the talking heads is AI researcher Hugo de Garis. This man is so condescending in his views (which are of the gloomy sort) that, while warning of his future hell of billion slaughtered, in what he calls the impeding Artilect War, actually feels he needs to explain that Artilect is a portmanteau of the words artificial and intellect.At the center of all these would be pundits' predictions is a reality that they assiduously think that, by not mentioning, will be avoided, and that is The Law Of Unintended Consequences. A minor example: the rise of digital information, in the 1980s, was hailed with the claim of being a green technology that would virtually eliminate paper copies of information, thereby saving reckless deforestation. Instead, the near ubiquity of personal computers has seen a mind-boggling increase in paper production and consumption for information, as private citizens and business print up emails and documents as backups for the digital information. More paper is consumed than ever before.Nonetheless, Kurzweil is an oddly fascinating subject for a film- the ever scared little man wasting his brief time alive on chimeras that are best left for a later time, even if not for the adulatory reasons director Ptolemy intones in virtually every scene of Transcendent Man, for, far from being transcendent, Kurzweil comes off as an emotionally arrested naïf, tilting at a Quixotic future he is wholly unprepared to wean himself from.

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.

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.

I recently came across the concept of the Singularity in a book "Why the West Rules...for now", which used its arguments. This documentary talks about Ray Kurzweil's predictions of the impact of the exponential growth of technology and its implications on the evolution of humankind: essentially that they will merge, with huge implications.Now I want to read his book The Singularity and explore the concept more thoroughly...I suppose this is a great outcome for such a documentary, but it's not for someone avoiding deep thought.Ray is a great thinker, and an optimist and believes that death is essentially avoidable by essentially transforming ourselves to a different "machine" body, based on the unavoidable trend of increasing computer power, which will soon be able to reach the capability of one human brain. Once computing power surpasses the brain, then computers will design computers, and they will grow exponentially smarter.But as is pointed out in the film, if we think we can control that process once it is smarter than us, we're being unrealistic. As these machines interconnect, the power of one brain becomes pretty insignificant.One incredible scene follows the promise of machines that can read printed text and read it aloud to the blind. Starting with a $20,000 machine decades ago that Stevie Wonder used, to something today that fits in a shirt pocket, which is the equivalent of a $100 million computer a few decades ago.Another interesting points is his prediction that the cost of a watt hour of energy from solar sources will fall below that of fossil fuels in 5 years. Once this happens and solar power can be obtained from flexible panels installable anywhere, the geopolitics, economics and pollution from extracting, buying and using fossil fuels begins to go away.I'm 49 and this makes me think as I type this on my <$500 laptop computer, after watching the movie on a $500 Ipad which I downloaded from the Internet, then I'm writing a review on a database of films where you can call up information on almost any film ever made; that none of this was doable just 15 years ago.I can go to a city I've never been in, load up maps on my Iphone, find my way around, use a translator I can speak into in English which will speak in another language, and access money in another country to pay my bills.The darker side as was also announced today as I write this is someone figured out that your Iphone stores your whereabouts for a year or so, and so we lose our privacy. Romances are made on the Internet and lost when a spouse sees a text message setting up an affair. My father recently died of small cell lung cancer. Within a week or so reading everything I could on it, i knew as much as many of the doctors I was dealing with (one asked if I was a doctor), and could help guide his therapy.My life, in terms of photos, comments, interaction with friends, things and places I like is already being compiled in Facebook, and that will live on long after I die...Our stupid political arguments now that you see on Cable TV are a disgusting waste of time: Was Obama born in the US? Should we cut the deficit by raising taxes on wealthy people, cutting medical care and financial support to older and poor people? Should gays be allowed to marry (20 years ago this was only an idea, now it's viable in a fast growing number of cities, states and countries).We don't talk about the big issues: what does it mean that China now uses more energy than the US does. That it's economy is #2 and will soon outpace us? That the US is really not #1 anymore in anything significant (life expectancy, literacy, income, science achievements, etc) but one among many. What does it mean that we are clearly destroying our planet and using its resources (food, fish, air, minerals) at unsustainable rates....where does that leave us? These are the kinds of questions this film made me think about, and it answers in an optimistic way: in 15 years the advances in life expectancy as we "reprogram the bad software that makes up the human body" will be growing at more than 1 year per calendar year, essentially meaning if we make it 15 years we may live forever.But more importantly, who has control of this technology or does it control us? There is no real way to program morality into a computer, it's too complicated and no one agrees on one correct moral path. Does that fact that eventually we can "upload" our brains into a net where there are billions of others, and all interconnect mean we'l never want to unplug for fear of being lonely or nonfunctional? (like the Borg in Star Trek)...? Can you live without your Facebook, cellphone, texts, email or Internet for even one day without feeling out of touch? Watch this film. We all need to be thinking about these issues, not the bullshit on cable TV news.