Country:
USA
Recognizable Faces:
Ray Kurzweil
William Shatner
Colin Powell
Directed By:
Robert Barry Ptolemy
Everybody is afraid to die, but some are more than others. Ray Kurzweil would be one of these people. Although, he's not satisfied with taking good care of himself and finding the right god to pray to. Kurzweil is a resourceful man. An inventor who's responsible for very important pieces of technology for blind people. He's been called by Bill Gates "the man most apt to predict the future". It's only quoted in TRANSCENDENT MAN, but apparently Kurzweil predicted the end of communist Russia and the rise of the internet. Ray's latest predictions are about the future of mankind. He calls it "singularity", or a moment where the nature of humanity will drastically change. Ray Kurzweil predicts that we're knocking at the door of a new age. That soon we're going to be hybrid man/machine. Cyborgs, if you prefer.
Kurzweil's point has some legs. He says that we're twenty to forty years away to be technologically enhanced and he takes his argument in the history of information technology. It's a revolution that keeps going faster and faster for a very simple reason. Technology feeds on itself for innovation. Whatever is the latest innovation, it opens a new world of possibilities to build on. In sixty-something years, computer chips have went from building sized to small enough to fit on a fingertip. According to Kurzweil, we can't be that far from making small enough computer chips to fit into somebody's bloodstream. From there, his predictions get bolder. The IT revolution will then take a medical turn and calamities like aging and diseases will be eradicated and people will live for as long as they want to.
That's where TRANSCENDENT MAN gets very interesting. Barry Ptolemy doesn't put down Kurzweil's prediction, but doesn't take them blindly either. His portrait of the scientist goes beyond scientific endeavors and reveals a man scarred by the untimely death of his father and afraid something similar is going to happen to him. Other scientist pretend that it's that fear of death that makes Kurzweil predict such a drastic paradigm change for humanity and that he's dreaming at best and what he predicts won't happen for hundreds of years. Honestly, I don't know who I'm more afraid of. The utopian, new age figure Kurzweil or the scientist that doesn't want to think ahead. Of course Kurzweil ideas are not scientific, but the idea of planes wasn't scientific five hundred years ago. It was science-fiction. Kurzweil's ideas receive the cold shoulder from the scientific community and there's not valid reason for that. It's motivated by fear and narrow-mindedness, which inexcusable from men of science.
The most balanced point of view in the documentary comes from AI researcher and author Ben Goertzel, who says that Kurzweil ideas are interesting, if a little candid. There's no way to predict what's going to happen when mankind will be able to build self-aware artificial intelligence and there's even a risk that technology might turn on us like a bad dystopian scenario. Mixing technology and humanity to a point where it's going to be impossible to know if you're human or machine causes an important ethical problem. TRANSCENDENT MAN is a riveting little piece of documentary cinema. It takes a highly critical point of view on the issue it's covering and ultimately empowers the judgement of its viewers. Watch it with friends, it's going to make for a lengthy and interesting discussion.
SCORE: 85%