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.
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.