Watch: Transcendent Man 2009 123movies, Full Movie Online – TRANSCENDENT MAN chronicles the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and futurist that presents his bold vision of the Singularity, a point in the near future when technology will be changing so rapidly, that we will have to enhance ourselves with artificial intelligence to keep up. Ray predicts this will be the dawning of a new civilization in which we will no longer be dependent on our physical bodies, we will be trillions of times more intelligent and there will be no clear distinction between human and machine, real reality and virtual reality. Human aging and illness will be reversed; world hunger and poverty will be solved and we will ultimately cure death. Critics accuse Ray of being too optimistic and argue that the dangers of the Singularity far outweigh the benefits, pointing out the apocalyptic implications that once machines achieve consciousness, we may not be able to control them. Whether Rays controversial ideas incite excitement or fear, dogma or disbelief this ambitious documentary will forever change the way you look at life, death, and your own future..
Plot: The compelling feature-length documentary film, by director Barry Ptolemy, chronicles the life and controversial ideas of luminary Ray Kurzweil. For more than three decades, inventor, futures, and New York Times best-selling author Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future.
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Great documentary about our love/hate relationship with technology
The documentary is, to an extent, a film version of Ray Kurzweil’s nonfiction text, *The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology* (2006).If you’re not familiar with Ray Kurzweil’s ideas, then I recommend familiarizing yourself with them. I want to go so far as to say he comes closest to articulating the general “mythology” of our time in regards to our relationship with technology.
This was a wonderful documentary to watch before reading his book. It’s also interesting because the ambivalent nature of our relationship to technology comes through in an intense way. Indeed, the extremes of “technology-as-savior” and “technology-as-doom” are evident in this documentary. For example, Ray Kurzweil believes that, eventually, machine intelligence and human intelligence will merge together, and that the next stage of human evolution involves our connection to technology: this connection will result in immortality. And yet, other scientists believe that machine intelligence will stay separate from us and, surpassing us in capabilities, intelligence, vision, will come to see us as a mere “insects.” Thus, they’ll destroy us with as much prejudice as we destroy a nest of wasps or some irritating rabbits.
We have here the vision of either technology as Utopia or technology as Dsytopia: the U.S.S. Enterprise or Skynet.
A lot of the documentary foregrounds Kurzweil’s views, but I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s biased towards them. A lot of time is spent allowing his detractors to speak. Particularly, Hugo De Garis becomes the representative of the “dark side” of Kurzweil’s technological vision. De Garis spends a lot of time talking about the “artilect war,” a scenario he has imagined. The artiloect war, according to De Garis, will take place right before machines achieve consciousness. The war will be fought between people who think that intelligent machines should be built and people who believe intelligent machines are our doom and should not be built. We basically have, in De Garis’s scenario, a fight between the two visions: those who recoil from technology as the death of humanity and those who embrace technology as the full manifestation of humanity (i.e. our destiny).
There are other vexed issues in terms of our relationship to technology that come through in this documentary, namely, how we are coming to interface with it. One question is, where do the boundaries of the human end? After we have replaced our eyes, our lungs, our brains, our limbs with technological apparatuses, when do we stop being human and start being machines? This is a metaphysical question regarding the fundamental ontological nature of human being as an discrete experience.
A lot of folks are reluctant to watch this documentary because they feel like Kurzweil is “just wrong.” I think that’s the wrong way of going about it. It doesn’t really matter if he’s right or wrong. What matters is that such visions are even being expostulated. That a man has written books claiming that technology will save us; that others have written books saying that technology will destroy us: these developments are culturally significant.
They point toward our vexed relationship with technology, the degree to which we both love it. And hate it.
A film biography of futurist Ray Kurzweil
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”
Original Language en
Runtime 1 hr 23 min (83 min) (USA)
Budget 0
Revenue 0
Status Released
Rated Not Rated
Genre Documentary
Director Robert Barry Ptolemy
Writer N/A
Actors Tom Abate, Hugo De Garis, Peter Diamandis
Country United States
Awards 1 nomination
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Sound Mix N/A
Aspect Ratio 1.85 : 1
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Printed Film Format N/A