hyped garbage

How sad is this?

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

The future isn't talked about enough. We need to be able to predict where we are going as a society so we can be ready for what's going to happen. Ray Kurzweil is a futurist. He spends all day every day thinking about the future. He is a genius inventor and he even invents things that we don't have the technology to make yet. If there's someone who can predict the future of technology, this is the guy. If you read his book, The Singularity is Near, you know exactly what "The Singularity" is and what is means for the human race. To put it in one sentence, it's the point where technology advances so exponentially fast that we can't even comprehend the growth. Ray explains that technology is advancing exponentially, and in a few decades, it will be advancing too fast for our own brains to comprehend. In order to keep up, we must merge with machines to enhance our intelligence and become immortal, super-intelligent, god-like cyborgs that will mostly spend time in full submersion virtual reality doing whatever our imaginations can imagine. The book explains everything that this documentary doesn't and if this doc interests you then I highly recommend the read. It's really hopeful stuff and people need to realize how important technology is going to become. We use our cellphones so much that they become a part of us. Sooner or later they will be a part of us. This is a very good summary to a very interesting subject. If you're very religious you may not like it due to its atheist theme, but people with an open mind will be very intrigued.

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.

(www.plasticpals.com) Regardless of what you think of Ray Kurzweil, his predictions, or the singularity, they certainly make interesting subjects for a documentary. If you're new to the singularity, Transcendent Man gives a primer on what exponential growth in information technology may bring for genetics, nano technology, and robotics – all within the coming decades. His predictions extrapolate on existing technologies and are vague enough that there's enough wiggle room to be convincing, at least superficially. Fascinating though these ideas may be, I felt the intimate portrait of Kurzweil himself is the real heart of the film. When you see how many supplements he takes on a daily basis, to say he's an eccentric would be putting things lightly.Kurzweil believes, for example, that he will one day bring his father back from the dead. Not a biblical resurrection, mind you, but one based on data. He believes that he will be able to feed information about his father's life (boxes and boxes collecting his father's personal letters, music compositions, and other documents), including his own memories of him, into a computer simulation that will magically recreate his persona. Most of the time, I felt like I had a good grasp on the concepts discussed in the film, but I take issue with this. Assuming that such a simulation were possible, it could never be accurate because it would be based entirely on Kurzweil's perception of his father and scraps of information that can't possibly reflect the depth of one's soul (for lack of a better term). Others' perceptions are usually quite different from how we see ourselves, and people usually have a hard time understanding themselves in the first place! I can play along and say that maybe, someday, we'll be able to "back up" our brains onto computers, but without those brains, a simulation could never be perfect. I'm sure such a simulation would have beneficial psychological effects for the bereaved, but that's beside the point. It seems to me that if Kurzweil is willing to delude himself into believing a simulation of his father is as good as the real thing (or at least good enough to claim it will cure his father's death), then he is probably deluding himself about a lot of other things, too. The film does give us some perspective through dissenting opinions, but everyone interviewed (with the exception of a religious radio talk show host) agrees to some extent with what Kurzweil has predicted.It's fun to think that an artificial intelligence may bootstrap itself, and our own limited brains, into higher and higher levels of consciousness. Yet I can't help but be reminded of that old adage, "anything that seems too good to be true probably is". Scientists with expertise outside of Kurzweil's domain (such as biology) argue that he oversimplifies things. Others say he is simply overly optimistic. I don't think either accusation is unjust. The film paints Kurzweil as traumatized by the loss of his father, and terrified of his own mortality. It isn't surprising that some accuse him of pseudo-scientific religious quackery of the sort Kurzweil dismisses as comfort for the dying.

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.