The cinematic singularitarian: Ray Kurzweil is immortal - on film

Scene: A movie theater on the west side of Manhattan during the Tribeca Film Festival. The audience teems with hip New York film students eager to see the world premiere of a new documentary. They’re joined, unexpectedly, by computer scientists, geneticists, and futurists from Denmark, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong. The lights dim. After a brief opening, inventor Ray Kurzweil appears on the screen, looks squarely into the camera, and says, “I’m never going to die.”

So began the world premiere of Barry Ptolemy’s Transcendent Man, a feature-length film that chronicles Kurzweil’s ideas on the future of technological innovation. Chief among his forecasts: In the next 30 years, humans will use genomics, nanotechnology, and even artificial intelligence to escape death.

“Soon, we’ll be able to reprogram the underlying process of biology,” Kurzweil told THE FUTURIST magazine after the screening. “We’ve mapped the genome; we’re making exponential progress in reverse engineering it. We can design new genetic interventions and test them with computer modeling. These breakthroughs are at an early stage, but because medicine is an information technology, it will progress at an exponential rate. If I were to say to you, “One day, you’ll have nanobots in your bloodstream and they’ll be keeping you healthy from the inside,” you might respond that that sounds fairly futuristic. But we’re already doing experiments in animals with first-generation nanodevices that are blood-cell sized.” For instance, a team at Sandia National Laboratories is working to implant individual red blood cells with DNA, proteins, or drugs via a machine with molecularly small parts.

With the 2005 publication of his fifth book, The Singularity Is Near, Ray Kurzweil became an international phenomenon. His ideas have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, FOX News, CNN, and hundreds of newspapers, magazines, and networks. Transcendent Man follows Kurzweil as he discusses his ideas with various glitterati, including Star Trek star William Shatner, musician Stevie Wonder, and former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Technology watchers like Wired founding executive editor Kevin Kelly also make appearances in the film to discuss — and dispute — Kurzweil’s ideas.

“We’ll have immortality one day, perhaps in 300 years,” says Kelly.

“The reason many people, including some futurists, have a myopic view of the future is that they think linear; the actual nature of information technology is exponential. The linear perspective is intuitive; the exponential perspective is historically accurate. The computation in a cell phone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful than the computer I used as a student. That’s a billion-fold increase in price performance,” Kurzweil told THE FUTURIST.

“Part of being a futurist is looking back,” director Ptolemy remarked. “He’s looking back at trends that have happened since the dawn of the universe. It fascinates me. I don’t know why, exactly. Human potential, what we can do, is fascinating to me.”

Kurzweil’s relationship with his late father was key to Ptolemy’s vision. At one point during the filming, Kurzweil confessed that he hoped to use artificial intelligence to bring his father back in the form of an interactive avatar. Even after hearing Kurzweil speak hundreds of times, the announcement was a surprise to Ptolemy. “That was the first time he’d expressed that idea on film,” he said.

“He’s really still the only person who was close to me who has died, but that was enough to really make me aware of just what a tragedy death is,” said Kurzweil.

Transcendent Man is Ptolemy’s first film, which he co-produced with his wife, Felicia, after Kurzweil’s ideas moved him. “I read The Singularity Is Near and when I was done with the first chapter, it was a movie,” he said.

About the author

Patrick Tucker is the senior editor of THE FUTURIST magazine and director of communications for the World Future Society.

Kurzweil’s latest book, with co-author Terry Grossman, is Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever (Rodale Books, 2009).