At the movies: future of technology documentary screening in Santa Monica

February 5, 2011

The scenario of super-intelligent robots as a part of our everyday life (and even ourselves) is not just a thing for the sci-fi books and movies according to the theory of singularity, the subject of a documentary called the Transcendent Man, which explores the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil.

Inventor of the first CCD flat bed scanner and the author behind the best-selling book, The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil has been compared to Nostradamus for his predictions of technology and the future — or dismissed as a lunatic. But the documentary illustrates that his predictions aren’t so far fetched. The theory of singularity doesn’t merely blur the line between human and machine, it forecasts the complete unity of the two.

By the 2030s, Kurzweil predicts we will have the technology to synthetically recreate all functions of the human brain. He furthers that eventually, this synthetic intelligence will advance at such a rapid rate that humans will have no choice but to merge with the same technology we have created. These merged, super-intelligent beings will be able to store and “backup” their consciousness (much like a computer today) and in doing so will become immortal entities, leaving death as a distant memory.