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Transcendent Man: Kurzweil outlines the future in his first documentary film

By the time Al Gore released his Oscar winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth“, few skeptics were left that the world’s climate was changing. Now, Ray Kurzweil -- one of the most prolific inventors of the 20th century -  is releasing an eminent documentary of his own.

Many futurists, including a growing band of leading scientists, predict that by 2045 we will have multiplied the intelligence of the human-machine civilization a billion-fold and reached the Singularity.

Whereas personal computers, videogames and cellphones were the emerging technologies of the 1970’s and 1980’s, today’s include mind-reading headsets, organic computing and nanotechnology.

When I was a student at MIT, we all shared a computer and it took up a whole building. The computer in your cellphone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand more powerful… What fits in your pocket, 25 years from now will fit in a blood cell.

Here’s a trailer for Ray Kurzweil’s upcoming film Transcendent Man:

And a video of a recent interview:

Part 2

Lists graphed from leading sources account for events only so far back as our civilization has the power to rationalize. In order to appreciate the grander scheme of things, reason must be flexed. If there is an asymptotic relationship between the end and the extreme beginning of the greater trend, this may infer two separate possibilities: our relative destruction of and departure from this planet, after which a seed sample of genetic material will prevail to begin a new era of biological evolution; or an ascension of another kind in which our solar system has its reset button pressed.

Singularity University

This year, Kurzweil launched the Singularity University. The idea? To assemble graduate students and those already working in various scientific fields, with the belief that advances come more easily when experts in different fields work together.

This multidisciplinary approach is designed to create the futurist of the future. A graduate student in nanotechnology, for instance, would receive expert briefings in future studies and forecasting up to 10 disciplines including biotechnology, finance and entrepreneurship networks and computer systems.

With Google and NASA as major backers, we should expect to hear more from the Transcendent Man.

More: The Rise of Transhumanists

Riding on the slipstream of the Singularity is another, more shocking term: transhumanism. Transhumanists support the use of science and technology to improve human physical and mental capabilities. Again, this movement is spearheaded by leading scientists from Oxford University and beyond.

In an interview with New Scientist, Kurzweil responds to our natural concerns about this trend:

People say they don’t want to change themselves, but then when they get a disease they will do whatever they can to overcome it. We’re not going to get from here to the world of 2030 or 2040 in one grand leap; we’re going to get there through thousands of little steps. Put these steps together and ultimately the world is a different place.

Related Articles

• Singularity U.: No Frats, Just Breakthroughs (businessweek.com)
• Hub Exclusive -- Interview With Transcendent Man Producer Barry Ptolemy (video) (singularityhub.com)
• ‘The future is going to be very exciting’ (guardian.co.uk)
• New school unites Google, Nasa -- and a plan for immortality (guardian.co.uk)