TRIBECA QUICK TAKE: TRANSCENDENT MAN
While its not reinventing the wheel aesthetically, Barry Ptolemy’s Transcendent Man, an engrossing feature length profile of inventor and futurist Ray Kurtzweil, is a thought provoking look at the man’s lifework and almost unimaginable predictions. Kurtzweil, who a few years ago wrote the controversial speculation on the emerging fusion of biology and technology The Singularity is Near,, has long suggested in other books like 1999′s The Age of Spiritual Machines and 1987′s The Age of Intelligent Machines that in the future humanity as we have previously conceived of it will be permanently augmented by technological intervention, both caused by man and by artificial intelligence which will surpass our own intellectual capabilities. Merging with us, in Kurtzweil’s mind, will thus end the separation between the two previously mentioned disciplines.
Ptolemy, a first time filmmaker, sticks to a well worn doc gameplan. He mixes found footage and stylized verite with Errol Morrisesque interviews of the subject, topping it off with animated and CGI illustrations to visualize some of Kurtzweil’s most bracing ideas. Ptolemy’s counterpoint to these are smaller profiles of individuals who dispute Kurtzweil’s wildest claims and his largely utopian vision of the implications of artificial intelligence. Hugo De Garis, an inventor who is currently at work on an “artificial brain” being paid for by the Chinese Government, suggests that by the late 21st century the world will be torn asunder in a war between those who will accept artificial intelligence surpassing man’s and those who will do anything to stop it. Wired Magazine Co-founder Kevin Kelly and a host of others offering critiques of Kurtzweil’s sincere belief that he and most other humans will eventually live forever.
Obsessed with escaping death following his father’s demise from heart disease in his late fifties, the sixty year old baby boomer from Queens, who was widely recognized as a genius since his teens, has never faced a challenge he didn’t think he could master with his intellect. The film glides easily into the world he inhabits and offers a fascinating portrait of a dynamic and deeply afraid man, a holder of 24 US patents who, when not meeting with Colin Powell about how to stop biologically engineered viruses of the future, has time to invent reading machines for the blind (approved by Stevie Wonder) and who confides to William Shatner at a party that he takes 120 supplements a day. And people call me a vitamin freak.
