Ben Goertzel got to see the opening of The Transcendent Man, the biographical Kurzweil film. He reviewed it yesterday at h+ magazine. I read that he was given heavy applause by the audience himself, and appears in the movie for 4-5 minutes, where he talks about becoming gods instead of just making them. Pretty forceful — I like it. In lieu of becoming a god, I’d rather become an icicle (cryonically suspended) than worm food.

Here’s how the movie opens:

Pulling no punches, the movie begins with the notion of the Singularity – a moment in time at which scientific and technological progress become so rapid as to defy human comprehension, with revolutionary developments occurring nearly instantaneously, and legacy human minds left in the dust by AI and cyborg intelligences.

Regular AF readers will know by now that I object to the framing of the Singularity meme in this way. To me, the Singularity is about greater-than-human intelligence, the miracle of “smartness” (seeing obvious solutions where others see nothing), and the myriad benefits it would offer that go beyond just technological development, such as the elimination of cognitive biases and the creation of a morality that is consistent under reflection. I also think “left in the dust” is a bit harsh, because in a positive Singularity no one would need to feel “left in the dust” at all, even if in objective terms it actually occurs. Remember, in my view, the post-Singularity world will look more like Renaissance Europe than Futurama.

However, in favor of the “left in the dust” argument, it seems likely that the minds to most quickly augment and ascend will be those with few compunctions about coherent human-style self-identity and penchants for smelling the roses. Anthropocentric transhumanists like to imagine themselves and their friends being the smartest minds around at any given time, but human-style continuity of identity is incompatible with very steep ascension speeds. The smartest mind will always be an alien one, and we’d damn well better hope (or better yet, act now) that said mind takes human-friendly actions despite its alienness in other areas.

In the sigh-producing department, supposedly there is a part with Hugo de Garis in the film where he says:

“Would I build these machines, if I knew there was a strong chance they would destroy humanity?” asks evolvable hardware researcher Hugo de Garis.

His answer? “Yeah.”

Why are there are some transhumanists who consider utterances like these to be socially or morally acceptable? Because de Garis has a fun personality otherwise? Is joking around about destroying humanity with AI funny/cool?

Skipping ahead to the conclusion:

I don’t know what the less Singularity-savvy members of the audience thought about that interchange — but I do know that, as the evening rolled on, none of them looked bored. And that, really, is the strength of Transcendent Man. It doesn’t go into much depth about the science and engineering that is bringing the Singularity to pass – for that the viewer will have to go buy Ray’s book The Singularity Is Near, Damien Broderick’s The Spike, or one of the numerous other books on future technology. But the film does get across the essential flavor of the radical future vision that Kurzweil, Vinge and other present-day Singularity sages are promulgating, and without ever getting preachy or long-winded. With a bit of luck, the movie may well prove an important step in the process of imprinting some critical ideas on the mass mind of our species… at this very special juncture of our history where we find ourselves, as man stands on the verge of his own… well… transcension.

Happy that the film got a positive review!