A lengthy review in Scientific America looks at the documentary, Transcendent Man, on the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil.
Cleverly edited and entertaining, Transcendent Man is unfortunately also too starstruck and reverent toward Kurzweil for its own good. It wants in part to be a movie about ideas, but frustratingly, it refuses to truly challenge any of those it raises—whether supportive or critical of him. Given that the film’s theme is the salvation or destruction of the human race, its lack of commitment to a perspective other than innocent wonder is unsatisfying.
Kurzweil has always been propelled by powerful ideas, as the film makes clear. A recipient of the National Medal of Technology, he has been a pioneer in optical character recognition, speech recognition and other technologies, starting with his invention of a computer that composed music when he was just 17. His study of innovation in the 1980s convinced him that what he calls a "law of accelerating returns" governs progress, meaning that technology advances at an exponentially increasing rate. …
The film is evenhanded enough to give some of Kurzweil’s more respectful critics a chance to air their disagreements with him, but it never shows anyone arguing directly with Kurzweil, so viewers are left with no sense of who might have the better-reasoned perspective. The film seems dedicated to this hands-off approach. [Director Barry] Ptolemy followed Kurzweil for two years and was clearly immersed in those ideas; surely he must have his own opinion of them. But if so, he keeps it under wraps.
As a result, the film fails to show that resistance to his ideas is often based on more than uninformed incredulity and that the science on which Kurzweil stands is sometimes rather flimsy. For example, Kurzweil states that biological evolution shows the same exponential rate of change that technology does—a claim that many biologists consider nonsensical. He confidently foresees uploading human consciousness and memories into computers but doesn’t engage with extensive objections to that possibility raised by neuroscientists. He talks about "reprogramming [his] biochemistry" with pills and supplements but doesn’t note that the science behind that regimen sometimes relies on a selective reading of the research literature. He speaks assuredly about genes as "software" but glosses over the problems with that metaphor.
I was a big fan of The Age of Spiritual Machines, but disappointed to find I couldn’t make it through The Singularity is Near [yawn]. I will be renting the documentary when it’s available. Above, the Transcendent Man trailer. The film’s website.