Transcendent Man (2010)

This quasi-autobiographic manifesto by "futurist" Ray Kurzweil expounds upon his ideas about the imminent "singularity" in which artifical intelligence will overtake humanity and profoundly change our way of life. It's a fascinating idea, but I find Kurzweil's efforts to justify his optimism quite unconvincing: simply extrapolating based on the exponential growth that has occurred thus far seems rather naive. Bacteria multiplying in a petri dish also enjoy exponential growth -- right up to the point at which they exhaust their available resources. Likewise stock prices in the run-up to a market crash.

There's something a little unseemly in his desire to resurrect his dead father (via an A.I. simulation), and also prolong his own life indefinitely. He claims that people who accept the "tragedy" of their own mortality are "kidding themselves". Personally, I don't agree with this view: I enjoy being alive but I also recognize that, in the cosmic scheme of things, my own existence is not especially important and no more worth preserving than those of the billions of other human beings that live or have lived. To think otherwise, even if you are a particularly smart guy like Kurweil, seems to be lacking humility.

Kurzweil's fetish for perpetuating his existence leads him to ingest, daily, a cocktail of 200 or so "life-preserving" pills (indeed, through the film he always seems to be slipping one into his mouth). He can afford this -- he's got the money, he can do what he wants -- but I can't help wonder if the money and effort would be better spent on simple tried-and-true measures (clean drinking water, immunisation against diseases that afflict developing countries) that would save lives of those less fortunate than himself. It would be a strange set of scales that could confidently weigh all those lives more lightly than his own.

Bottom line: raises some interesting, thought-provoking ideas; but over-reaches in its predictions.