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The Singularity is Intensely Near
by Doniphan Blair
Ray Kurzweil, co-director, producer, writer and star of 'The Singularity is Near,' with a visual simulation of a computing process in the background. photo courtesy: Terasem Motion InfocultureThe biggest new doc of the year—certainly in the scope of its ideas— is "The Singularity is Near." Largely produced in San Francisco by Ehren Koepf and Toshi Hoo, who also directed its interviews, it was executive produced by Martine Rothblatt and directed by Anthony Waller, an Englishman known for "An American Werewolf in Paris" (1997), perhaps because "The Singularity" could turn out to be a horror film.
Either way, it draws on a wide variety of genres in order to deliver some unbelievable, gargantuan—borderline insane, even—reports on recent scientific and philosophical developments in a digestible, as well as psychedelic, 79 minutes.
On top of this, "The Singularity" is co-directed and produced by Ray Kurzweil, the author of the 2005 book by the same name. He also wrote "The Age of Spiritual Machines" (1999), an earlier incarnation of the thesis, and "Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever" (2009, note the title's last word). A prolific inventor (optical character recognition, text-to-speech technology, music synthesizers) and entrepreneur, Kurzweil also stars in "The Singularity," which makes it an autobiographical documentary.
In one fictional re-enactment, the eight-year-old Ray is working in his basement on a puppet of a beautiful woman. "I will invent her one day," he says. Enter Ramona, played rather humanly in the fictional sequences by Pauley Perrette, both drop dead gorgeous and a million times "smarter" then any human.
"Biology is very intricate and impressive but ultimately suboptimal to what technology will build," Kurzweil tells us in an interview sequence. Although Kurzweil lives in a comparatively low-tech setting, in Newton, Massachusetts, he runs Kurzweil Technologies, Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, Kurzweil Music Systems, and FatKat, which applies his pattern-recognition systems to markets and has made him rich. Nevertheless, he commutes west often and his ideas on gender are quite San Franciscan.
Ramona, an AI played by Pauley Perrette, tries on Marilyn Monroe in her quest for a virtual identity, much to the amusement of her pixie friend Samantha. photo courtesy: Terasem Motion Infoculture“Women are more interesting than men,” Kurzweil told Gary Woolf ("Wired," 2008). “And if it’s more interesting to be with a woman, it is probably more interesting to BE a woman [my emphasis].” Indeed, "[Kurzweil] hopes one day to bring Ramona to life, and to have genuine human experiences, both with her AND AS her," Woolf continues. "'I don’t necessarily only want to be Ramona,'" says Kurzweil, who has been married for 32 years and has two children. "'It’s not necessarily about gender confusion, it’s just about freedom to express yourself.'”
The narrative story follows Ramona, whom/which Kurzweil introduced at the 2001 TED Conference, in a technology, entertainment and design (get it? TED) tour de force, by singing Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” through her. The performance supposedly inspired "S1m0ne," the 2002 Al Pacino outing, where he turns himself into a female bot. A rocked up version of "White Rabbit" also plays over the credits of "The Singularity," a bit of an anachronism considering classical rock is hardly a futuristic sound—but that's like critiquing the colors of the Titanic's deck chairs.
Forget the Mayan 2012 predictions, 9/11 conspiracy theories or your Arizona cousins' alien abduction reports and listen to Kurzweil: "I've become aware of a looming event in the first half of the 21st century... This impending Singularity... is increasingly transforming every institution and aspect of human life, from sexuality to spirituality," he wrote in the 2005 book which became a NY Times bestseller. The paper's reviewers called it, "startling in scope and bravado," although "shocking in universe-wide and utterly fantastic predictions" is more like it.
The word "singularity" was coined in 1965 by I. J. Good to suggest a total game changer, like the edge of a black hole. In this case, it is when our exponential growth makes "technology appear to be expanding at an infinite speed," which has evidently not already happened with radio, penicillin and lunar landings. Onrushing developments in computing, AI, health care, biotech, "tech-bio" and other technologies, notably nanobots—microscopic machines which will become something akin to magic gris-gris dust and be employable for good or evil—will produce a singular moment in history, somewhat like Francis Fukuyama's "End of History" but without Fukuyama's false ending.
The true end of regular human history will occur around 2030, according to Kurzweil and other futurists, when we finally invent inventing machines. They will explode our culture in an overwhelming tsunami of technology which will make all previous tools—stone scrapers, fire, language, writing, gun powder, the printing press, automobiles, planes, television, nuclear bombs, space rockets, the World Wide Web, and mechanical limbs—seem like child's toys.
For example: "By the 2030s or 2040s, we’ll have nanobot swarms which can assemble themselves to look like human bodies," Kurzweil told "Vice Magazine" in 2009. "They’ll also be able to change [those] bodies quickly, kind of like the Transformer concept."
"Techniology is always a double edged sword," admits Kurzweil in the movie. "Biotechnology presents us with intertwined promise and peril. But the same tools that could enable a bioterrorist to reprogram a biological virus to be more communicable or stealthy [would enable us to stop them]... Some people say, because of this danger, we shouldn't pursue advanced technologies. But relinquishment of these advanced technologies is a bad idea. It would just drive these things underground [and prevent] a responsible scientist from creating defenses. Creating defense is the right approach and the good news is: We have the knowledge. A good model of how to do it is how we [currently] deal with software viruses."
Meetings, as they will happen in the future, virtually, at the location of your choice. photo courtesy: Terasem Motion Infoculture"By my calculations," Kurzweil continues in "Vice," "a computer will pass the Turing Test [which determines if a computer has reached human levels] by 2029... True AIs will then have a presence in virtual reality, and avatars in virtual environments won’t be cartoonish, like they are today. By the 2030s, virtual reality is going to be as real and as compelling as 'real' reality, and we’ll be [entering virtual reality] from within the nervous system. Nanobots in your brain—which will get to your brain through the bloodstream, noninvasively and without surgery—will shut down the signals coming from your real senses and replace them with [information] that your brain will be receiving from the virtual environment."
"Then it would feel like you’re really in that environment... You’ll have a virtual body, but your virtual body doesn’t have to be the same as your real body. A couple could become each other... and experience a relationship from the other’s perspective." This is already largely true for 'Second Life' aficionados who live out alternative lives on line and are experimenting wildly with avatar identities (see CS article "The Women of SF IndieFest").
But Kurweil takes it a few steps further: "The AIs will have bodies, too, so you could be walking around 'Second Life' circa 2030 and run into a person and it may be a bot." Indeed, that's what happens to AI Ramona in 'The Singularity,' although the folks she meets dis her for being a bot. It is a pretty fascinating scene, although it lacks the full life-like-ness Kurzweil imagines.
Alas, "The Singularity" doesn't quite have the singular art directed look of that other dystopian masterpiece that recently rocked our world: "An Inconvenient Truth," which garnered Al Gore an Oscar as well as a Nobel in 2007. According to Tony Hudson, who did most of the effects ("World Magazine," 2009): "I was the on-set visual effects supervisor, the effects art director, and supervised the completion of over 400 greenscreens, set extension and matte painting shots in eight months... When I say 'supervised,' I actually mean that I did most of the work myself. There was no budget to hire anyone... There was so much to do that, early on, I gave up attempting to do 'film-quality' effects. Instead, I tried to do something a bit more stylized."
"I worked on the storyline portion," continues Hudson, "Over time [Ramona] develops from something similar to a 'Second Life' avatar to a full-fledged, autonomous human. My work was mostly in the realm of greenscreen plates with digital sets, but I also developed the look transforming Pauley [Perrette, the actress] into Ramona’s simple avatar... One of the biggest issues on the film was the FX editorial work. The production used Final Cut Pro [a pro-sumer editing program], but had no budget for FX editorial, so I had to do all of that myself, too."
It's odd that Kurzweil would skimp on his Paul Revere call to action, considering that in 20 years, it should make the current computer and biotech business look like small beer. Moreover, in the end, the film is estimated to have cost between two-and-a-half and five million, very high for a doc.
"Unfortunately, Final Cut does not lend itself to manufacturing shots for effects production... So I had to break the sequence[s] down and export to separate shot directories, all by hand... There was a great deal of rotoscoping [tracing of analog into digital]... [Fortunately,] I used Mocha for my roto work, and it works fantastically."
Ramona is busted by Homeland Security for trying to access information above her 'Turing' level, in her attempt to save the planet from a 'grey goo' nanobot attack. photo courtesy: Terasem Motion InfocultureHudson pulls it off handsomely, however, and there's some pretty moving animation and mixed media moments. "In addition to Ramona," he adds, "there was also Ramona’s digital helper, Samantha, who is represented as a sort of pixie type. For close ups, there was an actress, but [for] the wide shots [we] used a digital model I created."
One nicely rendered scene has Ramona hanging out on a virtual beach with life coach Tony Robbins, played by himself, who teaches her about "love," which concerns being able to give your life for someone, according to Robbins.
The narrative finally goes thriller-horror when Ramona is forced to tackle the problem of "grey goo." Evil nanobots are overreproducing and threatening to consume the planet. Forbidden access to top-secret nanobot code by virtue of being an AI, Ramona is busted by Homeland Security. "We don't tolerate anyone—especially virtual bots—hacking into the 'mich' firewall," says an enforcer nerd with a Russian accent. "I am afraid the protocol in this situation is immediate shut down."
Lawyer to the stars, Alan Dershowitz defends AI Ramona's human rights but first he has to prove she is human by subjecting her to a Turing test. photo courtesy: Terasem Motion Infoculture"But I'm a humanoid," Ramona protests, loudly and logically enough to win her day in court, where defense council Alan Dershowitz, played by himself, convinces the judge to administer a Turing Test.
Shortly before, however, Dershowitz notes in an interview: "Look, in virtual reality now, you can have sex with any prominent actress of your choice. You will feel exactly the same, theoretically, as you would if you were really having sex with her. Now does the real actress have the right to prevent her virtual image from satisfying your lust? Will it be adultery if you have virtual sex?"
Aside from doubting that virtual sex "will feel exactly the same" (it will always be a form of masturbation, I think), that exchange left me wondering how a real Ramona, a fully humanoid AI, with Robbins-inspired feelings, would feel about a sympathy screw for an old codger, even if he got her womanness as well as humanness Turing certified.
This is no prurient cud chewing. Biological law dictates you can't become a fully alive entity, i.e. a species, until you are able to reproduce—Darwin's second law, that of Sexual Selection. Ironically, Sexual Selection also controls communication, the complexity of which is driven not so much by survival but the need to find a suitable mate and continue the life process. Although communication is the essence of the eponymous information age, its dynamics can be traced right back to DNA, which is biological communication, as Kurzweil notes.
AI Ramona cracks a tear after Tony Robbins teaches her about love. Then a guard (upper left) announces the end of visiting hours—she is being 'held' for violating her 'Turing' level. photo courtesy: Terasem Motion InfocultureThis postulates problems well beyond Turing: Will Ramona manage her own reproduction? Does that mean she is a creator and must have a soul? Is it an actual ghost in the machine, and are all of our "souls" just ghosts naturally emerging in biological machines (which would explain a lot of ESP stuff), or will humans and machines will always be different?
"The notion that there is going to be this war... between machines and humans... is all nonsense," announces Richard Clarke, who has faced down some hard idea wars as the "Terror Czar." "What will happen is the distinction between silicon-based life and carbon-based life between mankind—humankind—and machine will gradually and subtly and, I think, peacefully become blurred."
Nevertheless, AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky cautions cryptically: "We should put a lot of effort into making sure that the very first AI that crosses that critical barrier, that threshold of intelligence, or whatever it is, is a friendly one."
Meanwhile, Kurzweil claims, in the "Vice" article, that we will eventually eliminate "the heart, lungs, red and white blood cells, platelets, pancreas, thyroid and all the hormone-producing organs, kidneys, bladder, liver, lower esophagus, stomach, small intestines, large intestines, and bowel. What we have left at this point is the skeleton, skin, sex organs, sensory organs, mouth and upper esophagus, and brain.”
Unfortunately, reproduction—that beautiful biological invention, which produced all existing species, the lusciousness of human sex and much of our language—turns ugly when it comes to nanobots. "Nano technology eventually will be self replicating... an entity that can go into a natural environment, gather materials to create a copy of itself and self replicate, just as the biological materials do."
Bill Joy of Sun Systems, who wrote the famous cautionary article in 'Wired,' looking a bit frazzled and mad scientist-like, despite his voice of reason. photo courtesy: Terasem Motion InfocultureTo its credit, "The Singularity" includes some opposing opinions. One is Bill Joy of Sun Systems, who Kurzweil and clan undoubtedly call "Kill" Joy for his deeply dystopian fears. Joy's 2002 "Wired" article, "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," led to him to appear from Charley Rose to The MacNeil-Lehrer Report albeit only for a week.
According to Joy: "A chain reaction at the biological level involves great concern... Let's find a way to get most of what we want while not giving crazy, powerful stuff to insane or stupid or careless people. We can do that but we have to try. If we don't care enough to try, something will happen."
In his article, Joy also elaborated on "white plague," an out-of-control virus which could kill all life, and the possibility that the Internet could become self-aware. Another ghost in the machine concept, this suggests that the infinitely expanding computational power of the Web could not help but eventually realize its own existence, that the earth is its "body" and that it no longer needs humans. These two horror movie endings of the human species are almost unmentioned in "The Singularity."
Still, Kurzweil is said to be a good listener and does tolerate opposing views. He addresses them in a long section in the back of the book "The Singularity" and in the movie's few interviews with contrarians like Joy. As for out-of-control nanobots which could "eat the earth" in 90 minutes, don't worry, Kurzweil has done the math. Just as we have antibodies, we should seed the planet with anti-body-like nanobots, which could attack killer nanobots.
Or we could have an AI hack their code, as Ramona does in "The Singularity." Indeed, if we have better and more human AI, we would certainly be able to get the jump on those stupid little machines and their mechanistic software, just as Ramono does, stopping their B movie 90 minute race to eat the earth by minute 84. (Since reproducing nanobots would increase algebraically, the last few minutes are critical.)
Alas, this is only one of the many mind-boggling issues broached if not fully birthed in "The Singularity," in which the future appears to be bearing down on us like a Mac truck with a supremely confident Kurzweil, and some likeminded, at the wheel. Kurzweil also co-founded The Singularity University in Mountain View, California, in 2008, with NASA and Google, which he now directs. It's an interdisciplinary graduate program designed to educate a new generation of leaders to use technology to defeat humanity's big problems, both classical and of our own modern making.
Much of Kurzweil's interviews have visionary backgrounds, portraying biological operations, computing and the universe, but they can't quite capture the scope of his ideas—what could? photo courtesy: Terasem Motion InfocultureAs per his long identification with Ramona, Kurzweil has a more human view of the machines then most of us, seeing them simply as a tool-like extensions of our biology. But this parallel is stretched to an extreme in his predictions that machines will eventually allow us to live forever, first using biotech, then nanobots to heal and rebuild our bodies from the inside and ultimately to download our consciousness onto a "non-biological substrate."
"You could put a nonobot at almost ever synapse in your brain [100 trillion] and, essentially, back up your brain," he claims, although that "you" will undoubtedly include only the extremely wealthy.
Since this will happen around 2030, Kurzweil, who is 62 and comes from a family with a history of heart disease, is in a race against time. He has become a health food and vitamin fanatic, as well as a practicioner of Dracula-Keith-Richards blood replacement therapies, in an effort to beat the irony of expiring just a few years before the immortality that he predicted and is helping to invent goes on line.
"Aging is, and indeed has always been known to be, a side effect of life," notes Aubrey de Grey, the PhD who developed the free-radical theory of youth preservation. All you have to do is reach what de Grey calls "longevity escape velocity:" i.e. add more than a year of life expectancy every passing year.
"Far be it for me to mess with the oldest dream of human beings," kvetches Bill McKibben, the environmentalist and author, who would prefer to preserve nature much as it is, "Except to point out that every time anyone in the world of literature has sat down to think about it, they have come up with pretty profound cautions." See Genesis: "Lest they eat from the tree of life and become like gods."
As if immortality wasn't extreme enough, Kurzweil claims we will eventually impregnate hard objects with computational ability and literally take over the entire universe, currently estimated at eighty billion galaxies, simply by using self-reproducing but GOOD nanobots.
"Nanobots called 'foglets,' that can manipulate image and sound waves, will bring the morphing qualities of virtual reality to the real world," Kurzweil writes near the beginning (page 29) of "The Singularity." "Ultimately, the entire universe will be saturated with our intelligence." Breathtakingly ambitious and god-like, this thesis re-enacts the god metaphor but in reverse and mechanically.
"We have to set up 'computronium,'" says Kurweil, refering to the "programmable matter" hypothesized by MIT's Norman Margolus and Tommaso Toffoli and popularized by Douglas Adams in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (1979). "[B]ut we have to get around the speed of light, which we do by sending nanobots through worm holes. It will expand our intelligence throughout the universe. This is our ultimate destiny," if, of course, you ignore the Icarus Myth about flying too close to the sun.
For all its short falls, in terms of aesthetic integration, opposing idea articulation and sheer hubris, "The Singularity is Near" is one hecka of a stimulating, exciting, frightening, fascinating and critically important—in terms of issues raised—film. Although catching it at the SF IndieFest in February, along side the pierced and tattoo-ed futurists of the Mission would be ideal, see it anyway you can—theater, DVD, nano-screen or virtual reality in your brain, when that becomes available around 2029.
This is one freaky film full of fantastic ideas that will undoubtedly resonate through the memo-sphere for years to come—perhaps even infinity, if it becomes Genesis 2.0, as it implies. Regardless, it will certainly influence today's eleven-year-olds who will be turning thirty when "The Singularity" presumably comes to pass.
Posted on Jan 21, 2011 - 10:07 AM
by Doniphan Blair
Ray Kurzweil, co-director, producer, writer and star of 'The Singularity is Near,' with a visual simulation of a computing process in the background. photo courtesy: Terasem Motion InfocultureEither way, it draws on a wide variety of genres in order to deliver some unbelievable, gargantuan—borderline insane, even—reports on recent scientific and philosophical developments in a digestible, as well as psychedelic, 79 minutes.
On top of this, "The Singularity" is co-directed and produced by Ray Kurzweil, the author of the 2005 book by the same name. He also wrote "The Age of Spiritual Machines" (1999), an earlier incarnation of the thesis, and "Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever" (2009, note the title's last word). A prolific inventor (optical character recognition, text-to-speech technology, music synthesizers) and entrepreneur, Kurzweil also stars in "The Singularity," which makes it an autobiographical documentary.
In one fictional re-enactment, the eight-year-old Ray is working in his basement on a puppet of a beautiful woman. "I will invent her one day," he says. Enter Ramona, played rather humanly in the fictional sequences by Pauley Perrette, both drop dead gorgeous and a million times "smarter" then any human.
"Biology is very intricate and impressive but ultimately suboptimal to what technology will build," Kurzweil tells us in an interview sequence. Although Kurzweil lives in a comparatively low-tech setting, in Newton, Massachusetts, he runs Kurzweil Technologies, Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, Kurzweil Music Systems, and FatKat, which applies his pattern-recognition systems to markets and has made him rich. Nevertheless, he commutes west often and his ideas on gender are quite San Franciscan.
Ramona, an AI played by Pauley Perrette, tries on Marilyn Monroe in her quest for a virtual identity, much to the amusement of her pixie friend Samantha. photo courtesy: Terasem Motion InfocultureThe narrative story follows Ramona, whom/which Kurzweil introduced at the 2001 TED Conference, in a technology, entertainment and design (get it? TED) tour de force, by singing Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” through her. The performance supposedly inspired "S1m0ne," the 2002 Al Pacino outing, where he turns himself into a female bot. A rocked up version of "White Rabbit" also plays over the credits of "The Singularity," a bit of an anachronism considering classical rock is hardly a futuristic sound—but that's like critiquing the colors of the Titanic's deck chairs.
Forget the Mayan 2012 predictions, 9/11 conspiracy theories or your Arizona cousins' alien abduction reports and listen to Kurzweil: "I've become aware of a looming event in the first half of the 21st century... This impending Singularity... is increasingly transforming every institution and aspect of human life, from sexuality to spirituality," he wrote in the 2005 book which became a NY Times bestseller. The paper's reviewers called it, "startling in scope and bravado," although "shocking in universe-wide and utterly fantastic predictions" is more like it.
The word "singularity" was coined in 1965 by I. J. Good to suggest a total game changer, like the edge of a black hole. In this case, it is when our exponential growth makes "technology appear to be expanding at an infinite speed," which has evidently not already happened with radio, penicillin and lunar landings. Onrushing developments in computing, AI, health care, biotech, "tech-bio" and other technologies, notably nanobots—microscopic machines which will become something akin to magic gris-gris dust and be employable for good or evil—will produce a singular moment in history, somewhat like Francis Fukuyama's "End of History" but without Fukuyama's false ending.
The true end of regular human history will occur around 2030, according to Kurzweil and other futurists, when we finally invent inventing machines. They will explode our culture in an overwhelming tsunami of technology which will make all previous tools—stone scrapers, fire, language, writing, gun powder, the printing press, automobiles, planes, television, nuclear bombs, space rockets, the World Wide Web, and mechanical limbs—seem like child's toys.
For example: "By the 2030s or 2040s, we’ll have nanobot swarms which can assemble themselves to look like human bodies," Kurzweil told "Vice Magazine" in 2009. "They’ll also be able to change [those] bodies quickly, kind of like the Transformer concept."
"Techniology is always a double edged sword," admits Kurzweil in the movie. "Biotechnology presents us with intertwined promise and peril. But the same tools that could enable a bioterrorist to reprogram a biological virus to be more communicable or stealthy [would enable us to stop them]... Some people say, because of this danger, we shouldn't pursue advanced technologies. But relinquishment of these advanced technologies is a bad idea. It would just drive these things underground [and prevent] a responsible scientist from creating defenses. Creating defense is the right approach and the good news is: We have the knowledge. A good model of how to do it is how we [currently] deal with software viruses."
Meetings, as they will happen in the future, virtually, at the location of your choice. photo courtesy: Terasem Motion Infoculture"Then it would feel like you’re really in that environment... You’ll have a virtual body, but your virtual body doesn’t have to be the same as your real body. A couple could become each other... and experience a relationship from the other’s perspective." This is already largely true for 'Second Life' aficionados who live out alternative lives on line and are experimenting wildly with avatar identities (see CS article "The Women of SF IndieFest").
But Kurweil takes it a few steps further: "The AIs will have bodies, too, so you could be walking around 'Second Life' circa 2030 and run into a person and it may be a bot." Indeed, that's what happens to AI Ramona in 'The Singularity,' although the folks she meets dis her for being a bot. It is a pretty fascinating scene, although it lacks the full life-like-ness Kurzweil imagines.
Alas, "The Singularity" doesn't quite have the singular art directed look of that other dystopian masterpiece that recently rocked our world: "An Inconvenient Truth," which garnered Al Gore an Oscar as well as a Nobel in 2007. According to Tony Hudson, who did most of the effects ("World Magazine," 2009): "I was the on-set visual effects supervisor, the effects art director, and supervised the completion of over 400 greenscreens, set extension and matte painting shots in eight months... When I say 'supervised,' I actually mean that I did most of the work myself. There was no budget to hire anyone... There was so much to do that, early on, I gave up attempting to do 'film-quality' effects. Instead, I tried to do something a bit more stylized."
"I worked on the storyline portion," continues Hudson, "Over time [Ramona] develops from something similar to a 'Second Life' avatar to a full-fledged, autonomous human. My work was mostly in the realm of greenscreen plates with digital sets, but I also developed the look transforming Pauley [Perrette, the actress] into Ramona’s simple avatar... One of the biggest issues on the film was the FX editorial work. The production used Final Cut Pro [a pro-sumer editing program], but had no budget for FX editorial, so I had to do all of that myself, too."
It's odd that Kurzweil would skimp on his Paul Revere call to action, considering that in 20 years, it should make the current computer and biotech business look like small beer. Moreover, in the end, the film is estimated to have cost between two-and-a-half and five million, very high for a doc.
"Unfortunately, Final Cut does not lend itself to manufacturing shots for effects production... So I had to break the sequence[s] down and export to separate shot directories, all by hand... There was a great deal of rotoscoping [tracing of analog into digital]... [Fortunately,] I used Mocha for my roto work, and it works fantastically."
Ramona is busted by Homeland Security for trying to access information above her 'Turing' level, in her attempt to save the planet from a 'grey goo' nanobot attack. photo courtesy: Terasem Motion InfocultureOne nicely rendered scene has Ramona hanging out on a virtual beach with life coach Tony Robbins, played by himself, who teaches her about "love," which concerns being able to give your life for someone, according to Robbins.
The narrative finally goes thriller-horror when Ramona is forced to tackle the problem of "grey goo." Evil nanobots are overreproducing and threatening to consume the planet. Forbidden access to top-secret nanobot code by virtue of being an AI, Ramona is busted by Homeland Security. "We don't tolerate anyone—especially virtual bots—hacking into the 'mich' firewall," says an enforcer nerd with a Russian accent. "I am afraid the protocol in this situation is immediate shut down."
Lawyer to the stars, Alan Dershowitz defends AI Ramona's human rights but first he has to prove she is human by subjecting her to a Turing test. photo courtesy: Terasem Motion InfocultureShortly before, however, Dershowitz notes in an interview: "Look, in virtual reality now, you can have sex with any prominent actress of your choice. You will feel exactly the same, theoretically, as you would if you were really having sex with her. Now does the real actress have the right to prevent her virtual image from satisfying your lust? Will it be adultery if you have virtual sex?"
Aside from doubting that virtual sex "will feel exactly the same" (it will always be a form of masturbation, I think), that exchange left me wondering how a real Ramona, a fully humanoid AI, with Robbins-inspired feelings, would feel about a sympathy screw for an old codger, even if he got her womanness as well as humanness Turing certified.
This is no prurient cud chewing. Biological law dictates you can't become a fully alive entity, i.e. a species, until you are able to reproduce—Darwin's second law, that of Sexual Selection. Ironically, Sexual Selection also controls communication, the complexity of which is driven not so much by survival but the need to find a suitable mate and continue the life process. Although communication is the essence of the eponymous information age, its dynamics can be traced right back to DNA, which is biological communication, as Kurzweil notes.
AI Ramona cracks a tear after Tony Robbins teaches her about love. Then a guard (upper left) announces the end of visiting hours—she is being 'held' for violating her 'Turing' level. photo courtesy: Terasem Motion Infoculture"The notion that there is going to be this war... between machines and humans... is all nonsense," announces Richard Clarke, who has faced down some hard idea wars as the "Terror Czar." "What will happen is the distinction between silicon-based life and carbon-based life between mankind—humankind—and machine will gradually and subtly and, I think, peacefully become blurred."
Nevertheless, AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky cautions cryptically: "We should put a lot of effort into making sure that the very first AI that crosses that critical barrier, that threshold of intelligence, or whatever it is, is a friendly one."
Meanwhile, Kurzweil claims, in the "Vice" article, that we will eventually eliminate "the heart, lungs, red and white blood cells, platelets, pancreas, thyroid and all the hormone-producing organs, kidneys, bladder, liver, lower esophagus, stomach, small intestines, large intestines, and bowel. What we have left at this point is the skeleton, skin, sex organs, sensory organs, mouth and upper esophagus, and brain.”
Unfortunately, reproduction—that beautiful biological invention, which produced all existing species, the lusciousness of human sex and much of our language—turns ugly when it comes to nanobots. "Nano technology eventually will be self replicating... an entity that can go into a natural environment, gather materials to create a copy of itself and self replicate, just as the biological materials do."
Bill Joy of Sun Systems, who wrote the famous cautionary article in 'Wired,' looking a bit frazzled and mad scientist-like, despite his voice of reason. photo courtesy: Terasem Motion InfocultureAccording to Joy: "A chain reaction at the biological level involves great concern... Let's find a way to get most of what we want while not giving crazy, powerful stuff to insane or stupid or careless people. We can do that but we have to try. If we don't care enough to try, something will happen."
In his article, Joy also elaborated on "white plague," an out-of-control virus which could kill all life, and the possibility that the Internet could become self-aware. Another ghost in the machine concept, this suggests that the infinitely expanding computational power of the Web could not help but eventually realize its own existence, that the earth is its "body" and that it no longer needs humans. These two horror movie endings of the human species are almost unmentioned in "The Singularity."
Still, Kurzweil is said to be a good listener and does tolerate opposing views. He addresses them in a long section in the back of the book "The Singularity" and in the movie's few interviews with contrarians like Joy. As for out-of-control nanobots which could "eat the earth" in 90 minutes, don't worry, Kurzweil has done the math. Just as we have antibodies, we should seed the planet with anti-body-like nanobots, which could attack killer nanobots.
Or we could have an AI hack their code, as Ramona does in "The Singularity." Indeed, if we have better and more human AI, we would certainly be able to get the jump on those stupid little machines and their mechanistic software, just as Ramono does, stopping their B movie 90 minute race to eat the earth by minute 84. (Since reproducing nanobots would increase algebraically, the last few minutes are critical.)
Alas, this is only one of the many mind-boggling issues broached if not fully birthed in "The Singularity," in which the future appears to be bearing down on us like a Mac truck with a supremely confident Kurzweil, and some likeminded, at the wheel. Kurzweil also co-founded The Singularity University in Mountain View, California, in 2008, with NASA and Google, which he now directs. It's an interdisciplinary graduate program designed to educate a new generation of leaders to use technology to defeat humanity's big problems, both classical and of our own modern making.
Much of Kurzweil's interviews have visionary backgrounds, portraying biological operations, computing and the universe, but they can't quite capture the scope of his ideas—what could? photo courtesy: Terasem Motion Infoculture"You could put a nonobot at almost ever synapse in your brain [100 trillion] and, essentially, back up your brain," he claims, although that "you" will undoubtedly include only the extremely wealthy.
Since this will happen around 2030, Kurzweil, who is 62 and comes from a family with a history of heart disease, is in a race against time. He has become a health food and vitamin fanatic, as well as a practicioner of Dracula-Keith-Richards blood replacement therapies, in an effort to beat the irony of expiring just a few years before the immortality that he predicted and is helping to invent goes on line.
"Aging is, and indeed has always been known to be, a side effect of life," notes Aubrey de Grey, the PhD who developed the free-radical theory of youth preservation. All you have to do is reach what de Grey calls "longevity escape velocity:" i.e. add more than a year of life expectancy every passing year.
"Far be it for me to mess with the oldest dream of human beings," kvetches Bill McKibben, the environmentalist and author, who would prefer to preserve nature much as it is, "Except to point out that every time anyone in the world of literature has sat down to think about it, they have come up with pretty profound cautions." See Genesis: "Lest they eat from the tree of life and become like gods."
As if immortality wasn't extreme enough, Kurzweil claims we will eventually impregnate hard objects with computational ability and literally take over the entire universe, currently estimated at eighty billion galaxies, simply by using self-reproducing but GOOD nanobots.
"Nanobots called 'foglets,' that can manipulate image and sound waves, will bring the morphing qualities of virtual reality to the real world," Kurzweil writes near the beginning (page 29) of "The Singularity." "Ultimately, the entire universe will be saturated with our intelligence." Breathtakingly ambitious and god-like, this thesis re-enacts the god metaphor but in reverse and mechanically.
"We have to set up 'computronium,'" says Kurweil, refering to the "programmable matter" hypothesized by MIT's Norman Margolus and Tommaso Toffoli and popularized by Douglas Adams in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (1979). "[B]ut we have to get around the speed of light, which we do by sending nanobots through worm holes. It will expand our intelligence throughout the universe. This is our ultimate destiny," if, of course, you ignore the Icarus Myth about flying too close to the sun.
For all its short falls, in terms of aesthetic integration, opposing idea articulation and sheer hubris, "The Singularity is Near" is one hecka of a stimulating, exciting, frightening, fascinating and critically important—in terms of issues raised—film. Although catching it at the SF IndieFest in February, along side the pierced and tattoo-ed futurists of the Mission would be ideal, see it anyway you can—theater, DVD, nano-screen or virtual reality in your brain, when that becomes available around 2029.
This is one freaky film full of fantastic ideas that will undoubtedly resonate through the memo-sphere for years to come—perhaps even infinity, if it becomes Genesis 2.0, as it implies. Regardless, it will certainly influence today's eleven-year-olds who will be turning thirty when "The Singularity" presumably comes to pass.
Posted on Jan 21, 2011 - 10:07 AM
