Transcendent Man

The documentary is about Ray Kurzweil. He is an inventor: a reading machine, a music synthesiser, work on speech recognition. But what the film is really after is his claim about the future, that artificial intelligence will pass human intelligence and that this happens around 2045. Kurzweil describes it not as a catastrophe but as the end of death. His father's early death, and the idea of one day bringing him back, are in the film too. He takes hundreds of pills a day; the intention is to live until then. Barry Ptolemy directs; eighty-three minutes. People who do not agree with Kurzweil also speak: they say the technology will not move at that rate, that the predictions are out of proportion, and that consciousness cannot be copied. The film takes both sides, with Kurzweil himself at the centre.