rileyedwardcowan The future isn't talked about enough. We need to be able to predict where we are going as a society so we can be ready for what's going to happen. Ray Kurzweil is a futurist. He spends all day every day thinking about the future. He is a genius inventor and he even invents things that we don't have the technology to make yet. If there's someone who can predict the future of technology, this is the guy. If you read his book, The Singularity is Near, you know exactly what "The Singularity" is and what is means for the human race. To put it in one sentence, it's the point where technology advances so exponentially fast that we can't even comprehend the growth. Ray explains that technology is advancing exponentially, and in a few decades, it will be advancing too fast for our own brains to comprehend. In order to keep up, we must merge with machines to enhance our intelligence and become immortal, super-intelligent, god-like cyborgs that will mostly spend time in full submersion virtual reality doing whatever our imaginations can imagine. The book explains everything that this documentary doesn't and if this doc interests you then I highly recommend the read. It's really hopeful stuff and people need to realize how important technology is going to become. We use our cellphones so much that they become a part of us. Sooner or later they will be a part of us. This is a very good summary to a very interesting subject. If you're very religious you may not like it due to its atheist theme, but people with an open mind will be very intrigued.

lazur-2 ....but this whole film seems to be based on the foundation that every prediction Raymond Kurzweil has made so far has been correct, and that every invention he's created has been successful. I find this to be disingenuous at best. The handful of correct predictions presented as evidence merely serves to make me wonder : Did Kurzweil only make this small list of correct predictions, and shut up the rest of the time? Was his plethora of correct predictions so overwhelming that severe editing was required for brevity? I find this impossible to accept. If you want me to be impressed with your successes, Ray, you must admit your defeats. Kurzweil's claim that man's lifespan used to be 25 years is a blatant misuse of statistics. His claim of rapidly multiplying information ignores that much new information disproves old information. I'll stop now.

sunking Ray Kurzweil has known he wanted to be an inventor from the age of 5, and has now been at it for all those years. Along the way he realized that the timing of inventions was critical to their success, otherwise most inventions fail. Think e-readers 10 years ago, tablet PC's 7 years ago, and the Apple Newton – all bombs then, but now the timing is right. So he started analyzing technology trends and discovered the "law of accelerating returns"; in summary that technology grows in a predictable and exponential patterns and that amazing things our in our future. Ray has had amazing success with his publicly made predictions. For instance, in the book "The Age of Spirtual Machines", he made 147 predictions for the year 2009, of which 86% are correct or essentially correct. (Reference: "How My Predictions are Faring, Ray Kurzweil, Oct. 2010; http://c0068172.cdn2.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/predictions.pdf ) In other words when Ray Kurzweil speaks, people listen and you should too. I will admit, when I first heard is ideas of how man will evolve with technology, I was quite skeptical. But as I dug deeper into why he was saying this would happen, I began to see the trends are in his favor. Think about it; have you noticed that technology has been moving at a quickening pace lately? The film follows Ray over several years, catching him on his lecture circuit, at his company, his home, and traveling about. Throughout the film Ray explains the "law of accelerating returns" and where it will lead to. Also Ray's critics and supporters give their opinions throughout. Ray himself seems to be an incredibly calm individual who rarely strays from his relaxed tone of speaking. Ray's trends predict that technology trends are crossing over into health-care and that if you can live for another 15 years you have the chance of living a very long time. Ray's predictions give us hope in a time when so much around us seems gloomy. The documentary is a fascinating look at Ray and his ideas, and I highly recommend it.

optionsf I recently came across the concept of the Singularity in a book "Why the West Rules...for now", which used its arguments. This documentary talks about Ray Kurzweil's predictions of the impact of the exponential growth of technology and its implications on the evolution of humankind: essentially that they will merge, with huge implications.Now I want to read his book The Singularity and explore the concept more thoroughly...I suppose this is a great outcome for such a documentary, but it's not for someone avoiding deep thought.Ray is a great thinker, and an optimist and believes that death is essentially avoidable by essentially transforming ourselves to a different "machine" body, based on the unavoidable trend of increasing computer power, which will soon be able to reach the capability of one human brain. Once computing power surpasses the brain, then computers will design computers, and they will grow exponentially smarter.But as is pointed out in the film, if we think we can control that process once it is smarter than us, we're being unrealistic. As these machines interconnect, the power of one brain becomes pretty insignificant.One incredible scene follows the promise of machines that can read printed text and read it aloud to the blind. Starting with a $20,000 machine decades ago that Stevie Wonder used, to something today that fits in a shirt pocket, which is the equivalent of a $100 million computer a few decades ago.Another interesting points is his prediction that the cost of a watt hour of energy from solar sources will fall below that of fossil fuels in 5 years. Once this happens and solar power can be obtained from flexible panels installable anywhere, the geopolitics, economics and pollution from extracting, buying and using fossil fuels begins to go away.I'm 49 and this makes me think as I type this on my <$500 laptop computer, after watching the movie on a $500 Ipad which I downloaded from the Internet, then I'm writing a review on a database of films where you can call up information on almost any film ever made; that none of this was doable just 15 years ago.I can go to a city I've never been in, load up maps on my Iphone, find my way around, use a translator I can speak into in English which will speak in another language, and access money in another country to pay my bills.The darker side as was also announced today as I write this is someone figured out that your Iphone stores your whereabouts for a year or so, and so we lose our privacy. Romances are made on the Internet and lost when a spouse sees a text message setting up an affair. My father recently died of small cell lung cancer. Within a week or so reading everything I could on it, i knew as much as many of the doctors I was dealing with (one asked if I was a doctor), and could help guide his therapy.My life, in terms of photos, comments, interaction with friends, things and places I like is already being compiled in Facebook, and that will live on long after I die...Our stupid political arguments now that you see on Cable TV are a disgusting waste of time: Was Obama born in the US? Should we cut the deficit by raising taxes on wealthy people, cutting medical care and financial support to older and poor people? Should gays be allowed to marry (20 years ago this was only an idea, now it's viable in a fast growing number of cities, states and countries).We don't talk about the big issues: what does it mean that China now uses more energy than the US does. That it's economy is #2 and will soon outpace us? That the US is really not #1 anymore in anything significant (life expectancy, literacy, income, science achievements, etc) but one among many. What does it mean that we are clearly destroying our planet and using its resources (food, fish, air, minerals) at unsustainable rates....where does that leave us? These are the kinds of questions this film made me think about, and it answers in an optimistic way: in 15 years the advances in life expectancy as we "reprogram the bad software that makes up the human body" will be growing at more than 1 year per calendar year, essentially meaning if we make it 15 years we may live forever.But more importantly, who has control of this technology or does it control us? There is no real way to program morality into a computer, it's too complicated and no one agrees on one correct moral path. Does that fact that eventually we can "upload" our brains into a net where there are billions of others, and all interconnect mean we'l never want to unplug for fear of being lonely or nonfunctional? (like the Borg in Star Trek)...? Can you live without your Facebook, cellphone, texts, email or Internet for even one day without feeling out of touch? Watch this film. We all need to be thinking about these issues, not the bullshit on cable TV news.