My university recently held an event involving a presentation and book signing by Ray Kurzweil and a screening of The Singularity is Near. Fangirling about meeting Ray and getting my book signed aside, I thought I would give a short description of the movie and my opinion of it.
The film is mostly made of interviews with big names, so most of the time you will have somebody’s head on-screen talking, whether it’s Ray’s, Aubrey De Grey’s, Eric Drexler’s, or Eliezer Yudkowsky’s. The movie covers a wide variety of singulitarian and transhumanist topics (including a small debate on life extension), and although the material is a bit basic for someone who has already spent a lot of time reading sites like lesswrong and The Transhumanist Wiki, I quite enjoyed it.
Some of the scenes make use of spiffy CGI, including the opening and a couple of illustrations of nanobots. The biggest use of CGI by far occurs in the B-Plot, though, which consists of several interspersed short scenes dealing with an artificial intelligence named Ramona who goes from being a mechanical paper doll to a Second Life bot to a wholly sentient virtual being as the decades pass. I thought this plot thread was the weakest part of the movie; while it was entertaining and it illustrated ideas like editing one’s own thinking process (Ramona cures herself of her fear of mice), several of the scenes were rather narmful (WARNING: TVTropes) and the overall sci-fi feel may have hurt the movie’s credibility with people who would have otherwise taken it seriously.
So, to conclude, I asked a friend what she thought of the movie, and she said that it had been “too flashy” for her taste.
My university recently held an event involving a presentation and book signing by Ray Kurzweil and a screening of The Singularity is Near. Fangirling about meeting Ray and getting my book signed aside, I thought I would give a short description of the movie and my opinion of it.
The film is mostly made of interviews with big names, so most of the time you will have somebody’s head on-screen talking, whether it’s Ray’s, Aubrey De Grey’s, Eric Drexler’s, or Eliezer Yudkowsky’s. The movie covers a wide variety of singulitarian and transhumanist topics (including a small debate on life extension), and although the material is a bit basic for someone who has already spent a lot of time reading sites like lesswrong and The Transhumanist Wiki, I quite enjoyed it.
Some of the scenes make use of spiffy CGI, including the opening and a couple of illustrations of nanobots. The biggest use of CGI by far occurs in the B-Plot, though, which consists of several interspersed short scenes dealing with an artificial intelligence named Ramona who goes from being a mechanical paper doll to a Second Life bot to a wholly sentient virtual being as the decades pass. I thought this plot thread was the weakest part of the movie; while it was entertaining and it illustrated ideas like editing one’s own thinking process (Ramona cures herself of her fear of mice), several of the scenes were rather narmful (WARNING: TVTropes) and the overall sci-fi feel may have hurt the movie’s credibility with people who would have otherwise taken it seriously.
So, to conclude, I asked a friend what she thought of the movie, and she said that it had been “too flashy” for her taste.