Transcendent Man

Ray Kurzweil, author of 'The Singularity'

The other day Aidan and I watched the film 'Transcendent Man', and I continue to ponder many of the ideas.  There are several premises that underlie the film.  One is that life on this planet is continually evolving.  Two billion years ago, there were single celled organisms.  Six hundred million years ago multi-celled organisms arose and radiated throughout the oceans and seas.  By the Permian, 230 million years ago, amphibians began climbing onto land.  The Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous saw the domination, at least on land, of dinosaurs, with little mammals trying to keep from getting crushed.  About 65 million years ago, a comet hit the earth, and the resulting drop in temperatures wiped out the extremely specialized dinosaurs, and mammals proliferated.  About 55 million years ago, the first primates emerge, living at the top of forest canopies, eating fruits and insects.  About 34 million years ago, an ape ancestor was living mostly on the forest floor.  Twenty two million years ago there was an ape that looked quite a bit like a modern chimp.  About 10 million years ago, our ancestors deviated from chimps, gorillas, and orangutans.  Between 5 and 6 million years ago, our ancestors began to stand uprightly, and moved out of the forest onto the savannah.  The freeing up of the hands eventually allowed the development of tool-making about 2.5 million years ago.  About 2 million years ago, humans walked out of Africa, 1.5 million years ago harnessed fire, and sometime after that began to communicate with verbal language.  It is most likely that about 100,000 years ago, our direct ancestors left Africa again and replaced the various human-like species of the Old World.  About 60,000 years ago humans made it to Australia, and perhaps about 15000 years ago, humans crossed over to and populated the Americas.  About 10,000 years ago, humans began producing their own food.  In the late 18th Century, our ancestors began to harness machines in a way that had not done before, and since then, our technology has been increasing in complexity and the speed of change geometrically.  And so, the technological changes that we see now can be considered part of a greater evolution beginning 2 billion years ago.

The second premise of the film is that the speed and complexity of technological change will bring about a 'Singularity'.  This means the point at which nano technology (the use of machines the size of a human blood cell) and human beings will come together into one being: we will not be human, and we will not be a machine.  Singularity will occur around 2029.  Diseases will be eradicated by these millions of machines, and we will say goodbye to death.

What is more, nano technology will allow the capture of the sun's rays in a way that we cannot really imagine today, and will be so efficient that fossil fuels will no longer be necessary to fuel everything.

This film is very different to the gloom and doom story about the imminent collapse of everything very soon. This film shows us passing from Vitruvian Man towards a Transcendent Man.  Perhaps there is room for hope after all.  Cool beans.