Singularity or Bust

 Singularity  

"Singularity or Bust," a documentary filmed by Raj Dye in 2009 features artificial intelligence researchers Ben Goertzel and Hugo DeGaris as they work in China to bring human conversation to a NAO robot.  The film also explores how radical the Singularity may be.

In 2009, film-maker and former AI programmer Raj Dye spent his summer following futurist AI researchers Ben Goertzel and Hugo DeGaris around Hong Kong and Xiamen, documenting their doings and gathering their perspectives. The result, after some work by crack film editor Alex MacKenzie, was the 45 minute documentary Singularity or Bust — a uniquely edgy, experimental Singularitarian road movie, featuring perhaps the most philosophical three-foot-tall humanoid robot ever, a glance at the fast-growing Chinese research scene in the late aughts, and even a bit of a real-life love story.

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The film was screened in theaters around the world, and won the Best Documentary award at the 2013 LA Cinema Festival of Hollywood and the LA Lift Off Festival. And now it is online, free of charge, for your delectation.

Singularity or Bust is a true story pertaining to events occurring in the year 2009. It captures a fascinating slice of reality, but bear in mind that things move fast these days. For more recent updates on Goertzel and DeGaris’s quest for transhuman AI, you’ll have to consult the Internet (we hear www.33rdsquare.com is a good source ;) ), or your imagination.

Initially the film was going to be titled, “Ten Years to a Positive Singularity – If We Really, Really Try,” based on talks at the time by Goertzel, but the idea was not used.  As for the idea behind the initial title, Goertzel comments, "4 years after the film was shot, that dramatic concerted effort still has not happened. My colleagues and I are doing our best to push OpenCog toward Singularity-enabling AGI [artificial general intelligence], and a few other teams around the world are doing similarly with their own approaches. But the world is not yet focusing on AGI the way it is focusing on, say, cancer research, or the production of integrated circuits, or the design of ever-sexier lingerie."



SOURCE  Singularity or Bust

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