Artificial Intelligence  

Lo And Behold: Reveries Of The Connected World, the new film from Werner Herzog touches on artificial intelligence, technology, and our growing interconnectivity with the "Internet of Things." Featuring original interviews with cyberspace pioneers such as Elon Musk, Danny Hillis, and world-famous hacker Kevin Mitnick, the film travels through a series of interconnected episodes that reveal the ways in which the online world has transformed how virtually everything in the real world works, from business to education, space travel to healthcare, and the very heart of how we conduct our personal relationships.

The pace of technological change today is inherently difficult to decipher. Just how far reaching is all of this change? Filmaker Werner Herzog has made an attempt to make sense of oit allt for us. His new documentary Lo And Behold: Reveries Of The Connected World traces what he describes as “one of the biggest revolutions we as humans are experiencing.”

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The film, which will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this month, is a deep dive into how virtually everything, from business to education, space travel to healthcare, and even how we conduct our personal relationships, has been transformed by the online world.

“I think this is the first coherent tour around the horizons of the internet,” says Herzog, who famously doesn’t carry a cellphone and only uses a computer for email and Google Maps. “Because my experience with the internet is limited, I came to it more as an outsider and could see the contours more sharply. I followed my curiosity and I think the awe and excitement come across.”

Lo And Behold: Reveries Of The Connected World features original interviews with pioneers and tech leaders including Elon Musk, Danny Hillis, Bob Kahn, and hacker Kevin Mitnick. “The Internet, even with its flaws, is the most important invention of our modern time. It is a powerful tool that permeates and drives all aspects of society and business,” said James P. McNiel, Chief Marketing Officer for Netscout. “It is our responsibility as benefactors of this invention to be vigilant and proactive in propelling and protecting it. We wanted to draw attention to how precious and fragile our “connected world” is.”

SOURCE  Popular Science

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 Ray Kurzweil  

In a very interesting interview with Ray Kurzweil, James Bedsole got the futurist and inventor to elaborate on how humans will potentially become like Gods with exponential technology.  He also talks about his project at Google and how medical technology is going to dramatically improve health in the next few years.

J ames Bedsole recently released a series of videos including in depth interviews with futurist, inventor and author of The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Ray Kurzweil.

In the interview, Kurzweil reviews the Law of Accelerating Returns, and the implications of exponential information technologies.  Included in the field of information technologies now, he talks of the impact of accelerating change on medicine.  "We'll see dramatic changes in health and medicine ten years from now.  We'll see radical changes twenty years from now," says Kurzweil.  "We need to get to that point."

Image Source: TIME

Expanding the last words of the film, Transcendent Man, "So, does God exist, I would say, not yet," Kurzweil states:

The different religions of the world have a surprising agreement on what God is. God is an unlimited amount of what: memory, intelligence, creativity and love — basically the highest things a neocortex does. What happens in evolution, entities like mammals and humans become more intelligent, more creative, more loving, and moving exponentially to become more God-like; never quite reaching God, but moving in that direction. So evolution is a spiritual process to bring us closer to God, and technological evolution is now running a million times faster than biological evolution and ultimately we will vastly ultimately trillions-fold expand our creativity and our sense of humor and our ability to love and will become more God-like.

For Kurzweil, we will never really become infinite, but it will seem infinite from today's perspective.

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Kurzweil also discusses how the cloud is increasingly going to take over our thinking. Starting in the 2030's our neocortex will extend to the cloud, he says. We will extend into the cloud "by sending nanobots into the brain which will basically just be communicators to the cloud and then we can have a neocortex extension in the cloud."

Kurzweil says the cloud is pure information technology.  "It's doubling in power every year."  The impact of this extending out is that more and more of our thinking will be done in the cloud, and Kurzweil predicts that it will eventually be mostly in the cloud, diminishing the need for biological bodies.

Discussing his project at Google, where he is the Director of Engineering, Kurzweil says he is creating a synthetic neocortex that can understand language just the way a human does.  "[It] can read something for meaning, and then end up with a hierarchical structure and its synthetic brain reflects on that meaning.  It will greatly enrich the world of search."

With the ability to scour the web with understanding, Google will become more of a personal assistant, summarizing up-to-the-minute information for you.


SOURCE  James Bedsole

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 Neuroscience  

The fourth installment in a 10-year documentary film-in-the-making about the 21st century race to understand the human brain, focusing on Henry Markram and the Human Brain Project has just been released.

The fourth installment in a 10-year documentary film-in-the-making about the 21st century race to understand the human brain has been released.

The film focuses on Henry Markram and the Human Brain Project, which seeks to build a full simulation of a human brain on supercomputers over the course of the next decade.

Director Noah Hutton began shooting in 2009, focusing exclusively on Markram's Blue Brain Project.

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Bluebrain: Year Four covers what proved to be a year of big announcements in neuroscience around the world, featuring a behind-the-scenes look at Markram and the Blue Brain Project winning the E.U. flagship award and becoming the Human Brain Project, as well as Obama announcing the BRAIN initiative, and a portrait of Christof Koch, expert rock climber and Chief Scientific Officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and interviews with Cori Bargmann, Idan Segev, and Nobel Laureate Torsten Wiesel.

SOURCE  Blue Brain Film

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 Transhumanism  

TRANSHUMAN is a short documentary film by director Titus Nachbauer. It is about radical life extension and future technology that might change the human condition.

Philosopher Anders Sandberg does not accept death as a foregone conclusion. According to him it will become possible this century to upload your mind into a computer. He is a member of a small group that calls itself the transhumanists.

TRANSHUMAN is a short documentary film by director Titus Nachbauer. It is about radical life extension and future technology that might change the human condition.

Related articles A Brilliant Introduction To Transhumanism  Anders Sandberg on Knowing The Unknowable  The Transhumanist Reader

According to Humanity+, transhumanism is:

(1) The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.

(2) The study of the ramifications, promises, and potential dangers of technologies that will enable us to overcome fundamental human limitations, and the related study of the ethical matters involved in developing and using such technologies.

Along with Sandberg, TRANSHUMAN features Nick Bostrom, Arjen Kamphuis, and Natasha Vita-More.



SOURCE  Titus Nachbauer

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 Technological Unemployment  

Will Work For Free is a documentary by Sam Vallely on the subject of technological unemployment.

Will Work For Free is a documentary by Sam Vallely on the subject of technological unemployment.

Related articles Technology Killing Middle Class Jobs  James Hughes On The Elimination Of Work  When Robots Rule The World

SOURCE  Maveric Media

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 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.

Related articles Ben Goertzel Discusses the Importance of Calico  Ben Goertzel On Aspects of Artificial General Intelligence  James Miller Discusses Aspects of the Singularity

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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 Mind Uploading  

Recently Stephen Hawking, in a talk at the premiere of the documentary film about his life, said that brain "could exist outside the body" and like a program, could be copied onto a computer.

Professor Stephen Hawking in a talk at the premiere of the documentary film about his life, said that brain "could exist outside the body" and like a program, could be copied onto a computer.

Speaking at the Cambridge Film Festival, The 71-year-old Professor, author of A Brief History of Time, said that it could be possible for the human brain to exist outside the body, but this is way beyond our present capabilities.

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"I think the brain is like a program in the mind, which is like a computer, so it’s theoretically possible to copy the brain on to a computer and so provide a form of life after death."

Hawking was cautionary however, noting that the technology is out of our reach for now, "This is way beyond out present capabilities. I think the conventional afterlife is a fairy tale for people afraid of the dark."

Hawking, who was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at the age of 21, and given only a few years to live by doctors has gone on to revolutionize cosmology and physics. Among his quests is work to harmonize quantum physics with Einstein's theory of relativity - a unified theory. His life is the subject of the new documentary, "Hawking."



SOURCE  My Science Academy

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 The Singularity

Doug Wolens's recent documentary, The Singularity takes on the complex, abstract concept of the Singularity. Too some, the idea sounds like sci-fi but, Wolens and others argue, there's no denying the sweeping impact of technology on human existence.  In a recent interview with The Atlantic, Wolens described the film.

In a recent interview with The Atlantic, film maker, Doug Wolens discussed his new documentary, The Singularity.

Wolens' film looks at the sweeping impact of technology on human existence and the implications of the technological Singularity using interviews with subject matter experts and clever animations.

For the film, Wolens interviews: Ray Kurzweil, Leon Panetta, Richard A. Clarke, Bill McKibben, David Chalmers, Christof Koch, Aubrey De Grey, Ralph Merkle, Brad Templeton, Cynthia Breazeal, Marshall Brain, Glenn Zorpette and others.

As Wolens describes in the interview, the process of making the film led him on a journey of self-discovery as well.  While he initially "drank the Kool-Aid" of the singularitarian movement, he came to recognize the deeper nuances of the implications as he interviewed his subjects.

As I interviewed these scientists and technological leaders, I started to see holes in some of the arguments. I began questioning the philosophical and moral implications. The promise of this new future began to lose its luster. If smarter-than-human computers were created, how would they treat their human creators? Would everyone have the means to augment their intelligence or just the rich? What would happen if something went wrong with these super powerful technologies and destroyed everything on the planet? Or if these powerful technologies got in the wrong hands and were maliciously used? Maybe the Singularity wasn’t such a good idea.—

This thinking also shaped the way Wolens constructed the film.  While he could have cut the interviews in a way to put forth his own opinions on the subject, his format lets the viewer reach their own conclusions.

"Just as in real life, the viewer brings his or her own picture of the world to the film and draws their own conclusions about the goals of each interviewee. It’s as if the viewer gets to meet each person in the film and sit with them as individuals, not just characters in a story."

Also, compared to other science and technology documentaries that show scientists in their labs, or working on computers, Wolens used a different technique.

"I decided to use animation to depict these technologies. I recognized that animation, as an art form in itself, could not only depict the science, but also capture our notion of the future and the promises of technology," Wolens says. "We also decided to make the animations fun and silly to balance the tone of the film’s subject matter."

Wolens is currently self-distributing this film and is hoping to work on another documentary on aesthetics in the future, he tells The Atlantic.

The Singularity is available  on iTunes or from the film's website.

SOURCE  The Atlantic

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 The Singularity

In his documentary film, The Singularity, director Doug Wolens interviewed leading futurists, computer scientists, artificial intelligence experts, and philosophers examine the question of what will humanity look like in the future.

In his documentary film, The Singularity, director Doug Wolens interviewed leading futurists, computer scientists, artificial intelligence experts, and philosophers examine the question of what will humanity look like in the future.

The film has just been released on iTunes.

According to Wolens, he first learned about the Singularity concept in 2000 while on the road self-distributing his documentary Butterfly (about the young woman who sat in an ancient redwood tree for two years preventing it from being cut down).

Ray Kurzweil’s argument that the rate of technology advances exponentially sounded reasonable to Wolens. As he read more about the science involved he became inspired with the arguments, especially having grown up in an age when "we were taught that science could solve all problems."

Those who insist this paradigm shift is only decades away emphasize that we’re on the cusp of creating nanotechnology that will patrol our bloodstream and repair cellular damage, athletes with jacked-up genetic code who sprint like gazelles, the Internet will interact directly with your  mind, and medical labs with computer-replicated brains working by the thousands to cure disease.

In the film, Wolens interviews: Kurzweil, Leon Panetta, Richard A. Clarke, Bill McKibben, David Chalmers, Christof Koch, Aubrey De Grey, Ralph Merkle, Brad Templeton, Cynthia Breazeal, Marshall Brain, Glenn Zorpette and many others.

Ultimately, if we become more machine-like, and machines more like us, will we sacrifice our humanity to gain something greater? Or will we engineer our own demise? Even if the answers are impossible to know, The Singularity makes clear that we cannot postpone addressing the questions.

The down-to-earth and visually fun animations created by Jerry van de Beek and Betsy de Fries of Little Fluffy Clouds, illustrate the complex ideas with clear and simple artistry. These animations build upon our past notions of the future and playfully complement the talking-head interviews.

The film’s score, composed by renowned cellist Chris Lancaster, resonates to the viewer’s core. Wanting to stay away from heavy-handed music and sound cues, Wolens and Lancaster collaborated to create a cohesive sound that reflects the film’s sensibilities and aesthetics. The Singularity is a comprehensive and insightful documentary that examines technology’s accelerating rate, and deftly addresses the resulting moral questions. —


 
SOUR CE  The Singularity Film

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