The Singularity Is Near

At the onset of the twenty-first century, humanity stands on the verge of the most transforming and thrilling period in its history. It will be an era in which the very nature of what it means to be human will be both enriched and challenged as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity. While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, futurist Ray Kurzweil presents a view of the coming age. The movie intertwines a fast-paced A-line documentary with a B-line narrative story. Ray Kurzweil interacts with a panoply of thinkers on the impact of exponentially expanding technologies on the nature of human life in the next half century. Intertwined is the story of Ramona, Ray Kurzweil's female alter ego, starting with actual footage of Kurzweil creating and demonstrating his virtual creation at the 2001 TED (technology-entertainment-design) conference, where Ray - as Ramona - sang Jefferson Airline's "White Rabbit." Ramona goes into the future where she becomes more and more humanlike, and more and more independent, a Pinocchio story. She combats an attack of self-replicating nanobots (gray goo) and hires Alan Dershowitz to press for her legal rights as a "person." The judge rules that he will grant her full legal personhood if she passes a "Turing test," in which she must appear indistinguishable from an actual human in a text conversation. She gets coaching from Tony Robbins to become "more human." The story continues from here. . .