

Singularity movie is in production, co-director is Raymond Kurzweil - bemmu
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1049412/

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clavalle
I wish this pseudo-technical, new-age, flim-flam of an idea would die already.
Seriously, does anyone with a real technical background that is not directly
making money off of seminars, books and articles selling this believe this
stuff?

~~~
JeremyChase
No doubt. It isn't the first singularity movie anyway; Terminator, Matrix,
Eagle Eye, A Space Odyssey..

~~~
zephjc
I wouldn't call those singularity movies.

Maybe movies with transhuman/posthuman themes, but the singularity implies
things about the rate of technological progress - certainly there wasn't much
rapid progress in Terminator after the machines nuked the earth (except,
maybe, in the production of new terminator robots, but even that wasn't fast,
really).

~~~
electromagnetic
Eagle Eye was a singularity movie in potential, but in essence it was no
different than _War Games_ in that it was about a rampant AI with no
progression beyond. I, Robot had a far greater display of the advance of
technology than virtually any Sci-Fi movie (except maybe the bicentennial man)
and only displayed ~3 generations of robots (the replaced, the being replaced
and the new) but is in no sense a singularity movie.

I doubt we'll ever see a movie truly depict the singularity in any way other
than a glimpse and will be akin to virtually any sci-fi movie in any setting.
We might get there with a great TV series, but that's doubtful.

IMO a singularity TV series would have to take the story progression of
_Taken_ in the generation skipping, but instead of giant leaps, it would be a
leap of decades, years and then months as technology advances up to the '2030'
mark.

For movies we'll be stuck with a BS intro that pails in comparison to the
introduction of each Fallout game but will inevitably be describing similar
events.

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simon_
Isn't a lot of the singularity idea based on flawed math? I always hear about
and see graphs of exponential curves about to "go vertical", but...
exponential curves definitely don't do that. You can zoom in on any point of
e^x and it will look like it's about to have a singularity...

In more general terms... if ~technology has been getting better with some
short doubling time for hundreds of years... why is it that the NEXT doubling
is supposed to be the really significant one?

~~~
rms
The last doubling was really significant. You know, instant free communication
to humans anywhere on the world as well as instant access to the sum total of
human knowledge.

~~~
simon_
Right, and the next doubling will be even better (twice as good!). But the
sense that we're right on the threshold of the infinite future has probably
been around at least since industrialization.

For example, that bit about instant access to people and knowledge was
probably said about the telegraph too.

~~~
rms
Sure, I agree. My only point is that people seem to underestimate the regular,
non-singularity exponential doubling. Already some aspects of science and
civilization have become more far-fetched than the sci-fi of 50 years ago.
Like <http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/mf_optigenetics/>

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tfh
I've read charles stross's accelrando yesterday. One of the best books about
singularity. It's also free (Creative Commons License). Probably the best free
ebook I've ever read.

~~~
heed
Sort of related: this is one of the best short stories (actually it's a play)
I've read on a singularity-esque vision of the future.

<http://www.fullmoon.nu/Resurrection/PrimarySpecies.html>

~~~
Micand
On a similar, somewhat-related tangent: The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect
is a fantastic novella depicting rapid change caused by a technological
singularity.

<http://www.kuro5hin.org/prime-intellect/>

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martythemaniak
Reading The Singularity kinda reminded of a Neal Stephenson novel. You start
off with well-grounded reality, you progress smoothly, then you finish and you
wonder...wait, wtf just happened? How did I get to this wacky place?

I mean, we'll all me omniscient, immortal demi-gods in 39 years? Really?

~~~
tfh
May be "humanity becoming immortal demi-gods" is like "having flying cars
everywhere". It's always 39 in the future.

[http://graphjam.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/song-chart-
memes...](http://graphjam.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/song-chart-memes-the-
future.jpg?w=506&h=442)

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iterationx
In the movie, an AI hires Tony Robbins to help her become more human.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Robbins>

Emotional machines plot? ugh.

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zephjc
Eh, I don't know about this. It sounds like it has a plot and conflict, but
will it be good storytelling? However, it's kind of cool to see so many big
AI-community/singularitarian names in the cast credits!

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geuis
I did some work earlier this year making some machinima video in Second Life
for this movie. From what I've seen so far, it's just a documentary-style
movie.

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drhowarddrfine
Any movie that has co-directors means it's going to be bad. Particularly when
one of them is not in the film business at all.

Yes, I'm aware of the films made by "brothers" but those are exceptions to the
rule.

