Trangressive Intelligence
Transgressive Man
Cyrus Shahrad
/
July 2011
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Ray Kurzweil believes that innovations in biogenetics and nanotechnology are creating a new future for humanity, leading toward a future event he calls the Singularity, in which man and machine finally merge. We catch up with the man himself, as well as some of his skeptics, to find out what the controversy is all about.
There’s a scene near the opening of Transcendent Man, the 2009 documentary on futurist “Ray Kurzweil, showing archive footage of the then-17-year-old’s appearance on panel show I’ve Got a Secret. Suited and smiling, exuding the awkward confidence of someone becoming slowly aware of a great gift, Kurzweil sits at a piano and rattles off an unusual piece of music. The panel is surprisingly quick to guess his secret: the composition was written by a computer—a computer, it transpires, that Kurzweil also built and programmed. The host, Steve Allen, congratulates young Raymond and predicts a bright future for him.
It’s an auspicious introduction to a man for whom computers are arguably as valuable as human life itself, a man for whom predicting the future is very much part of the present. Kurzweil made his name as an inventor in the ’70s and ’80s, patenting everything from the flatbed scanner and text-to-speech synthesizer (both preemptively created to enable the completion of the Kurzweil Reading Machine for the blind), to the Kurzweil K250, a piano synthesizer constructed following a conversation with Stevie Wonder.
