The Singularity movie is near

IMDB says The Singularity Is Near, Ray Kurzweil's film adaptation of his 2005 book, is opening in the US this Friday. I don't know where they got this date from (all the other sources I can find just say "Summer"), but let's spread the word anyway. After all, the more people are expecting it to open on Friday, the more incentive there'll be for it to actually open on Friday. (And if the movie's release can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, then maybe its subject matter can as well, but that's another story.)

TSIN is part documentary and part science fiction, and you probably don't have to agree with many of Kurzweil's predictions to appreciate both parts. In the documentary scenes, Kurzweil interviews dozens of experts, gathers opposing viewpoints about the history and future of technology like any good documentarian, and presents his own conclusions.

Modern technology, obsolete economics

Courtesy of Ray Kurzweil and Kurzweil Technologies Inc.

Ray Kurzweil claims technology has been steadily narrowing the gap between rich and poor. Richer people still get new technologies first, but poor people are catching up. As proof, he offers us his chart "Mass Use of Inventions". Technological acceleration, Kurzweil tells us, means this trend will continue during the 21st century. When the Singularity finally arrives in 2045, it will finish -- not start -- the world's transition to a post-scarcity economy with no financial inequality. I'd like to agree with him, but I can't, for two reasons.

First, the idea of corporate-made technology as a social leveler amounts to trickle-down economics, a dead theory whose obituary hit the papers earlier this month.

Kurzweil: no prophet, but a name worth dropping

For most of my undergraduate career, I wouldn't have been able to write a blog like this one. Without being thoroughly familiar with such keywords as "technological acceleration", "transhumanism" and "singularitarian", it was hard to articulate my visions and sense of purpose in life, and hard for Google to find me any of the relevant writing on the subject by futurists.

What finally got me going in the right direction was when one of my profs name-dropped Ray Kurzweil this summer, and I started reading his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.