This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

The future isn't talked about enough. We need to be able to predict where we are going as a society so we can be ready for what's going to happen. Ray Kurzweil is a futurist. He spends all day every day thinking about the future. He is a genius inventor and he even invents things that we don't have the technology to make yet. If there's someone who can predict the future of technology, this is the guy. If you read his book, The Singularity is Near, you know exactly what "The Singularity" is and what is means for the human race. To put it in one sentence, it's the point where technology advances so exponentially fast that we can't even comprehend the growth. Ray explains that technology is advancing exponentially, and in a few decades, it will be advancing too fast for our own brains to comprehend. In order to keep up, we must merge with machines to enhance our intelligence and become immortal, super-intelligent, god-like cyborgs that will mostly spend time in full submersion virtual reality doing whatever our imaginations can imagine. The book explains everything that this documentary doesn't and if this doc interests you then I highly recommend the read. It's really hopeful stuff and people need to realize how important technology is going to become. We use our cellphones so much that they become a part of us. Sooner or later they will be a part of us. This is a very good summary to a very interesting subject. If you're very religious you may not like it due to its atheist theme, but people with an open mind will be very intrigued.

One part biography, one part brain food; as an appetizer to the thought path of noted futurist Ray Kurzweil, it can be difficult at times to separate fact from fragment over the course of this documentary. Kurzweil's favorite subject is one of increasing relevance, perhaps even by the minute: he seeks to pinpoint the moment of so-called "singularity," when mankind's built-in body chemistry will finally cross the line into his rapidly-developing technological and biological know-how. In short - how soon will we be able to back up our thoughts and feelings to an external hard drive, what sort of moral and philosophical arguments will be made for and against the practice, and where will the ball of wax roll after that debate is behind us? Though its post-production effects can get a bit over-the-top at times, reminding viewers more than once of the over-ambitious "world of tomorrow" predictions popular in the 1950s, the film is largely successful at fostering a curious sort of fascination with the current point in history and the staggering number of possibilities present within our lifetime. Kurzweil himself is to thank for much of that, as his smooth, relaxed speaking gives the impression that anything is possible, even if (as some of his detractors point out during the film's apex) he completely overlooks humanity's tendency to use such moments for evil causes as well as good. Intensely interesting stuff that effectively sows the seeds of conception.

I recently came across the concept of the Singularity in a book "Why the West Rules...for now", which used its arguments. This documentary talks about Ray Kurzweil's predictions of the impact of the exponential growth of technology and its implications on the evolution of humankind: essentially that they will merge, with huge implications.Now I want to read his book The Singularity and explore the concept more thoroughly...I suppose this is a great outcome for such a documentary, but it's not for someone avoiding deep thought.Ray is a great thinker, and an optimist and believes that death is essentially avoidable by essentially transforming ourselves to a different "machine" body, based on the unavoidable trend of increasing computer power, which will soon be able to reach the capability of one human brain. Once computing power surpasses the brain, then computers will design computers, and they will grow exponentially smarter.But as is pointed out in the film, if we think we can control that process once it is smarter than us, we're being unrealistic. As these machines interconnect, the power of one brain becomes pretty insignificant.One incredible scene follows the promise of machines that can read printed text and read it aloud to the blind. Starting with a $20,000 machine decades ago that Stevie Wonder used, to something today that fits in a shirt pocket, which is the equivalent of a $100 million computer a few decades ago.Another interesting points is his prediction that the cost of a watt hour of energy from solar sources will fall below that of fossil fuels in 5 years. Once this happens and solar power can be obtained from flexible panels installable anywhere, the geopolitics, economics and pollution from extracting, buying and using fossil fuels begins to go away.I'm 49 and this makes me think as I type this on my <$500 laptop computer, after watching the movie on a $500 Ipad which I downloaded from the Internet, then I'm writing a review on a database of films where you can call up information on almost any film ever made; that none of this was doable just 15 years ago.I can go to a city I've never been in, load up maps on my Iphone, find my way around, use a translator I can speak into in English which will speak in another language, and access money in another country to pay my bills.The darker side as was also announced today as I write this is someone figured out that your Iphone stores your whereabouts for a year or so, and so we lose our privacy. Romances are made on the Internet and lost when a spouse sees a text message setting up an affair. My father recently died of small cell lung cancer. Within a week or so reading everything I could on it, i knew as much as many of the doctors I was dealing with (one asked if I was a doctor), and could help guide his therapy.My life, in terms of photos, comments, interaction with friends, things and places I like is already being compiled in Facebook, and that will live on long after I die...Our stupid political arguments now that you see on Cable TV are a disgusting waste of time: Was Obama born in the US? Should we cut the deficit by raising taxes on wealthy people, cutting medical care and financial support to older and poor people? Should gays be allowed to marry (20 years ago this was only an idea, now it's viable in a fast growing number of cities, states and countries).We don't talk about the big issues: what does it mean that China now uses more energy than the US does. That it's economy is #2 and will soon outpace us? That the US is really not #1 anymore in anything significant (life expectancy, literacy, income, science achievements, etc) but one among many. What does it mean that we are clearly destroying our planet and using its resources (food, fish, air, minerals) at unsustainable rates....where does that leave us? These are the kinds of questions this film made me think about, and it answers in an optimistic way: in 15 years the advances in life expectancy as we "reprogram the bad software that makes up the human body" will be growing at more than 1 year per calendar year, essentially meaning if we make it 15 years we may live forever.But more importantly, who has control of this technology or does it control us? There is no real way to program morality into a computer, it's too complicated and no one agrees on one correct moral path. Does that fact that eventually we can "upload" our brains into a net where there are billions of others, and all interconnect mean we'l never want to unplug for fear of being lonely or nonfunctional? (like the Borg in Star Trek)...? Can you live without your Facebook, cellphone, texts, email or Internet for even one day without feeling out of touch? Watch this film. We all need to be thinking about these issues, not the bullshit on cable TV news.

The subject of this documentary, Ray Kurzweil, is an accomplished inventor and futurist whose creations include a reading machine for the blind. The film focuses on Kurzweil's ideas about "The Singularity" an event in which humans will be able to incorporate machines into their bodies, including their brains, and augment their intelligence. Kurzweil sees a great deal of promise in this, including the potential for immortality.The film provides an interesting portrait of the man and his ideas, but it suffers from a relative lack of questioning of his optimism. Kurzweil has an at times deterministic vision of technological progress that fails to account for human foibles, and the double-edged sword of technology itself.For example,Kurzweil dismisses the issue of class totally as it applies to who can benefit from technological advancement. Kurzweil argues that the costs of new technology are only prohibitive during its early stages. He points to the fact that his reading machines for the blind have become more affordable. This ignores the fact that even in a wealthy society like the United States, many people cannot afford even basics like health care. The benefits of Kurzweil's techno-utopia are likely to fall on the wealthy alone.Furthermore, the law of accelerating returns that Kurzweil relies on seems deterministic, and ignores variables such as declining natural resources. At times, his faith in technological progress has an almost religious quality, particularly given the fact that he places so much hope on technology for achieving immortality.