Katalyst
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Singularity

Ray Kurzweil
Interview Interview by Carver Wilcox, Anthony Batt & Kashy Khaledi

Vernor Vinge describes [technological] "Singularity" as having the technological means to create a superhuman intelligence where the human era will be ended. There's an inherent fear in hearing "the human era will be ended." How do you think people today can cope with this possible future?

I don't describe it that way, at all, at least not with that terminology. In my view, the technology we are creating is part of the human civilization. Life expectancy was 20 [years] one-thousand years ago, and we're ultimately literally physically merging with these machines, we're going to put them inside our bodies and brains as I just said, and I think that's an arbitrary distinction because we're very intimate with our computers. We're going to multiply the overall intellectual capability in our civilization a billion fold by 2045. That date, what I call "the Singularity" and that's where, borrowing a metaphor from physics, it's hard to see beyond the event horizon. It's not a point of infinity it's a point of profound transformation.

I think the term "post-humanism" or "trans-humanist" is unfortunate because we're going to transcend our biology, [and] we're going to enhance our humanity. We will be human even if most of the action is with the non-biological portion of our civilization. That's part of who we are as well. I see all these terms as unfortunate, artificial intelligence implies that it's not real intelligence, but it is real. "Virtual reality" implies that it's not real reality, but you and I right now are in a virtual environment - it's called the telephone. So, virtual reality is real reality, artificial intelligence is real intelligence and our future is not going to be post-humanist or trans-humanist, we're going to be trans-biological.

Are you implying that what we see with wars and the crude nature of man improving in the era of Singularity?

It's a separate issue. Overall, yes I do. With the rise of the web in the 1990s we saw a great wave of democratization we're seeing continued today. The rise of social networks - it's a very powerful democratizing force and not just politically - it harnesses the wisdom of crowds. My vision is not a utopian one. Fire cooked our food and kept us warm but it also burned down our villages, so these technologies are double-edged swords. You could certainly see bullying and lynch-mob behavior on the internet, but I believe the wisdom of crowds. The democratization and sharing of knowledge and wisdom is ultimately a more powerful force. The world is actually less violent today. Now someone incredulously might take issue with that because all we see is suffering, violence and war but that reflects the fact that we have much better information today about what's wrong with the world. If there's a battle in Fallujah or a police station blows up in Kabul, we're there. It's not that the problems didn't exist, in fact they were much worse in the past, if you read Thomas Hobbes or Charles Dickens you can see how disaster prone, short, brutish, disease filled, poverty filled human life was.

Do you see us becoming more civilized?

Life expectancy was 37 [years] in the 17-1800s, so we're making progress. I have a graph actually showing a continual decline in casualties of war. We get upset, rightly so, about wars that cause thousands of casualties today, [when] we used to have wars that caused tens of millions of casualties. Sixty million people died in WWII. So I do think we have greater wisdom, which does lead to a cacophony of voices, the free exchange of information is messy and doesn't go in a straight line, but I do think we're gradually becoming wiser. I've actually been working with the army and my mission there is to help them develop rapid responses so that they can respond to new biological viruses to the way we successfully deal with new software viruses. If we just sat back and said no one would ever put out a dangerous software virus, the internet wouldn't last more than a day. We have developed a technological immune system which is constantly obsolete so we have to constantly re-do it but nobody's taken down the internet for even a second over the last ten years because we have this rapid response system which detects the software virus and deactivates them. So, there's a complex issue. I'm not a utopian, there are dangers. It's not a pat answer, but we do need to put a higher social priority on dealing with the dangers, but the world actually is getting better. People think the world is getting worse, what's actually happening is we get better and better information about what's wrong with the world.

If the world is getting better and I were to essentially double my life span, how would this affect our resources?

In short, the same technologies that are going to extend human life are also going to expand resources. Just to give you one example [Google CEO] Larry Page and I did a study for the National Academy of Engineering of Energy and we discussed extensively solar energy, which is on an exponential rise. The total amount of solar energy is doubling every two years and it's only 8 doublings from meeting 100% of the worlds energy needs. So, we could talk a long time about that, but the overall observation is we're awash in energy. We are awash in water, it's just most of it is unusable but we have the technology to transform it into a usable form. There are new food technologies based on artificial intelligence and other biological technologies that can make very inexpensive high quality food in very high volumes. So the resource question is basically the same technologies that are going to extend life are also going to extend resources.

How would longer lifespans affect entertainment for humans?

So then the challenge is "okay, if I live hundreds of years isn't that going to get boring?" and I think that alludes to your entertainment question, and yes, I think if we lived hundreds of years and nothing else changed it would get boring. But that's not what's going to happen. Along with radical life extension, there's going to come radical life expansion. Just to give you one example, virtual reality which today is a form of entertainment (e.g. massive multi-player games, Second Life) is ultimately going to be full immersion as realistic as real reality including the tactile sense, which will ultimately go inside the nervous system in the 2030s. This is when going to a website will actually mean going into a virtual reality environment that will be as real as real reality and it will be induced from within the nervous system.

My brain will be receiving signals from the virtual environment as if it were receiving them from the real environment and I can then be an actor in those virtual environments. It really feels like it's me but it doesn't have to be the same body that I have in real reality, I can be someone else. A couple could become each other, a student could become a virtual Ben Franklin and then the virtual constitutional Congress. That's not just a matter of dressing up in costume but actually becoming that person, so clearly the entertainment opportunities for these highly realistic virtual environments that can be either realistic recreations of earthly environments or fantastic environments, or environments that couldn't exist on Earth because maybe they defy the laws of physics certainly have tremendous entertainment and educational value. It can change relationships, because you can experiment being different people. So, that's one advantage to virtual reality and that's where a lot of entertainment could take place but that's where our relationship will take place and education.

It sounds like the role of the storyteller will actually be greatly expanded because he or she will be able to create an immersive environment to tell, perhaps even, historical stories.

Right, so you can just imagine a movie that's three-dimensional but while the movie takes place you can walk through the Roman square where the actions taking place, sit down on the cobblestone fence and watch the action from where you want to see it.

On a practical level, would you see some sort of wi-fi device that's literally plugged into us and is hooked up to some sort of network that we can then step into?

My vision is we're going to have nano-bots, small computerized devices inside our bodies and brains in the blood stream. One function of them will be to keep us healthy, they'll be augmenting our immune system and won't be subject to the limitations of our immune system. For example, our immune system doesn't recognize cancer, it thinks it's you and our immune systems turn on us, those are auto-immune disorders. There are many medical implications of this. One way we can achieve radical life extension, they'll go into the brain, into the capillaries, interact with our biological neurons and they'll be able to either augment or replace signals coming from our real senses. So if I wanted to completely go into a virtual reality environment, they'll shut down the signals coming from the real senses - tactile sense, eyes and so on - and replace them with the signals your brain would be receiving if you were in the virtual environment.

Don't you think it's also going to be a bit taboo to integrate technology into our own nervous systems? If our iPhones were able to plug into our bodies, there would be a lot of fear and trepidation with it. How do you reconcile those two notions?

People don't really wait for congress to pass a law to do body modification, there's a whole body modification movement. It used to be a very fringe radical thing to do, and now it's very mainstream to modify your body. And it's going to happen as the technology becomes available and relatively safe and it is also going to be driven by medical application. It's not one thing that I can check a box, I want to be augmented or I don't want to be augmented, it's going to be a million choices or more. You have a million choices today just for iPhone apps, and some people are very aggressive users of technology, very few people opt out completely. There will be conservative technologies that you would be crazy not to use because they protect you from most common diseases for example.

Other things will be more experimental, they'll be infused bit by bit, just as we see other movements but very few people will opt out and price is not going to be a barrier. People say "only the wealthy are going to have these things" and I say "yeah, like cell phones" which in fact only the wealthy could have twenty years ago, when they didn't work very well and did one thing which was make phone calls and it did that poorly. Today, when they do a million things there are 5 billion of them in the world and 30% of Africans have them, the farmers in China have them and it's going to be totally ubiquitous very soon and that will be the same thing with these technologies.

It's going to start out non-invasively with eyeglasses that beam images into your retina that create a full immersion visual of virtual reality or augmented reality. You can have a screen that's as big as you want including taking over your entire visual field of view, put you in a full immersion three-dimensional environment that responds to your movements or it can overlay real reality. We will be an augmented reality all the time and this will be non-invasive, this will be in your eyeglasses.

Do you think that we could be missing out on something by relying on technology [and] being confined to our limited sensory perception? Considering the infinite nature of things - fractals, inner and outer space, etc.

Technologies initially start out as compromises and are crude. People often point to DDT, but it didn't wipe out malaria. Fossil fuels are a big compromise. Generally speaking it's these first industrial revolution technologies which are crude in this way that technology is getting more and more refined. If you look at virtual reality it starts out being a compromise because it's not realistic at first. The first virtual reality game was Pong which was virtual reality tennis and it couldn't be more crude.

Ultimately, these technologies are getting more and more refined when we recognize things that are missing as the law of accelerating returns continues and we double the capability of these technologies every year. They ultimately can capture more and more reality and it does extend our reach. I mean, look at the situation today, we have the entire world of human knowledge in our pockets [and] can access it instantly. It's quite extraordinary and we take it for granted. I think it expands human potential and I think that's what technology does, ever since we picked up a stick to reach a higher branch we've extended our reach with our tools and we're the only species that does that. We're very unique in that regard, but it's part of who we are and there's always compromise.

Michael Miner
Interview Interview by Carver Wilcox

What inspired you to pursue film?

When I was an undergraduate at UC Riverside, I co-founded a film society out there, and we screened the European New Wave Films. Janus Films was just starting to ship out 16mm prints of Bergman, Polanski, Truffaut, Fellini - films like 8 1/2, Juliet of the Spirits, Repulsion. We would take the prints home, consume psychedelics and project them in our living rooms and I just became completely infected by the virus of film and its excitement. It was irrepressible. At that time, I made a short film called When Shit Becomes of Value, The Poor Will Be Born Without Assholes. It's a Lenny Bruce quote, and I was just off to the races. It was a really exciting time.

Were you gravitating towards particular genres? I've noticed a lot of your filmography deals with technology.

Actually, that involves a kind of complicated theory about the difference between craft, art and genre. At that time, I was making highly personal films similar to Luis Buñuel's early surrealist style, which had political content but I was trying to work through and understand my own psychological landscape a lot better. Even when I got to UCLA - and I was attracted to science fiction especially because my father was in a medical profession, but it was always tinged with the more surreal aspects like horror and dystopian futuristic fantasies. So, it wasn't purely technical in the sort of clean modern sense that it is today.

With RoboCop, you really created one of the most iconic man / machine characters ever. What went into this?

That's a really interesting question. Ed [Neumeier] and I are really different people, and I think that in a way is what made RoboCop what it was. I am more of an intuitive person, a leap before you look kind of artist - where Ed is more calculating and machiavellian, and I mean that in the best sense of the word. So we got the best of two personalities to go into the project and there were aspects of the corporate culture which Ed understood better than I did, and there were aspects of horror and identity which I understood better than Ed. I think, also, that in terms of Orion as a company, John Davison as a producer, Paul Verhoeven doing his first American film all combined to create this kind of kismet or a kind of synergy that you can't legislate. You couldn't stand back as an architect and build that kind of building, there were a lot of elements of nature and chaos that threw together the right blend of personalities along with the late '80s, the cynicism about Ronald Reagan and where the country was that allowed us to create a kind of satire similar to Network and I think the country and the world was ready for a combination of a human and a machine in the pre-Matrix world of science fiction and speculation. It was just the right time. Everyone was sort of hungering for that idea.

Do you feel like there was a seed you were originally trying to plant in peoples' minds with your early work?

Bertolucci says "the robin always sings the same song," and by that he meant that every writer / filmmaker really only makes one film over and over again, and I truly believe that, based on our psychological makeup. You look at the masters of film: Kubrick, Coppola, their entire canon can be boiled down to one simple thing and with me, my father was a scientist and my mother was a spiritualist, so the stories I tell are about the rational mind confronting the mysterious or the infinite. RoboCop is obviously that melding of the irrational human side of existence melding with the objective, cold hard steel of the robot. Anacondas you could say has the same quality, the search for immortality and how ultimately nature pulls it back. Is it possible for science to mint immortality? What is intelligence in the universe? We may just be puppets of a much larger system and our empire could be at the behest of bacteria for all we know.

[In film] there is a cross cultural exploration of death / rebirth through technology. Do you think this alludes to a possible future?

Verhoeven identified a Christ-like quality to RoboCop that I hadn't even thought of and I think his European sensibility really helped the film in terms of the violence because it wasn't Tarantino or Rodriguez type silly inconsequential violence. The violence that European directors and African American directors bring to film has consequences, it's not just geek violence, first. Second, I think the Kurzweil "Singularity" vision of the future, which I thought a lot about and could take up five interviews, is a little bit overrated. I would say that those unions - the first real mechanical-human union is the mouse, beyond surgical applications that help cripple people, the universal union is the hand and the mouse reaching into the screen. There's a lot of pain in that, you have physical problems carpal tunnel syndrome, and those unions are - I think that the reality on the ground is different than the paradise in theory, if that makes any sense to you. I'm a bit of a Luddite, in fact, and there are two authors who I'm a big fan of. One is Paul Virilo who is a Christian anarchist technophobe, who thinks that the internet may be one of the most dangerous inventions concocted by humans, because when it goes down, in a global sense and it will, there will be suicides, there will be mass chaos, and it's all because of a need for power and electricity. If you think about the automobile, it was not designed anticipating the freeway crash and the Titanic wasn't designed to hit an iceberg. The internet was not, obviously, designed to crash after we have completely inhabited it. So, this whole Thomas Friedman, the earth is flat Kurzweilian happy face future I think is really overrated. You can see that in RoboCop, all of these wonderful gifts of technology have a very dark side.

Are you at all optimistic about the future? Do you feel that there's going to be a positivity that enlightens us all?

When I saw everyone showing up for the first Matrix I thought, oh wow, there's a hunger for people to understand this. I walked out 3/4 of the way through, when it became just another Joel Silver action film, and obviously expensive beer commercials. Everyone hungers for an answer to the question that you've asked. When I was younger I delighted in the apocalypse and dystopian fantasies, because I think that's what the young mind in searching for limits is occupied with. I've grown to adopt a theory about history: a number of empires and civilizations that fell went through 4 basic cycles: the age of Gods, the age of Heroes, the age of Humans and the age of Chaos and then they emerged out of the chaos into another age of Gods. So, my feeling is, to be ahead of the curve. Storytellers need to start speaking about the metaphysical again, because that is [Giambattista] Vico's sense of history as a circle is where we will go and emerge out of this world of primitive chaos. If there is only a cold objectivity to life, then they can explain to me the phenomenon of love, and how the mind can create the concept of God, and they can't do that. I think we are much better animals than we think we are. We're underestimating ourselves by simply embracing an objective cold reality, and I think there's going to be a hard rain before we emerge into a deeper understanding of the universe.

In our initial correspondence, you mentioned that the media breaks [in RoboCop] were an early inkling of this process of media being instantaneously transferred around the world. Could you talk more about that?

It's interesting, again I have to give Paul Virilio credit for the concept of time in the form of speed annihilating space and distance, and it's true, we could create a PowerPoint, electronically send it to Mumbai where they would break it down into 50 deliverable packages and it could be ready for a PowerPoint meeting in 40 capitals an hour later. This is what brings us into this 24/7/365 data haze that no longer has any time zones and there's a downside to that. When the sun goes up and down, when we go to sleep, when we have our petit morte, when we die for 8 hours and wake up we are resurrected into a new sense of the world, but the machine never sleeps and it has no sense of a beginning or an end. I'm not sure what that means. I wear a watch that has an analog circle, digital numbered time, to me this is part of this obliteration of horizons, and the loss of the circle and those simple shapes and concepts I think have been with us for a long time.

Alt heroes, Ladytron & Cults, face off on 5 films that say it's so. Words by Kashy Khaledi

Ladytron Equal parts Nico, Kraftwerk, Velvet Underground, Portishead and Brian Eno. Ladytron brought back the "new wave" before retro chic was chic. Sadly, the name Ladytron comes from the Roxy Music song, and not a reference to a female character from the film Tron.	VS	Cults Equal parts Ronnie Spector, Bob B. Sox and The Blue Jeans, Lush and My Bloody Valentine. Cults' Madeline Follin and Brian Oblivion dropped out of NYU film school to lead the new wave of Wall of Sound 2.0. And yes, Brian Oblivion stole his name from the eerie prophetic character in Videodrome played by Jack Creley.
Ladytron Westworld Virtual realities replace picturesque vacations. Yul Brynner plays a psychotic cyborg cowboy that kills motherfuckers in a "western" alternate reality picked by Richard Benjamin and James Brolin that goes awry.	VS	Cults Tetsuo: The Iron Man A Japanese metal fetishist becomes obsessed with sticking metal in his body, gets run over by a couple in a car, then somehow terrorizes the couple by making shards of metal rip through their bodies. Great industrial soundtrack if you can endure things like metal snakes spiraling out of a man's pelvis. I guess Cults have a penchant for the industrially macabre.
Ladytron Brazil An Orwellian inspired acid trip about a paradox society led by broken machines, big brother paranoia and total fucking insanity. Robert DeNiro defies the government by fixing shit. Some bloke starts flying around like Icarus, following the girl of his dreams and shit starts to unnecessarily blow up. Bottom line: they did too much blow in '80s development meetings.	VS	Cults Videodrome James Woods plays a sleazy TV programmer who pirates Videodrome a Malaysian snuff program. Bad move Woods. Turns out the show emits mind control signals and gives fucked up people brain damage, hallucinations and gut busting VCRs. More metal and flesh fare. Bottom line: shit is fucked up.
Ladytron Death Race 2000 If you saw the Jason Statham remake, you're a fucking asshole. In the OG version, David Carradine is a cyborg race car driver who races with Sly Stallone to see who can run over the most pedestrians. "It's a cross country road wreck, and the traffic is murder." Best. Tagline. Ever.	VS	Cults THX 1138 Angry android cops, monochromatic whites, government mandated pill popping, total fucking chaos. Also, Nine Inch Nails ripped off sound design for "Downward Spiral." Bottom Line: George Lucas before he fire saled his soul.
Ladytron Metropolis The first ever man vs machine epic is German engineered, pre-WWII. It's androids, class warfare and biblical themes in one savory quesadilla. Fucked up fact: It was Hitler's favorite movie. Cool fact: the director Fritz Lang fled to America after he got a pass from Hitler for making such an awesome movie.	VS	Cults Terminator 2: Judgement Day Fuck you.
Ladytron Fahrenheit 451 Being smart is stupid in Fahrenheit 451 as book burning firemen dominate a fascist society. Fun fact: Books burn at 451 degrees and author Ray Bradbury made the film as a cautionary tale about TV's pollution of factoids.	VS	Cults Alphaville Jean Luc Godard's dystopian, minimalist film noir centers around Alphaville, a future city from another planet where individuality and human emotions are outlawed by a computer named Alpha 60. Bottom line: Hal 9000 owes a debt to Alpha 60 and Anna Karina cements herself as a '60s style icon.

How I Learned To Stop Worrying... Words by Paul Cullum

Where do zombies come from? Mutant, flesh-eating viruses, I know. But I mean, from whence do they derive, and why do their delivery mechanisms - movies, novels, video games - seem so much like an ambulatory, brain-dead horde?

Five years ago, it was vampires. Before that wizards. Before that hobbits. Or the master carpenters and omnipotent sadists of the Saw cycle and extreme Asian horror, who refashioned moral dilemmas as medical atrocities. Is this just the secular longing for spiritual guidance in a rational world grown too sophisticated for religion's magical thinking? Maybe. Spin veteran Chuck Klosterman, writing in the New York Times, nailed the vampire craze -- and the Twilight series specifically -- in just four words: "nostalgia for teenage chastity." Yet the zombie wave, his putative subject, he attributes to the generic onslaught of electronic information, be it emails, voicemails, texts or tweets. That seems an order of magnitude removed from ropy viscera and the ravenous undead.

Adam Curtis, the dean of BBC documentarians, in his films The Trap and, more recently, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (the title comes from a Richard Brautigan poem), sees the seeds of the Internet rooted in the nuclear brinksmanship of the 1950s, of a piece with systems analysis, game theory and Cold War paranoia. Utopianism aside, with the crash of the tech bubble, the computer found its lasting legacy in the rise of corporate culture, with algorithms its private language, the Internet its commonwealth, Ayn Rand's Objectivism its marching orders, and humanities and the arts empty diversions at best.

So that now, everywhere around us, we see zombie banks, warfare conducted by military drones, an emerging Meth Belt to replace the collapsing Rust and Corn Belts, and a world where no one seems to be driving. Globalism has given our jobs away to robots and non-union economies. Our movies and television are dictated by marketing formulas and brand recognition. Our popular culture has become coarsened and vulgar, harder-edged, more extreme, hardcore, less laced with civility or sympathy. Our politics seems inhabited by vicious automatons at the top and mindless drones at the bottom. Our financial system seems as rapacious as it is inevitable. Our humor is mean-spirited. Everything is on the same lurching path toward mindless apocalypse. Even the Internet ten years on looks less like a populist soapbox and more like an unregulated labor farm, or the loose tethers between networks of survivors. If pod people were the working conceit for expansive Communism in the 1956 cautionary dystopia of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, then no wonder flesh-eating zombies are their equivalent for late-stage capitalism.

But maybe this is merely the view from the bridge, a last outpost of humanity, gazing out on whatever comes next. Perhaps what we're experiencing is the dismantling of those aspects of ourselves that make us human, and that celebrate the individual at the expense of the hive mind and shared symbiosis. Our memories (and with it, all history and tradition) have been outsourced to Wikipedia, digital archives and the cloud. The self-correcting, invisible hand of the free market absolves us of the need for conscience by making the difficult decisions for us, threading a fabric of virtue out of competing self-interests. Our moral compass has been demagnetized by Derrida and deconstruction and the axiomatic rejection of absolutes of any kind, rendering all ethics situational. Our emotions are muted by virtual distance and the scrim of Facebook and social networking. What's left is the hard-shell casing and motor functions of a stripped-down CPU. Viewing it through our vestigial romanticism, we feel the panic of self-preservation, of virtues lost. But maybe this is just the machine, welcoming us through the gates of digital heaven by disencumbering us of all those organs and ephemera we'll no longer need. What looks to us like zombies are merely acolytes of a new order - Social Darwinism no longer saddled with biology.

This, of course, is the Singularity -- the evolutionary transfer of human to artificial intelligence, which will not come with one last pitched battle a la Terminator, or even a divine ransom note like Colossus: The Forbin Project, but rather technological ease and the paternalism of the corporate state. Instead of the cybernetic enhancements we've come to anticipate from Neuromancer and the like, we merely need to float downstream into the imposed consensus of connected sentience. Like the Rapture, those who survive it will have already made the transition in their own minds.

Perhaps it's akin to what the Italian Futurists welcomed at the turn of the last century in their paean to the transgressive speed of the Italian motorcar, the speeding motorcycle of aesthetic perfection. Of course, they were fascists -- literally. But sometimes that's the downside of being a visionary.

In the words of Doc Humes, a founder of the Paris Review who swan-dived into the '60s:

"If you were a fish, you'd be the last to discover the existence of water."

Welcome to the machine.

Emerging Technologies Words by Eduardo Sciammarella

Dream Cam & Brain Training

3-D Touchable Characters & Faces

Flying Hacker Drones & Stingray Tracking

Pro-limb Runner & Eye Implant

Bots

Haptic Games

Future City