{"id":241929,"date":"2026-07-31T08:02:24","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T13:02:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/07\/barry-ptolemy-on-transcendent-man"},"modified":"2026-07-31T08:02:24","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T13:02:24","slug":"barry-ptolemy-on-transcendent-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/07\/barry-ptolemy-on-transcendent-man","title":{"rendered":"Barry Ptolemy on \u201cTranscendent Man\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In August 2010, I got on the phone with a filmmaker who had spent three years following Ray Kurzweil around the world with a camera.<\/p>\n

Barry Ptolemy was twelve years old when he stood on the set of E.T. next to Spielberg. Decades later, he read The Singularity is Near and decided his first feature film would not be fiction.<\/p>\n

Transcendent Man had not opened in theaters yet when we spoke. Back then the claims in it sounded like a pitch meeting nobody would greenlight: intelligence that stops being biological, no clean line left between human and machine, aging reversed, world hunger solved, death itself treated as an engineering problem.<\/p>\n

Read that list again in 2026 and tell me which line you want to laugh at.<\/p>\n

Some of it looks naive now. Some of it looks early. What stayed with me is what Barry said about the man behind the predictions, because the film is not really a documentary about #ArtificialIntelligence. It is a documentary about a son and his father, and about what grief will build if you give it enough compute.<\/p>\n

I asked him whether he believed Ray. Sixteen years on, his answer is still the part I turn over in my head when people tell me the #Singularity is finally here.<\/p>\n

Continue reading \u201cBarry Ptolemy on \u201cTranscendent Man\u201d\u201d | ><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In August 2010, I got on the phone with a filmmaker who had spent three years following Ray Kurzweil around the world with a camera. Barry Ptolemy was twelve years old when he stood on the set of E.T. next to Spielberg. Decades later, he read The Singularity is Near and decided his first feature [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":737,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,32,38,269,2018,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-241929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological","category-education","category-engineering","category-life-extension","category-ray-kurzweil","category-singularity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/737"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241929"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241929\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}