Earlier this month I interviewed Ray Kurzweil, the inventor, futurist, and author of The Singularity Is Near. Parts of the interview will be published in "The Grill" next month, but I wanted to highlight an interesting tangent that Ray mentioned when I asked him about "strong" artificial intelligence:
Ray: ... I am making a movie based on the book Singularity is Near. It has an A-line documentary, and a B-line story. And in the B-line story, I have an AI that tries to pass the [Turing] test in 2029. It does not actually succeed in 2029, but she goes on to try again.
Ian: So this is a science fiction movie that you are producing right now, or someone is producing with you?
Ray. Yes. The movie is called "The Singularity is Near: A True Story About the Future." The A-line documentary has me interviewing 20 big thinkers on their ideas about the future, and their ideas on my ideas, people like Marvin Minsky, and Alvin Toffler and others. And then the B-line is an actual narrative story illustrating the ideas.
A forum thread on the Immortality Institution website has a few more details about the movie, including some other participants (legal scholar Alan Dershowitz, director Anthony Waller) and even the movie poster.
The interview touches on a lot of other issues, ranging from augmented reality to long-term data storage. I will not be able to squeeze everything into The Grill (the transcript is over 5,000 words long!) but I may put other parts of it on this blog and in Computerworld podcasts.