During TechWeek, Insight Labs sponsor Manifest Digital will host the Chicago premiere of “Transcendent Man,” director Barry Ptolemy’s film about the life and thought of futurist Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil is best known for the idea of the technological Singularity, defined as a point when artificial intelligence, biological augmentation, and other enhancements accelerate the rate of technological advance beyond anything we can presently conceive. In his 2005 book The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil predicted such a convergence would occur as soon as 2045.

TechWeek participants will gather at the Museum of Science and Industry on July 25 to view the film, then to discuss its ideas in a Q&A with Ptolemy. (Click here for more information on how to attend the event.) To get the discussion started, Labs Content Director Andrew Benedict-Nelson called the filmmaker to talk about the origins of “Transcendent Man” and what Kurzweil’s ideas might mean to the entrepreneurs and innovators at TechWeek. Their conversation follows:

Andrew Benedict-Nelson: When did you first hear about Ray Kurzweil and his ideas? How did you react to them then?

Barry Ptolemy: I wasn’t completely immersed in Ray’s ideas until 2005. I had been tangentially aware of the Kurzweil name and his companies prior to that, all the way back to 1985 when he was awarded the National Medal of Technology by Ronald Reagan.  But 2005 was the year I read The Singularity is Near.

After reading a few chapters, I realized that these ideas were being articulated better than I had ever heard before. He was articulating one of the most productive explanations of the future I had ever heard. I think these are some of the biggest ideas our human civilization will have to grapple with in the coming years. It was a profound experience and struck me immediately. I had been thinking along these lines since I was a teenager, and when I finally reached the end of the book it was kind of like coming home.

It was upon reading the book that the idea for the film materialized — me and my wife and producing partner Felicia immediately decided that we would make it.

ABN: Why do you think you immediately knew that you wanted to make the film?

BP: I had been pursuing my filmmaking chops since the 1980s and went to film school in the 1990s. When I set up my production company my goal was to produce films that I thought would be special in some way. We did several TV show pilots and over 100 commercials, a whole host of projects, gaining experience while I was looking for a film I really wanted to do. Then finally I came across the book.

For me, I’m always on the lookout for the possibility of something that can be converted into film, so from the moment I cracked open the book I was hopeful that it could be a film.  But with books, it’s usually the case that everything has been done before. One of my important mandates is to do something that had not been done before, something that creates a new model. When we saw that this was a kind of movie that had never been made before, we jumped at the opportunity.

In the first few weeks after reading the book, it was like Christmas morning every day. I was looking at the world in a completely new and rich way, and seeing how different our lives would be in the coming decades. I wanted everyone to feel that way. I wanted everyone to see that we could be hopeful about the future.

ABN: So what was your basic approach to taking the excitement of those ideas and translating them into a film?

BP: There was a gestation period of about a year, of bouncing ideas back and forth. We knew we wanted to tell a story about the Singularity. It took several months before — well, I always knew I wanted a hero, but it took a few months before we realized that Ray Kurzweil would also be the hero of the film. His story would guide us through the narrative process,  and along the way we would come to understand all of these ideas that he is known for. It was like an epiphany. I felt at that point we would have a successful film because people could hook into the mythological archetype, the hero’s journey that Ray takes, even if they didn’t understand the technology.

ABN: I’ve read that you shot more than 200 hours of footage for this film, and the end run time is 85 minutes. What was the most interesting thing you had to throw out?

BP: Well, most of it. We’ve actually added a lot of scenes to the DVD and iPhone and iPad app, because a lot of the best scenes are deleted. There were so many interesting moments that we didn’t have time for. There were famous people we couldn’t include, like Quincy Jones or Herbie Hancock. In terms of the most interesting, we spent a lot of time at Singularity University. There was a lot to explore there. There was also a story at one point that included the development of Ray’s alter ego, a virtual artificial intelligence. That was something that I thought was really interesting and had been working on for over a year, but it had to be cut. It would have shown a really different kind of story.

If you had a thousand filmmakers, you would have a thousand different films. The choices are crucial to making a film that not only has information, but is also entertaining. Entertainment value is often discounted, but it shouldn’t be, because it allows the information in the film to be dispersed to a wider audience.

ABN: I think it’s really interesting that you’ve made a highly intellectual film that is also highly personal, since it is a story about one man and his journey. How did you balance those two factors in the film?

BP: All you can do as a filmmaker is make a film that you personally enjoy and respect and find interesting. One thing that was important to me was to create a film that was more full of ideas than previous films, because I think we’ve evolved to the point where we can handle it. My five-year-old daughter watches more movies and is more sophisticated an early age than I was. And we are more sophisticated than our parents were. …

So I wanted to make sure the film had both those qualities: the nutrients that the film needed to have, but also a story, a mythological archetype as a structure. We are literally programmed to receive those — that’s why religion is so sticky. Storytelling is extremely powerful — we cannot build our civilization without it.

ABN: That makes sense to me. But it seems like there is a potential cost to that mythology too. The story of Ray and his father is very central to the film — he was obviously affected by his father’s early death and he talks about using the man’s personality as the basis for a future artificial intelligence. Are there people who look at this film and say, “Gosh, this entire dream of the Singularity is about recovering his father?” How do you react to that?

BP: Well I’ve said this before — people say, “Oh, Ray has daddy issues” or “Ray is compelled to invent things because his dad died.” Some of those things might be true — I’m sure he does miss his father. But you could also hang around with Ray for years or go read all of his books and he will not once mention his father. It is really more about the relationship between the filmmaker and his father.

I’m sure Ray is very motivated by his late father, but he’s also motivated by various human biological restraints. He himself had health problems already in his 30s. Had he not been inspired by those restraints, he might not have made it where he is today. When people say, oh, he is crazy, he pops too many pills, I don’t know what they’re talking about — the man is trying to stay alive, for Heaven’s sakes! Which we are all trying to do. He just has a little bit more discipline and a little bit more knowledge to be more cutting edge.

So that’s what I tend to say, that the whole father-son story is more about the filmmaker. I was the one who asked Ray about his father. I remember we were on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 2007 and I asked him, “Would you take us to your father’s grave?” He was a little bit startled, but he said he would. I knew at that moment that I had my story. So it was more about the filmmaker’s choices than Ray’s choices.

ABN: Sure — I think you can always make that argument in response to psychoanalysis of a person or a character. Yes, his father died, but we all had fathers and they have all either died or are going to die. That’s why it’s powerful.

BP: Yes, it’s horrible and powerful to think about — there are lots of psychological implications about the death of your father, especially if you’re a man. That’s what makes it a powerful story. But it also allowed us to explore a lot of interesting technologies that will come about with the Singularity. Bringing his father back is a metaphor for lots of other spiritual aspects of the story, so I thought it would be a great way to go.

ABN: It’s interesting that you use the term “spiritual,” because another really interesting thing to me about this film is that you’re trying to depict phenomena that we can’t imagine yet. That’s one of the reasons why it’s called the Singularity.

BP: Yes — there are a lot of phenomena that we can appreciate at this point, but of course that’s right, it’s a historic veil that we cannot see beyond. Ray talks about how we can make certain educated guesses about what could be on the other side. But there are a lot of interesting things that will happen leading up to the Singularity that we can talk about.

ABN: My more pedestrian point, though, is that you can’t film it. What techniques did you use as a filmmaker to represent complex phenomena that you can’t go take a picture of?

BP: That’s why early on, when we said we wanted to make a film about the Singularity, a lot of people said, “It’s impossible. There’s nothing to film.” My point was that we can create an experience that will be metaphorical to the Singularity in some ways. That’s what poetry does. That’s what metaphor is.

So we would never be able to show the Singularity in all its magnificence in Dolby color. You can’t do that. Steven Spielberg can’t do that. But we can get around the edges of it and speculate about it. … When you arrange all the forms properly, you can create this ascending experience where literally more and more chemicals are being released into your brain. When we create a climax in a film that moves upward and beyond, that is literally part of what the Singularity is.

Singularity-related ideas have existed for thousand of years. Why did people like Buddha or Christ talk about healing people or feeding all of humanity with one fish? Now we are actually in a generation where we could make that manifest. We happen to live at the precise moment when these technologies are occurring. The Universe has been heading in this direction for a long, long time — just to be born right now is really a treat.

So getting back to your question, I think the nature of storytelling can really create an experience that is, in a very small way, akin to the Singularity. That might sound out there, but I believe that.

ABN: I think that especially makes sense if you consider the meaning of a singularity in a philosophical sense. It’s one thing to compare your film to what you consider to be the most important event in human history; it’s another thing to say, this is the same essential phenomenon, it’s just a matter of scale.

BP: By the way, it’s not just my film. If you’re talking about the Singularity in the proper setting, maybe with a few friends, you start getting to a point where the ideas get fantastical and almost crazy. You get a feeling of the awesomeness of what the Singularity could represent. It’s an amazing thing to even talk about sometimes.

ABN: One of the reasons I was interested in this question of representation is that our audience at TechWeek will include many entrepreneurs, innovators, and other people who in one form or another will need to represent to other people their ideas about the future and what is possible. What advice might you give them for representing those ideas to other people?

BP: I really do believe that when you are communicating an idea about a technology or a business, the best thing to do is basically to wrap it in a story in some way. You see this in political narratives. You see it in business when Steve Jobs makes a presentation.

Steve Jobs actually does talk about changing the world in presentations — we’ve just gotten used to it. You create an objective, a goal, and you say the world is going to change is we reach this objective. Then you have your hero take a journey that calls that goal into question and puts it in danger. The goal goes back and forth between two poles — one being accomplishment, the other being defeat. We go back and forth between these poles as we march toward the end of the story.

If you have an idea and you can couch it in this sort of mythological storytelling, you can actually affect people in a much more powerful way and illuminate you ideas much more effectively than you could without a story. It doesn’t have to be a huge grand thing. You see it in great TED talks all the time. So my advice is to use this great technology we have called storytelling.

ABN: It’s interesting to think about storytelling as a technology.

BP: It absolutely is. This is something we didn’t really get to talk about in the film. People readily discount  technology because they think of technology as only Facebook or an iPhone. But the truth is that technology includes things like animal husbandry, democracy, the rule of law, all of these invisible things that we take for granted that we have built up and compounded.

When you see technology like that, it really changes your perspective, because you understand that technology has always been a part of our civilization, from the very moment that we picked up a stick or put a little piece of cloth on. We amplified the needs, wants, and desires that really made us human. When you see technology that way, you realize that it has primarily been used for good. We have primarily used fire to heat ourselves and cook food, not to burn down our neighbors’ houses. Otherwise we would not be here having this conversation. I think that’s a powerful lesson that Ray talks about.

ABN: Let’s say that I’m the CEO of a tech startup and I have never heard of Ray Kurzweil or his ideas before. Then I see your film at TechWeek and I am completely persuaded that the Singularity is going to happen in 2045, 2050. How do I behave differently at work the next day?

BP: That’s a great question and I think about it all the time. First of all, technology is a great democratizer. Whether you’re that CEO or a guy in a garage, you have the opportunity to take advantage of the great new tools that will be coming along. But if you are the CEO of a corporation, you may have the ability to use these tools to wield more power than at any other time in history — and you can shape it for good.

The next three years are not going to be like the past three. We are going to grow faster. The world we are going to be in could be a completely different place. If you can plan not for the way the world is now but for a three, four, five year projection of how the world is actually going to be, then you will have an edge. There is no doubt about it. If you study Ray thoroughly and read his books, you’ll start to intuit what the future will actually be, at least broadly.

I would encourage people to study the future. We can all became futurists together. And the best way to predict the future is to make it. We can make a commitment as a country or as the world to making the future better. So that’s my advice — predict the future, even in your own limited way, and then try and go in that direction.

ABN: I think it’s interesting that the film jumps back and forth between Ray’s biggest prediction for the long-term future and his immediate innovations designed to improve people’s lives, inventions like the Kurzweil Reader that helps the blind. Given his certainty that things are going to get so much better fairly soon, what would you say is his motivation to work on devices and products that improve people’s lives on a somewhat smaller scale?

BP: Well, that’s how the world does become better and change — you effect change in your sphere. As his college roommate talks about in the film, at a very early age Ray said he wanted to invent technologies that would help the blink see, the lame walk, and the deaf hear. He’s hasn’t gotten to the lame walking yet, but he has already invented technologies that help the blind see and deaf people hear better. He can’t wrap his arms around the whole world. He just wants to help people. That’s his M.O. — to help people, any way he can. If everybody were doing something like that, we would have a better world. And it’s because of people like Ray that we will move toward the Singularity, because obviously new technologies aren’t just being created on their own.

ABN: What other lessons do you think aspiring inventors and entrepreneurs can draw from Ray’s life?

BP: Probably the biggest one is perseverance. “Failure is just success deferred” is not just a throwaway statement. Ray never gives up. He comes up against his own limits all the time, but he just continues on. There are a host of ingredients that are required for success, but perseverance is definitely one. When you really latch onto something that you think is good and true, don’t let anything stop you.

ABN: I’ve read that one of the films that inspires you is Errol Morris’s “The Fog of War.” I think one of the great things about that film is that even if you really hate Robert MacNamara, by the end you understand his worldview and how he got to be there. Have you seen people who are skeptical of the idea of the Singularity have a similar reaction to your film?

BP: That’s what we’ve seen. There are people who fundamentally disagree with Ray’s ideas and think they’re stripping us of our souls and it’s the wrong direction go in. There are polarized reactions to Ray’s ideas and polarized reactions to the film. Mostly it goes to two poles. But I do think there are people — there have been a lot of women who are dragged to the movie kicking and screaming. But they find it to be much more humanistic than they thought.

I do think there are people out there who don’t buy into the Singularity completely but also think Ray is making the world a better place. They can see he is a mere mortal man who is undergoing all the things and has all the same flaws that we all do and is just trying to make a go of it. I think people can identify with that.

ABN: An important difference with “Fog of War,” of course, is that you have people besides your subject in this film — but you use them in a very particular way. Could you tell me more about how you arranged these other futurists to be in conversation with Ray and the idea of the Singularity without ever taping a conversation between them?

BP: Well, we followed Ray wherever we went, to five countries and something like 30 cities. And we interviewed something like 70 people. But we were only able to use 21 people in the end in the film. Some of these people we interviewed several times, like Tom Abate or Ben Goertzel. We followed Ray, then found people who were already familiar with his ideas in one way or another, so when we interviewed them we were able to create a conversation that was not just the layperson’s point of view. We were able to start right where the meat is. We could have a true dialogue about the bigger ideas.

ABN: To me, the impression that you’re left with after the film is that even if you don’t agree with Ray or one of the other people you interviewed, you come away with the impression that this is a conversation that we have to have now. I was wondering how you think people might encourage those kinds of conversations about the future in the rest of their lives?

BP: I agree with that sentiment quite a bit. That’s one of the reasons I felt good about making the movie. Whether you buy into the Singularity or not, one thing is certain: progress is accelerating. Things are changing faster and faster. Of course, if you buy into the idea that technology is accelerating faster and faster, you have to buy into the fact that we are on the precipice of radical change. There is no way the two can be separated. If technology keeps accelerating at the rate that it has, it’s about to have an enormous amount of compounding ramifications.

Just look at technological adoption rates. If you go back to the Gutenberg printing press, you see that it took 100 years for 25 percent of the population to adopt that technology. The telephone took 50 years for 25 percent of the population. Twenty-five years for the television, 15 years for the PC, ten years for the Internet, five years  for Facebook and social media, and now we’re down to just a few years for technological disruptions like WikiLeaks that can have profound changes worldwide. We could only be a few decades away from intra-day phenomena, where a challenge will come up in the morning and a new technology will be adopted by the population that very day. All the trends point in that direction.

So start with what we know — technology is accelerating faster. Then we have a debate about what happens as that continues. That’s where the fulcrum is: how can we shape technology to help ease suffering and end disease and stop climate change and meet our energy needs? That’s how I would frame it.

ABN: That reminds me of something Kevin Kelly says in the film, that even if the Singularity is a false concept, it provides a useful intellectual exercise to think about the future.

BP: It’s absolutely true. There are a lot of unknowns going forward. There are a lot of unknowns about what is going to happen tomorrow. But the more we talk about it, the better prepared we are going to be for those unknowns. We’ll be better prepared for some rogue nation acquiring a new bomb  or a new strain of salmonella. What’s the worst that could happen if we prepare ourselves for technology’s consequences? I hope “Transcendent Man” can help us do that, to talk about and realize that we are on the precipice of a whole new civilization. It’s time we start talking about it and waking up to that fact.