Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near New York film premiere June 24, 2010

June 7, 2010

The World Technology Network (WTN) in association with TIME magazine has announced the New York premiere screening of The Singularity Is Near: A True Story About the Future by filmmakers Anthony Waller, Ray Kurzweil, Ehren Koepf and Toshi Hoo, with Executive Producer Martine Rothblatt (Terasem Motion InfoCulture) on June 24, 2010 at the Time & Life building in New York City.

The screening and special presentations will be held in the historic Time & Life Building, and will kick off the new WTN “Imagined Worlds” Film Series as a lead-in to the 2010 World Technology Summit & Awards to be held later this fall (November 30 – December 1, 2010) in association with Time Magazine, Fortune Magazine, CNN, Science Magazine and The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The World Technology Summit is a global annual gathering of the leading innovators in the world in science and technology, to inspire and educate each other.

This feature-length documentary film presents the daring arguments from Kurzweil’s New York Times bestselling book, The Singularity Is Near. He predicts that with the ever-accelerating rate of technological change, humanity is fast approaching an era in which our intelligence will become trillions of times more powerful and increasingly merged with computers.

Kurzweil examines the social and philosophical implications of these profound changes and the potential threats they pose to human civilization in dialogues with big thinkers, including former White House counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke; technologists Bill Joy, Mitch Kapor, Marvin Minsky, Eric Drexler, Sherry Turkle and Cynthia Breazeal; Future Shock author Alvin Toffler; civil liberties lawyer Alan Dershowitz; venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and environmentalist Bill McKibben. Kurzweil illustrates the future with a narrative story about an “AI” seeking her human rights, featuring popular NCIS actress Pauley Perrette and personal development guru Tony Robbins. The movie, The Singularity Is Near offers a view of the coming age that is both a dramatic culmination of centuries of technological ingenuity and a genuinely inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny.

An audience Q&A with Ray Kurzweil, moderated by Moria Gunn, host of NPR’s “Tech Nation,” will immediately follow the screening. Advance tickets for the event are $35 ($55 after June 20).