An Evening with Ray Kurzweil

The University of Florida Student Government ACCENT and campus and community partners present:

Inventor, futurist and author Ray Kurzweil will host a special screening of his film “The Singularity is Near, A True Story About the Future.” The evening will include a talk delivered by Kurzweil, a screening of the film followed by an audience Q&A and book signing.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011
7:30 pm.
Phillips Center for the Performing Arts
Free admission — doors open at 6:30 p.m.

“Kurzweil is the best person I know at predicting the future,” according to Bill Gates. “Kurzweil envisions a future in which information technologies have advanced so far and fast that they enable humanity to transcend its biological limitations–transforming our lives in ways we can’t yet imagine.”

“The Singularity is Near: A True Story About the Future ( singularity.com/themovie),” by filmmakers Anthony Waller, Ray Kurzweil, Ehren Koepf and Toshi Hoo, with Executive Producer Martine Rothblatt (Terasem Motion InfoCulture), will be shown after a 40-minute lecture by Kurzweil.   The film made its world premiere earlier this year at the 30th Annual Breckenridge Film Festival.

The 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. This will be the dawning of a new civilization, enabling us to transcend our biological limitations. In Kurzweil’s post-biological world, boundaries blur between human and machine, real and virtual. Human aging and illness are reversed, world hunger and poverty are solved, and we cure death. He maintains a radically optimistic view of the future course of human development while acknowledging profound new dangers.

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.

Sponsored by: Dharma Endowment Foundation

For more information: http://www.arts.ufl.edu/kurzweil

About Ray Kurzweil

Inventor Ray Kurzweil is one of the world’s leading futurists, with a 20 year track record of accurate predictions. Called the “restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes magazine, Kurzweil was selected as one of the top entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine, which described him as the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison.” Inventor of the first CCD flat bed scanner and many other firsts, Kurzweil is an inductee in the National Inventors Hall of Fame and recipient of the National Medal of Technology, the Lemelson-MIT Prize (the world’s largest for innovation), and 19 honorary doctorates and awards from three U.S. presidents.

Producing Partners:

ACCENT Speakers Bureau and Student Government
UF College of Fine Arts
UF College of Engineering
UF-HHMI Science for Life
UF Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation
UF Center for Humanities in the Public Sphere
UF Smathers Libraries
Gainesville Area Chamber of Commerce
Innovation Gainesville