Transcendence
As the title would suggest, this year’s Transcendence is one of the few entries on this list that is a proper, intentional exploration into some of the central issues of actual transhumanism. Hotly anticipated for its intriguing premise, and for being one of Johnny Depp’s more promising mainstream projects for a while (incidentally, whoever it was that prised Depp out of Jack Sparrow’s hat and boots long enough to make a different movie is clearly some kind of superhuman themselves), Transcendence was on a steady track to getting a great reception.
To say that it didn’t get it is a bit like saying that Hitler wasn’t very well received when he arrived in Poland. Critics and audiences alike argued that its ideas of the human consciousness being ‘uploaded’ into technological form were too ambitious for its weak narrative, and that its themes were greatly exaggerated or simply that they were just a repeat of the all too familiar movie-fears of futuristic technology and its threat to humanity.
Those criticisms are entirely understandable – or, if I can manage to stop being so utterly British for a moment, completely damn right. However, there is at least one thing about Transcendence that is much more defensible than some critics have allowed for. This is that the central theme of artificial or technological intelligence suddenly reaching a point at which it far surpasses human abilities or limits is not just futuristic chit-chat – it is an actual, recognized concept which is known by an official term that Transcendence actually uses: The Singularity.
‘The Singularity’ is the sociological theory that at some point in the (not too distant) future, the acceleration in technological advancement that we’re seeing at the moment will achieve a speed at which it suddenly overtakes human control, and becomes a form of actual, functioning, intelligence that is entirely independent of humanity. Ray Kurzweil, an American futurist, computer scientist and inventor predicts The Singularity to happen at around 2045 – and, exactly as Will pursues the expansion of his own consciousness in Transcendence, it is likely to somehow involve the internet.
So, the overall storyline of Will’s consciousness being uploaded into a quantum computer, and then expanding at such a rate that he eventually gains control of everything from nanotechnology to the ecosystem is not as absurd as it might sound. Transcendence is a clear representation of the very real idea that humans could fuse with technology to the point at which bodies are not needed at all, and that that consciousness – still being human – would naturally need to grow.
Director Wally Pfister also specifically uses the language correctly and boldly: Transcendence is not the only movie to include the idea of The Singularity – Her, for example, shows us a society in which it has to some extent happened, or least begins to happen during the movie – but it is among the very few mainstream ones to explicitly draw attention to it.
But then, of course, we come to the glitches. As ambitious as Transcendence is in attempting to cover this most extreme of transhumanist visions, it simply doesn’t present its concepts very well. The movie is – with the exception of the finale, by which point everything in the plotline has gone completely [to pot] anyway – often too slowly paced, and some of the more impressive technologies that Will has achieved in the two year span of the movie are completely unexplainable, even if we do accept that his knowledge is basically wider and more sophisticated than even the World Wide Web.
Transcendence is clever, but it is clever in everything except for its delivery; here we are again left with that sense that dogged Lucy, that as smart and as exciting as this movie looked, it relied heavily on audience acceptance rather than understanding – and that is always the weaker position for any movie in any genre (see Darren Aronfosky’s The Fountain. Like, what?).
However, returning to the focus of how well Transcendence performs as a transhumanist movie, there are two last points that might just save it from basically being a movie about how what would happen if your local I.T department went on a bit of a bender. The first of these is that it makes the point (expressly, in Will’s speech at the beginning of the movie) that the point of a technological singularity is not simply to see how far humans can go, but rather the hope that it could save both human beings and the planet by making our existence more capable and therefore safer. This is also true of real-life transhumanists; they’re not aiming to better the human being for the sake of it, but to improve individual and overall global wellbeing.
And finally, Transcendence also clearly exhibits another feature of The Singularity – and it’s the one that gives that term its slightly sinister feeling. The movie both begins and ends with shots of a world that has clearly collapsed: Squalor reigns, and human beings have been reduced to simply making their way from day to day life as best they can, in a world that is now unrecogniszble to them.
This is the final part of the theory of The Singularity – the idea that the event will be so major and so all-consuming that what comes after it is simply incomprehensible, unfathomable, and quite possibly catastrophic. The Singularity is definitely at the farthest extreme of transhumanists ideals – as Transcendence is as a movie – but it is also the most dangerous, to the world and to the human species.
This will most definitely not just be a case of turning it off and on again.