"An Evening with Ray Kurzweil" @ Coolidge Corner

TJ writes: "I can't make it to the Meetup! I am busy with work on a last minute project given to me on Friday. Can someone volunteer to hold the Meetup sign?"

From the Coolidge Corner Theater mailing list:

"The Coolidge Corner Theatre wraps up the 2008-2009 season of its acclaimed Science on Screen series on Monday, May 11 at 7:00 p.m. with a special program, An Evening with Ray Kurzweil. The celebrated futurist, inventor and entrepreneur will give a multi-media presentation based on his best-selling book The Singularity is Near andshow a trailer of the upcoming film of the same name. Audience members will also be treated to a sneak peak of director Barry Ptolemy’s Transcendent Man, a documentary charting Kurzweil’s journey to bring the ideas from The Singularity is Near to a world audience. A question-and-answer session with Kurzweil will follow the program".

From Coolidge Corner's "Science on Screen" site:
https://www.coolidge.o... (https://www.coolidge.org/node/2287)

Tickets can be purchased online https://www.coolidge.o... (https://www.coolidge.org/showtimes) ... but still need to be picked up at the ticket booth before showtime.

Where to meet:

It might be best to meet up at 6:15 pm and hang out while waiting in the line that is forming behind us. At 6:15 pm, we line up along the brick wall across from the box office. By 6:30 pm, the line is so long it snakes through the alley. By 6:35 pm the people behind our group are giving us all the evil eye, since they just witnessed a group of twenty form around T.J. Maher and cut in front of all of them. T.J. Maher is 5 foot 7, with blue eyes, short brown hair, and a large MEETUP sign attached to his black messenger bag.

About Ray Kurzweil ( From kurzweiltech.com ):
https://www.kurzweilte... (https://www.kurzweiltech.com/aboutray.html)

"Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Ray has successfully founded and developed nine businesses in OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment, cybernetic art, and other areas of artificial intelligence . All of these technologies continue today as market leaders. Ray's Web site, KurzweilAI.net, is a leading resource on artificial intelligence.

"[...] Ray Kurzweil's new book, published by Viking Press, is entitled The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology [ Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com... (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0670033847) ]

Background of the Movie (According to the Official Site):
https://singularity.co... (https://singularity.com/themovie/background.php)

"The Singularity is Near, A True Story about the Future, based on Ray Kurzweil’s New York Times best selling book, will be a full-length motion picture slated for theatrical release in early 2009. The movie intertwines a fast-paced A-line documentary with a B-line narrative story".

According to the site, the A-line documentary will feature "Ray Kurzweil interacting with a panoply of thinkers on the impact of exponentially expanding technologies on the nature of human life in the next half century. It will feature many cutting-edge graphics and special effects. Featuring: Bill Joy, Mitch Kapor, Alan Dershowitz, Vinod Khosla, Bill McKibben, Marvin Minsky, Martine Rothblatt, Alvin Toffler, Sherry Turkle, Eliezer Yudkowsky"

Here is where it gets goofy... "The intertwined B-line is the story of Ramona, Ray Kurzweil’s female alter ego, starting with actual footage of Kurzweil creating and demonstrating his virtual creation at the 2001 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference, where Ray – as Ramona – sang Jefferson Airplane’s 'White Rabbit.' This presentation was the inspiration for the Warner Brothers’ movie Simone, where the character played by Al Pacino turns himself into Simone, just as Ray turned himself into Ramona at TED".

Profile on TED: Ray Kurzweil: Inventor, futurist:
https://www.ted.com/in... (https://www.ted.com/index.php/speakers/ray_kurzweil.html)

"[H]is impact as a futurist and philosopher is no less significant. In his best-selling books, which include The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (which is set to become a movie in 2008), Kurzweil depicts in detail a portrait of the human condition over the next few decades, as accelerating technologies forever blur the line between human and machine".