Doug Wolens on the Singularity: It’s Ultimately Up To You

Today my guest is Doug Wolens. Doug is the lawyer-turned-documentarian whose most recent film is The Singularity. I have to say that neither Doug nor his film are what I expected. To paraphrase and add to one of the other iTunes film reviewers – what I was expecting was “Wohooo! Singularity!” But what I got instead was a surprisingly detailed critical examination of the notion of the singularity, by a very honest, open-minded and profoundly human and humanistic film-maker. And that made the whole experience uniquely better. During this Singularity 1 on 1 interview with Doug Wolens we discuss a variety of topics such as: how he decided to quit being a lawyer and become a documentarian film-maker and story-teller; growing up in the 60’s and getting inspired by the Apollo program; reading Ray Kurzweil‘s seminal book The Age of Spiritual Machines and deciding to make a movie about those ideas; the singularity, its definition and what the film is all about; Doug’s Socratic method of film-making and story telling; his 12-year-long struggle to produce, shoot, edit and distribute the movie; the things that inspired and surprised him the most during the making of The Singularity; his experience interviewing Ray Kurzweil… My two favorite quotes from Doug are: “Just because I am suggesting science as a means, it doesn’t get us to a scientific end. It gets us to a humanistic end.” “It is ultimately up to you – the viewer, you – the thinker in the world, to say: “This is right for me; this is how I want to live in this world.””