Bill Maher: What my interpretation, and this is as laymen as it gets, is that knowledge is expanding exponentially so at a certain point, hopefully before I die, machines and humans will sort of merge and then I’ll live forever. That’s what I took away from it; I could live forever. The rest of it to me is bullshit.
In general I do believe what he says, I mean that’s why I’m here because I think this man is a genius. And I think when he says, “This is where the trend line is going,” I pay very serious attention.
We’re putting together a new new rules book. We put one out in 2005 and now we have another one out in November, so I’m going through all the old new rules from 2005 until today. Well, I mean, it’s hysterical what we were talking about 3,4,5,6 years ago. You know that was new and crazy, and you know, “Hey! Who are these crazy people wearing a Bluetooth? Are they talking to themselves?” You know it’s like now a Bluetooth is like yeah, that’s life in the big city. We all see people talking to themselves. It’s not crazy or novel. So you see it anecdotally that things change really fast.
I was talking to Ray about this area of how religion butts up against what he is talking about when he was on the show. And that is when you get into the area of living forever, of eternity, and when you get to the area of somehow man and machine melding to the point where they have sort of ultimate knowledge you’re sort of treading on the area of religion. I think the way I said it to him was you’re selling crack on their corner and someone is going to get mad at you for that because you know that’s what religion has always had as a monopoly. It’s that even science could not answer that question: What happens when you die? Can you go on forever? Can we know all the answers? Even scientists have said, “Look this isn’t something we can approach.”
I do have a personal animist toward religions that try to use technology. You know, I think if you are a religious organization and your beliefs come from bronze-age desert dwellers, people who did not know what a germ or an atom was or where the sun went at night, you really shouldn’t be using Facebook or cellphones, you know. I mean, and I would say the same thing of the Islamic religion, you know. If you’re using a cellphone to call people to get over here and have a stoning of some woman because, you know, she committed adultery so we’re going to throw rocks at her head, that’s not fair. You have to pick a century. You can live in this one or you can live in the old one but you can’t live in both.
Transcendent Man LIVE: A Conversation About the Future. Live with Ray Kurzweil.
NCM Fathom, Ptolemaic Productions and Therapy Studios Present One-Night Event on August 3 in Nearly 500 Select Theaters. Broadcasted LIVE from the Lincoln Center in NYC.
This first-of-its-kind event will be a powerful discussion about the possibility of immortality becoming reality by 2045 as well as other implications of accelerating technologies. The evening will begin with a brief presentation by inventor and futurist, Ray Kurzweil, followed by a provocative panel discussion, which will incorporate clips from the critically acclaimed documentary TRANSCENDENT MAN.
Panelists include Kurzweil; Barry Ptolemy, filmmaker; Deepak Chopra (Live via Teleportec); Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Inc.; Michio Kaku, physicist; Tan Le, technology entrepreneur; and Dean Kamen, inventor. With pre-recorded remarks from former Vice President Al Gore, Quincy Jones, Bill Maher, Elon Musk and others.