gavoweb

spiritual | cultural | technological life

netflix

Singularity of Transcendent Man

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Credit to JDLasica for photo used in this posting

More in my ongoing series of Netflix documentaries. I checked out Transcendent Man a chronicle of Ray Kurzweil. Now, other than seeing him on the Daily Show (which actually shows up in the documentary) I knew nothing of the man. Have to feel I’ve been influenced by him in some ways as his premise of our bodies being filled with microcomputers has been one of my crazy thoughts that the future might look like as well.

The documentary is rather interesting as it chronicles a segment of the life of a complicated man. Here’s a guy who has some deep family pain he’s obviously hoping to rectify at a future point in time. Here’s a man who has boundless creative imagination yet still bound by the mathematics and engineering of our time & near future. It is very human, yet dabbling around the artificial intelligence of being un-human.

From this I picked up the idea of Singularity, explained here:

I’m wondering as we move towards this fusion of mechanical and human. What would be the loss or gain of our spiritual life? Would we become a Spock type character who struggles with the emotions because of the process logic? Maybe we are already there even without the machines?.. Are we going to program ourselves with the theology of all our great theologians and various versions (feminist theology, liberation theology, radical orthodoxy, etc)? All I know is that I’m not there right now to wrap my very biological brain around what impact that is going to make. But something will happen and then a question arises. What will the church do about it? If there is even a church…

The Rising Son Transformation

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Began a Netflix account last month and have actually been a bit disappointed in the movie catalog (apparently what I want to watch hasn’t been in streaming demand of yet), but what has been great is some of documentaries/movies. Figured I’d share some of the things I’ve been watching.

I was an adolescent in the late 80’s to early 90’s. Which, was an interesting time of pop culture, hair metal, to grunge music, folding & rolling your jeans, and some really horrid other fashion experiences. One thing that was a constant for many years of my adolescent was ‘skating.’ In the skating world Christian Hosoi was huge and my group of guys were big fans. So it was a no brainer to check out a “Rising Son” a documentary on him. I know some of his story from the rise and fall of skating, but he wasn’t on my radar the last decade. I was interested in checking that out & had an expectation for what was going to be shared.

The documentary is a nostalgic walk for me seeing old footage and hearing names, interviews with guys that I cut out photos from magazines and posted on my wall and more. As the story goes.. Oh, heck, I’ll let you hear a bit from him (not actually part of the documentary though):

In Rising Son he speaks to how he got a hold of a bible and searched through the scriptures, found the book of Kings and that was his transformative moments. From there he became a believer and accepted Christ. He’s now a pastor as well as professional skater.

I wasn’t aware of his transformation story, so that caught me off guard but really excited about where he was in the world. Seems he’s found a place of peace and knowing of self which is celebratory.

If you can check out the film and don’t care for the 80’s and 90’s of skating then skip forward as his story profiled in the documentary is really remarkable (at least for me).